Revolutionary Demonology

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

Why do we yearn to be seen when we are already far too visible? How do we want to be perceived, and how are we exposed? Could we ever really see for ourselves?

In memoir, vignettes, poetry and essays, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan records her observations from the stands at the dizzying circus of being seen and unseen. She surveys the criminalising stadium of civic life, the open-air arenas of family, friendship and grief, the performative pageantry of the public eye and the unclad secrets of the self in solitude, paying attention to what’s on show and what goes undetected.

Perhaps the strangest, most exciting possibilities are opened when we surrender to another kind of sight. Submitting to the gaze of the Unseen and the All-Seeing, Manzoor-Khan invites us to close our eyes and discover what it would mean to look with our souls instead.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge. She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre.

A reader documenting the exhibition and symposium on eight schools, educational organisations and independent, self-organised educational programmes which see themselves as alternatives to traditional art academies and currently occupy central positions in the field of contemporary art.

The Educational Web: Reader brought together eight schools, educational organisations and independent, self-organised educational programmes at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. Often with a strong theoretical orientation, each of the programmes can be understood as a space for learning, a network and a community that does not rely on traditional curricula, but is organised around a form of immediacy and the relationship between artistic practice and local context. The programmes were invited to exhibit their own pedagogical approaches, resulting in an exploration of the interface between pedagogy, artistic practice and curatorial work.

Artists, researchers, and educators came together for the symposium on 1 and 2 July 2023 to articulate and reflect on recent developments in artist-initiated pedagogy and institutional practice. The symposium continued the questions raised by the exhibition and was expanded by a series of contributions, which are now collected for the first time in revised form in this volume, The Educational Web: Reader.

Texts by Luis Camnitzer, Feza Kayungu Ramazani, Maria Lind, Ghislaine Leung, Christian Nyampeta, Sofía Olascoaga, Emily Pethick, Laurence Rassel, Anja Steidinger, Nora Sternfeld, Prodige Kevin Tumba Makonga, Marina Vishmidt, Mi You.

While presented as a contiguous work, the book is formed of different essays that have been dissected, recomposed with artificial connective tissue. The result lies somewhere between the rhizomatic continuity of a Body-without-Organs, and the disjointed assemblage of roadkill; either way, the question of where to even begin remains the same. 

These essays each grow out of a particular resentment that developed through years of experience as a working-student of biology, but the task of the book was to transform this into something productive, something that sticks granular propositions into Biology like acupuncture needles. Inherent sexism within Biological research is, after all, not entirely disconnected to Pharmaceutical giants flooding the streets with opiates—and it is simply a writer’s hope that some well positioned words can remind enough people of how its all connected. 

In what could be perceived as a philosophical turn, the importance of talking about science, as much as doing it, is re-entering the popular scientific consciousness, and it is high time, too. What was already getting bad under Biden, became catastrophic under Trump, and the infiltration into public research by private institutions and capitalist enterprises, which this book highlights, is proving dire. The capitalisation of all things bio, whether -yoghurt, -metric data or -logical institutions, is necrotic—MeltdownYourBooks didn’t flinch, they just grabbed the scalpel, dowsed the flesh in ethanol, and asked the question we all forget needs answering: where first, Doc? 

Meltdown Your Books (M.Y.B.), the pen name, was made as a portmanteau of the seminal essay Meltdown by Nick Land, and the landmark film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets by Shuji Terayama. I chose the name, almost 3 years ago now, to reflect the political and digital black hole I saw hovering at the edge of contemporary media experience, and to present my work without the muddy veneer of personal identity. It has remained, since its inception, an anonymous project in only the loosest terms. The dedicated could always find my real identity, and some have, and so its anonymous character existed primarily as an element of presentation. Its anonymity existed to emphasize its deindividuated character. The things I discuss and emphasize under the M.Y.B. label are not items with definitive characteristics, they are collective experiences. M.Y.B. is something I cherish beyond self.

Featuring contributions from various artists and authors, including Louis Morelle, Persis Bekkering & Crisis Acting. 

Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde gathers the work of over forty artists, writers, and philosophers to address the trajectories of the underground avant-garde digital art-world. A variety of topics and visual styles are represented in this anthology, but particular attention is paid to CoreCore, the DIY experimental filmmaking meta-trend which emerged on TikTok in the dusk of 2020. In part an anthology of critical and experimental essays, in part a curatorial artbook, in part a volume of conference proceedings, this text invites the viewer to explore the grassroots conference of a particular cybercultural moment. 

This book follows on from the proceedings of All Things are Nothing to Us, a symposium on CoreCore and the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde, held on December 2nd. 2023, at the School of Visual Arts, NYC; organized by 0nty and OnMyComputer (Dylan Smith). 

FEATURES WORK FROM:
0nty - Dylan Smith (OnMyComputer) - John-Robin Bold - Bebe_Crotte - Societyiftextwall - Aemmonia - Emonie Fay Chetwin (Xleepyfay) - Alice Aster - Anastasija Pavić - Anastasiia Pishchanska (shelestvetrovki) - Ash Ingram - ChaoticRhizomatic - Crisis Acting - Dana Dawud - Daniel Neeman - Edson Javier Rogil - Hunter Thompson - Joe Iovino (Levels of Nuance) - John DeSousa - John Michael - Jomel - Liam Harding (X._.pulp) - Louis Higgins - Louis Morelle - Maria Puglisi - Mason Noel - Mischa Dols - i0 xen0 - Nicholas Sanchez (Wonderful Cringe) - Nick Vyssotsky - Nikolaos Sakkadakis - Orion Arnold - Persis Bekkering - Redacted Cut - Reed McDonaldson - Rokas Vaičiulis - Rozzlyn Agnes K - Soham Adhikari - Uba - Zoey Solomon - Machine Yearning - Jordi Viader Guerrero - Tommaso Campagna - Kali Masoch  

A speculative, psychedelic ecology of a text, with echoes of Aase Berg, Ursula K Le Guin and Fern Gully.

"Shiny shiny beetle beings,
please open up your bellies to me
Shiny shiny beetle beings,
may I gently pat you on your silver shield
Shine shiny beetle beings,
I beg you to stay with me in my pea pod at night
to scare away the thunder from the low-hanging clouds
and their secret conspiracy with the bear claws."

Illustrations by Anna Sofia Bregnehave Windum.
Risograph printed with We Make It Berlin and Cover Crop.
Graphic design and layout by Zak Bergmann.
Copyright © 2024 Juniper.
Published in Berlin, Germany by TABLOID Press in an edition of 100.