Monsters, mashups, and popular culture
Join artist David Blandy and curator and researcher Annie Jael Kwan as they discuss Blandy’s major new John Hansard Gallery solo exhibition, Atomic Light. The discussion reflects his use of archives, from pop cultural collectables, through to historic records and collective memories. The talk will be chaired by Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé. This event is in-person at John Hansard Gallery.
Read more about the event and the exhibition on the John Hansard Gallery website, and book your place here.
Want to geek out about Carmen Maria Machado? Want to see four literary professionals geek out about Carmen Maria Machado? Or are you just in the mood for a good book or for some good old fashioned spooky stories? Whatever the reason, join us at Cardiff BookTalk on 15 November, 19:00 – 20:30 GMT, for an online talk about Her Body and Other Parties, Machado’s debut short story collection. The event is free and open to all. Book your place via Eventbrite.
Join us for a free creative workshop where you will become part of the strange ebb and flow of Winchester School of Art Library! This session is part of both the Creative Posthumanism series and the UK’s Being Human Festival. It will take place in person on 16th November, 2022 (2-4pm UK time) and will start at Winchester School of Art library, West Side Building, Park Avenue, Winchester.
Happy spooky month! To celebrate the season and the paperback edition of Gothic Remixed, I’ve made a playlist of 21 songs that mash up or remix Gothic literature in different ways, available on Spotify and Apple Music. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it—and let me know if you have any recommendations to add to the list.
If you enjoyed the last two workshops from the Creative Posthumanism project, or if you wanted to attend but couldn’t make it, we’d like to welcome you to our third and final event of the summer, ‘Monstrous Words: Writing and Incoherence’ (Wednesday 27 July 2022, 2-4pm BST)
Join artist Rebecca Jagoe in a play with language and writing incoherence. Incoherence can be expressed in writing on many levels, for instance in terms of narrative, in the sense of neologisms (for instance in the different spellings of Middle English), or in the transcription of nonverbal sound into roman or other characters. We will think together about how a language deficit or specific forms of speech have been used to deny access to the category of the human. This means we will also be writing in defiance of the idea of rationality and knowability—not only of subjects, but of the ability of language to catalogue and define them. We will work towards what Erin Manning (2020) calls a pragmatics of the useless; ‘the way the work’s work eludes us, escapes us, the way it delays the affirmation of its tenuous apparition, the way it touches us, in the lag’ (p. 15).
Looking for a listen that’s spooky but casual, a slow burn for your morning commute? Then you might be interested in the newest episode from WAKE ISLAND, a bi-weekly podcast hosted by Paul K and David Leo Rice. In it, we have a lovely and wide-ranging chat about the public domain as both an unmarked grave and as a place of rebirth, the tentacular, mashups/remix studies, Twilight, and our current undead state.
The second workshop in this year’s Creative Posthumanism series took place on June 1st, 2022. Workshop coordinators Angela YT Chan and Cristina Diamant invited participants to ‘scrapbook the wasteland’. We did so by looking at the mix of extractive practices that (re)produce wastelands, drawing together a variety of materials and theories to “reconfigure the relationship between our own situated embodiments and technological developments from a more-than-human ethical perspective, acknowledging the affect behind our response and confronting the biases that hold us back”.
Are you interested in critical posthumanism and the creative arts? Did you see images from our zine-making workshop and wish you’d been able to join us? Now is your chance! Our next Creative Posthumanism workshop will be on Wednesday, 1st June 2022, from 2-4pm at Winchester School of Art. This week, our theme (and the focus of our collaborative making project) is ‘Scrapbooking the Wasteland—A Posthumanist Terror Management Theory Toolkit’.
Last week we ran a pilot event in the Creative Posthumanism project, specially for the postgraduate research (PhD) community at Winchester School of Art (WSA). The event was facilitated by me and Noriko Suzuki-Bosco, an artist, artist’s book-maker, and fellow bibliophile who has also worked with me on several previous zine workshops. The theme? ‘Being Human under Technocapitalism’.
The plan was to create something collaboratively, using the creative process to think differently about topics we might historically have only considered academically or through critical writing. The exact format of the zine was decided on the day, once we could see how many participants we had and could discuss what everyone felt comfortable with. In the end we had a nice small group of around six people, which meant we could all speak to each other and work together around the same table.
In the first part of the session we introduced participants to the process of making an individual zine, including the work of folding and cutting the paper and the types of things you might have as topics or content. We also introduced them to the materials we had assembled: magazines, patches, bits of washi tape, stickers, and other decorations.
Today, the 26th of October, 2-4pm (UK time) I’ll be giving a talk / workshop for Winchester School of Art PhD Researchers on #HauntedTikTok. This will be in the WSA PGR room, but also on Microsoft Teams (link