Matt, Hamish and Sophie had a catch up about lockdown, money, art and fatbergs.

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In March and April 2020 Hamish MacPherson used social media to ask, “Are you having sexual or sensual intimacy with people who are distant from you during the COVID-19 lockdowns?”  People replied anonymously and Hamish asked friends and acquaintances to record themselves reading these texts out.  Then Matt turned them into this podcast. It contains some sexual references.

Words: anonymous. Voices: Adam Wilson Holmes, AF, Angela Andrew, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot, Beth Bramich, Carolin Meyer, Conor James, Elizabeth Rochester, Emilia Robinson, Francisco Zhan, Genevieve Costello, Gillie Kleiman, Gregory Hari, GS,  Hannah Bellil, HMTIDT4U, Joshua Jayraj, Maria Sideri, May, Michael Whitby, Molly Chapman, Molly Martian, Nina Sever, Paul Hughes, Peter Jacobs, Ralph Pritchard, Sean Alayo, Tamara Tomic-Vajagic.

Music/editing: Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau

You can buy a book of the texts with original photographs from stilllifemag.org with profits going to Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement and Covid-19 Prisoner Emergency Fund.

Image: Teresa Albor

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As part of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s artist commission with Open School East, He presents three online seminars about communication on the internet.

In the final seminar we’ll spend time understanding and critiquing the structuring ideology of the attention economy. We’ll look at artists, activists and other practitioners who have interrupted the attention economy in different ways: diverting and disrupting attention in order to make political statements, offer critique, or create moments of aesthetic instability in the flows of attention we direct towards broadcast and networked media.

To take part in the seminar, visit the Open School East website.

As part of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s artist commission with Open School East, He presents three online seminars about communication on the internet.

In the second seminar we will look at the different broadcasting models that govern the rules of transmission for different media. From traditional media’s ‘one-to-many’ model, to the ‘many-to-many’ model of social media. We will think through the implications for status relationships in these models, is ‘one-to-many’ broadcasting always authoritarian, and does ‘many-to-many’ deliver the equality it seems to promise?

To take part in the seminar, visit the Open School East website.

As part of Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau’s artist commission with Open School East, He presents three online seminars about communication on the internet.

In the first seminar we explored the development of performativity (the idea that language can construct the things it describes) by looking at a range of texts on the subject by J.L Austin, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick and Sara Ahmed.

Matt speaks to the writer Lars Iyer about his latest book, Nietzsche and the Burbs. They also talk about method, music and what time Lars wakes up in the morning.

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Matt speaks to the music producer M.J Harding about bangers, intensity, addiction, shame and the voice between speaking and singing.

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Matt speaks to the artist Joey Holder about conspiracies, getting caught in the crossfire of artworld controversy, and the time a clownfish squared up to her.

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Matt speaks to the artist Richard Whitby about conspiracies, Virginia Woolf and the post-cinematic, and his newest film ‘The Lost Ones’.

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Matt talks to the artist Kate Liston about affects, stances, performance and CrossFit.

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Matt talks to artist Ben Jeans Houghton about two of his film works. ‘2ndlife’ (2018), made on a residency in Japan, and a new work in progress, ‘Screaming Bird Singing Dawn Rainbow Mountain’, made at Hongti Arts Centre, Busan, an international collaboration made possible by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and supported by Arts Council England and Arts Council Korea.

You can watch Ben’s film ‘2ndlife’ at the below link.
https://vimeo.com/253318990
Password: please_take_a_stone

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Seething resentment; imposter syndrome; work-life balance; discrimination; office politics; Slack channel bitching; rotten food in the fridge; coffee grounds in the staff room sink; micro-management; glass ceilings; cubicle farms; open plans and hot desks.

Using breathing and visualisation techniques, artists Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Hamish MacPherson present a guided meditation for the contemporary work place, taking you from exhaustion to exuberance and beyond.

Matt speaks to curator Anne Duffau about her peripatetic project A-Z, sci-fi and the power of parties.

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Join The Bad Vibes Club for a reading group and discussion about how paranoia affects the way we think, and the possibilities for what Eve Sedgwick has called ‘reparative reading’; a powerful corrective to paranoia and cynicism, and a much needed way of engaging with people and ideas that are different from our own. We will be reading excerpts from Sedgewick’s book ‘Touching, Feeling’ and talking about them. No need to read the text beforehand, just turn up.

The third and last conversation with Andrea Francke. This time we talk about Eve Sedgewick’s writing on paranoia and reparative reading. We talk conspiracy, strong theory, universalism and black feminism.

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Join The Bad Vibes Club (Beth Bramich & Kathryn Siegel) at Whitechapel Gallery for a reading group and discussion about transgenerational approaches to feminist politics, based on a reading excerpts from Alex Martinis Roe‘s book To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice. This event touches on themes Martinis Roe explores of intergenerational rifts and estrangements, the affective aspects of collective practices and the possibilities of solidarity in difference.

Participants are not required to read the text beforehand.

Free, booking required.

The second conversation with Andrea Francke. This time we talk about The Idiot, a novel by Elif Bautman, and from that, we talk about female subjectivity in fiction, mumblecore, and privilege.

