My sprawling review of the Goldsmiths Art MFA Degree Show, 2011
Originally published by Groupe d’Etudes Interdisciplinaires en Arts Britanniques

The labyrinth. Turning; coiling. An allegory of improbable human journeys. Physical; mental; spiritual. Beyond; behind; within. But underneath the mythos and symbolism labyrinths are simple structures. The maze is corners, mere corners. Unfurl them all and the labyrinth becomes a cul de sac; a doorless hallway; a vanishing point leading nowhere.

Browsing an MFA final show can… ]]> Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:03:25 -0700 http://www.geiab.org/GEIAB_DEUX/index.php?lang=eng&revue=showit&rn=4&article_id=91#begin http://www.fuel.rca.ac.uk/articles/thoughts-on-art-practice-phds

“Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorised in a new production: in both cases, the goal is exchange.”

- Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

What are artists to gain from taking a PhD? How does the mantle of ‘artistic research’ enable art objects and those invested in them? And where does art’s autonomy reside when its criticality comes from within an academic institution?

Over the last 20 years art has eased its way into academia. Past the door of the artist’s studio and… ]]> Thu, 21 Jul 2011 02:58:04 -0700 http://www.fuel.rca.ac.uk/articles/thoughts-on-art-practice-phds http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/headless-research

This is an extract from a collaborative text I recently worked on, to be published (soon) in Texte Zur Kunst :

The animal of research, being nourished from its root, springs up from the dirt of discourse, the direction of growth pandering to a supposed head. “Humans see the world through language, but do not see language.” ^[1] What exactly do the bees mean when they pollinate the blossom?

For art meaning tends to be expressed through… ]]> Sun, 15 May 2011 10:26:51 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/headless-research http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium

What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:39:59 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/errors-in-things-and-the-friendly-medium http://machinemachine.net/text/words/3quarksdaily-arts-and-literature-prize-vote-for-me

Four times a year 3quarksdaily runs a competition for great blog writing. This month it’s the Arts and Literature prize. An article of mine from October (Mapping the Cracks: Art-Objects in Motion) is in the running, all I need now is some votes…

• To check out the details of the prize go here
• To see the list of nominations go here
• To vote directly go here

That should keep you busy, there’s lots and lots… ]]> Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:27:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/words/3quarksdaily-arts-and-literature-prize-vote-for-me http://machinemachine.net/text/featured/beyond-the-topology-of-the-book

…the human perceptive apparatus [has] a potential to break with action and self-organisation: to see as such, without that point of view being folded around my organizing striving centre. It is precisely the image of bounded life that Deleuze sees as the illusion that has dominated philosophy and that is overcome in the radical connections of art.

- Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed

Books are passive, denying their rigid topologies only… ]]> Wed, 27 May 2009 09:01:00 -0700 http://machinemachine.net/text/featured/beyond-the-topology-of-the-book http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-two.html

Speed is the elegance of thought, which mocks stupidity, heavy and slow. Intelligence thinks and says the unexpected; it moves with the fly, with its flight. A fool is defined by predictability…

But if life is brief, luckily, thought travels as fast as the speed of light. In earlier times philosophers used the metaphor of light to express the clarity of thought; I would like to use it to express not only brilliance and purity but also speed. In this sense we are inventing right now a new Age of Enlightenment…

A lot of… incomprehension… comes simply from this speed.… ]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 07:35:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/04/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-two.html http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-one.html

Grapholectic Thought and The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

(Originally published at 3quarksdaily · Link to Part Two)

“There are things,” Christoph Martin Wieland… contended, “which by their very nature are so dependent upon human caprice that they either exist or do not exist as soon as we desire that they should or should not exist.”…We are, at the very least, reminded that seeing is a talent that needs to be cultivated, as John Berger saliently argued in his popular Ways of Seeing (1972) “…perspective makes the single eye the centre of… ]]> Mon, 04 May 2009 07:17:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2009/03/the-next-great-discontinuity-part-one.html