Disappearance and Assembly – extract

‘Disappearance and Assembly’ is now published open access in Springer’s Nanoethics journal as part of the BrisSynBio Art-Science Dossier   Meshes Of The Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943) from SeriousFeather on Vimeo. It is easy to believe nobody built this degradable substrate with that small figurine encysted within, an unsung astronaut, that the condition did not […]

The Biomorphic Horror of Everyday Life

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 that does most of the hurting here – remarked, disjointed, its grammatical lifelines […]

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 […]

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, […]

The Sub-Dual

Inquisitions gamed her like melanomas, but Map offered them no apology or reasons. She’d weakened from the conflicting imperatives, though. We were out of eigenbodies mostly, hiding out in black-louvred rooms by Decasia’s garment quarter. Being with constituted persons just added to her docket, so Map kept in with me to the end. She’d not […]

Evyenia (frag)

The process complete, I felt no connection with orienteering, bitter chocolate, rustic wines and cheap antiques, Map’s pensive smile. The investigative skills had passed, in any case, to her dual. Something fibrillating beyond sleep like a trapped bird had emptied her in a way that drew more than repelled me. It was Evyenia, wan oval […]

The Moral Landscape (in progress)

The watery medium approximates a life, a medusa. Don’t get too comfortable. It is a solvent and the Gorgon is just a catalyst. There is never ‘a family.’ There is the only one and it is yours. That is something the worst pain can only symbolize. It is submerged and, naturally, greater than me. It […]

Anna

  Every situation has the same structure, which is to kick over its own traces. You’d think we were getting wise. And she tells herself such things often lately: that the face of permanence is an artifact of who knows what or who. She flatters herself that she knows – of the machines that draw […]