This paper has been written for the Philosophy, Art and Society: Body as Medium event in the Watershed Media Center, Bristol June 16 2018 It explores the idea of the ‘biomorph’ as a perverse ‘non-philosophical’ solution to the aporias of speculative posthumanism through the work of J G Ballard, Hans Bellmer and Gary J Shipley. […]
Necroconceptuality in Gary Shipley’s Warewolff
Gary Shipley’s work is often compared to Ballard for its single-minded estrangement of sense. Yet it refuses even more, the satisfactions of setting and psychology. It is sometimes marketed as ‘concept horror’ – which is accurate insofar as it is the concept which does most of the hurting here – remarked, disjointed, its grammatical […]
Bellmer in Doll Space: A Note
Perversion defers all conceptual or affective satisfaction; proliferating desire in ways that cannot answer to any settled ecology or ethics. Hans Bellmer’s dolls afford a kind of plastic algorithm for this infinite potentiation – in particular his celebrated second doll, equipped with its articulating ball joint. In one of the texts from his 1934 book […]
Framing and the Ontology of the Art Work: Kendall Walton and Jacques Derrida
In his 1977 paper “Categories of Art” Kendall Walton argues that aesthetic categories like “piano music” or “bust” determine how an audience ascribes aesthetic significance to the non-aesthetic properties of the work such as their shape, matter or sound. Walton calls the perceptible properties that determine whether it belongs to a given category of artwork […]
Some clarifications on the Inhuman
Originally posted on Toy Philosophy:
Since I posted the summary of the Labor of the Inhuman (LoIH) yesterday, I have had various conversation with friends. I thought it would be best to at least provide a few brief correcting remarks. I think I was clear at the beginning of the previous post, that I no…
He is By the Window
We know a body by what it can do. Perhaps this explains this curious standoff, for he does nothing but stand by the window. Before he was written he wrote, ‘Is this, too, love?’ It must be. Feedback hurts: that and its foreknowledge. In a coruscating interruption, he said, ‘Kill me.’ Do I recall an […]
Transcriptor
They brought the Transcriptor to the basement. Its grey concrete blotched with organic stains, square pillars receding into black. One can rot happily here. Behemoth brought a table whose top was fitted to rubber pipes, an electric pump, sterile containers and surgical lamps. Near the shaft, the Clocks were chivying the Six from the van, […]
