Matt Colquhoun

A collection of transcripts from Mark Fisher’s final series of lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, in late 2016.

Edited and with an introduction by Matt Colquhoun, this collection of lecture notes and transcriptions reveals acclaimed writer and blogger Mark Fisher in his element — the classroom — outlining a project that Fisher’s death left so bittersweetly unfinished.

Beginning with that most fundamental of questions — “Do we really want what we say we want?” — Fisher explores the relationship between desire and capitalism, and wonders what new forms of desire we might still excavate from the past, present, and future. From the emergence and failure of the counterculture in the 1970s to the continued development of his left-accelerationist line of thinking, this volume charts a tragically interrupted course for thinking about the raising of a new kind of consciousness, and the cultural and political implications of doing so.

For Fisher, this process of consciousness raising was always, fundamentally, psychedelic — just not in the way that we might think…

Edited by Matt Colquhoun
Published 2021

Explorations of the audio essay as medium and method.

With contributors including Justin Barton, Angus Carlyle, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, and Iain Sinclair, Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.

Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….

Kode9's Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher's On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay's By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.

Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists' discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.

Contributors
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower

A body of essays and visual contributions by radical theorists around the prosthesis and the "augmented body" issues.

"We all need means of supplementing our natural capabilities, since nature is indifferent, inhuman (extra-human), and inclement; we are born naked and with insufficient armour."  — Le Corbusier

Once confined to the narrow circle of "medicalizing" practices, the prosthesis finally colonized our imagination thanks to the promise of an "augmented body" capable of undermining traditional dichotomies such as artificial vs. natural and organic vs. non-organic. But what are their speculative, theoretical and political repercussions? In this selection of original papers, the authors of Insufficient Armour reflect on the subject from their own peculiar perspectives, each of them contributing essays, political-philosophical analysis and theory fiction experiments.

Texts and contributions by Luigi Alberto Cippini, Matt Colquhoun, Helen Hester, Simon Sellars.