Afterimage Nos. 8/9, Beginning … and Beginning Again

The independent British film journal Afterimage published thirteen issues between 1970 and 1987. International in scope, it surveyed the many forms of radical cinema during an extraordinary period of film history. Having emerged in the wake of post-1968 cultural and political change, Afterimage charted contemporary developments with special issues on themes such as the avant-garde, Latin American cinema and visionary animation, and also looked back at early film pioneers. It published many of the leading critics of the period and vitally provided a forum for filmmakers’ writings and manifestos.

We are not where we need to be but, we ain't where we were is the first volume of a new series of publications by the collective Wages For Wages Against that reports on active research engaged within the artistic professions and institutions since 2017. Its aim is to question the underlying neoliberal logics in the contemporary art world, by orienting our object of study towards the struggles that impact it. With this publication, our hope is to put into practice various values specific to the campaign: the existence of a systematic and fair remuneration, a desire for transparency, the sharing of knowledge, and the visibilization of demands proper to the field of the visual arts and concomitant struggles. It is the result of militant experiences, at the convergence of our individual experiences and collective questionings.

With texts by Tiphanie Blanc, Antonella Corsani, Fanny Lallart, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ramaya Tegegne and an interview with Outrage Collectif.

This DVD includes three seminal early films: 
Key, 1968, 10 min.
Clouds, 1969, 10 min.
Room Film 1973, 1973, 55 min. 

Peter Gidal's films have been an influence on several generations of artists. An important theorist and writer as well as a filmmaker since the late 1960s, Gidal was a pioneer of 'structural-materialist' film and his work has been shown around the world, including retrospectives at the ICA in London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. You can read more about Peter Gidal on LUX Online.

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

The fifth issue of Rab-Rab: Journal of Political and Formal Inquiries in Art includes stories about nation traitors, fierce masses, socialist women struggles, love-forms, psychedelic counter-revolutionaries, workers unions, Brecht fiddlers, jazz surrealism, Soviet trains, and anti-fascism.

Among the contributors to the fifth issue are Anna Thew, Yehuda Safran, Peter Gidal, Cana Bilir-Meier, David Black, Marjo Liukkonen, Alejandro Pedregal, Peter Hallward, Minna Henriksson, and Jyrki Siukonen.

It has also two extensive dossiers. One dedicated to Franklin Rosemont is presented by Joe Feinberg and is introducing some unpublished and difficult to find texts parallel with writings of T-Bone Slim and Joe Hill. The other dossier on Robert Linhart is presented by Tevfik Rada, and it includes a translation of a chapter from Linhart's book on productivism, an article against Western bourgeois dissidents, and an interview with him.

Les Voies du Paradis rassemble ce qui subsiste d’une œuvre perdue : les seules notes de bas de page d’un texte manquant, laissées par un chercheur après son décès et éditées par Peter Cornell. Ces notes et leurs illustrations forment un ensemble incomplet, qui se donne ici à lire à travers ses manques. Un fil – d’Ariane ? – se tisse entre les diagrammes, les figures de spirales et de labyrinthes – de Cesare Ripa à Ernst Josephson et Robert Smithson, des Templiers aux spirites et aux surréalistes – qui parcourent le texte et se font écho, comme les éléments d’une énigme ou des figures ésotériques. Le « Paradis » dont il est question ici, c’est le rêve de la connaissance absolue, la saisie de l’ordre caché des choses, à laquelle aspirent autant poètes et artistes que mystiques et scientifiques…

Paru en Suède en 1987, Les Voies du Paradis y a acquis la réputation d’un livre culte. Peter Cornell y propose une perspective inédite sur les liens entre art, littérature, spiritualité et occultisme, dans un texte à mi-chemin de l’essai et de la fiction, de l’érudition et de la mystification. La volonté de savoir y est mise en scène comme une quête prise au piège de l’irrationnel ; les notes s’assemblent par logique associative, programme éclectique qui tente encore de retrouver un centre perdu – comme les algorithmes auxquels est confiée aujourd’hui la tâche fantasmée de mettre en ordre les connaissances humaines.