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The first of three podcasts with Andrea Francke where we read different texts and use them to talk about Andrea’s research and interests. For this conversation we both read some Chinese sci-fi (the book is called Invisible Planets) and then talked about care, AI, robots and subjecthood. (You don’t need to have read the stories to enjoy this I promise.)

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The Gleaning is the second in a series of events and artistic responses to James Richard’s Wales in Venice representation at the 2017 Venice Biennale.

For ‘The Gleaning’, the artists Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau and Sophie Mallett present a series of stories and short audio essays highlighting different kinds of gleaning. They explore gleaning as a historical right to subsist on common land, as a creative practice of selection, as mimicry and stealing, and examine examples of gleaning by machines and animals.

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To celebrate the end of the 2017-2018 programme we made a pdf publication, containing essays, interviews, scripts and documentation by the artists and writers we worked with over the past year.
​
It’s called The Bad Vibes Club Reader. It’s free. Download it or read it here.

Residence Kitchen is a recurring, scored, hosted space for approaching problems of Residence: the things that are at stake because we live in this city, at this time.

There will be a kitchen, not a dining room. It will be organised for the sake of working out how best to organise. There will be pauses but they won’t be uncomfortable. There will be ways to work together, and to work alone. We’ll plant ingredients to make the food better next time, using bad tools that make it last as long as we want. There’ll be writing about the things we’re doing, but it won’t be as good as doing it. There will be deceleration before we begin.

A screening of Matt and Hamish’s film Breathe Imperative followed by a talk by Matt on affect theory and work.

A screening programme of feminist film on the theme of affective and reproductive labour.

Image credit: Carolee Schneemann, Still from Plumb Line (1968-72). Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Beth Bramich talks to the artist Chloe Cooper about her work with Jenny Moore and Phoebe Davies as Bedfellows, a research project about sex re-education, performing an Internal Scratch at Battersea Arts Centre, sex education at the British Museum, sex positivity, activism and consent.

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A larp written by Masha Bugayova, Zhenja Karachun, Olga Rudak and Nastassia Sinitsyna

Have you come here to play Jesus? is larp (live action role play) that portrays the controversial phenomenon of euthanasia in the modern world. The characters face the unbearable choice of determining whether or not to end the life of a paralysed family member. It’s about love, family and choices we make. This is a larp for 6 people.

Join The Bad Vibes Club (Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau & Beth Bramich) for a reading group and discussion about how paranoia affects the way we think, and the possibilities for what Eve Sedgwick has called ‘reparative reading’. Reparative reading is a powerful corrective to paranoia and cynicism, and a much needed way of engaging with people and ideas that are different from our own. We will be reading excerpts from Sedgewick’s book ‘Touching, Feeling’ and talking about them.

This event touches on themes explored in Joey Holder’s new commission Adcredo: The Deep Belief Network and the event will take place within Holder’s installation at Bloc Projects.

A live listening and screening session. In this speculative docufiction video, jellyfish are cast as the protagonists of a new era in geopolitics. Global warming has disrupted ocean currents and their dependent trade routes, simultaneously halting trade relationships and enabling epic blooms of our gelatinous overlords.

We’ll be reflecting on Wayne’s World (1992, Penelope Spheeris). A talk and discussion including but not limited to: Garth, beta-bros and non-toxic masculinity, Wayne’s relationship to money, work and selling out, and Stacy’s radical vulnerability.

Two days of gentle activity, physical exercise, drawing and listening, reading and writing, walking and talking and eating together. I made a pdf from our reading groups which you can read below.

A guided meditation for the contemporary work place, taking you from exhaustion to exuberance and beyond.

Matt talks to Revital and Tuur about their film ‘Trapped in the Dream of the Other’, filmed in a coltan mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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A performance with sampled sound about Grenfell Tower, resentment and cruelty. Originally given as a performance at ICA London and CCA Derry-Londonderry as part of The Bad Vibes Club’s ‘Feeling Bad’ events in summer 2017. I use ideas and words from Jean Franco’s book Cruel Modernity, Achille Mbembe’s essay Necropolitics and Marina Warner’s essay Back from the Underworld: The Liveliness of the Dead.

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A day of workshops and an evening of performances by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Hamish MacPherson and Sophie Mallett.

Matt speaks to Sarah about collaboration, dithering and her internet doppelgänger

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Matt speaks to artist John Walter about jesters, Alien Sex Clubs and Shonkyness.

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As part of In formation at the ICA, The Bad Vibes Club presents a day of workshops and an evening of performances by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Hamish MacPherson and Sophie Mallett.

The Bad Vibes Club presents a new performance by artist Sophie Mallett (feat. Jenny Moore on drums).

Beth Bramich speaks to artist Jonathan Hoskins about gentrification, politics and his recently published book ‘OWN DE BEAUVOIR!’

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The Bad Vibes Cloud hosts an episode of Seven Oh Nine, a podcast of stories, poems and improvisations made collaboratively by Robert Bidder and Siân Robinson Davies. Hear more at https://soundcloud.com/sevenohnineisalovelytime/

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Matt talks to the artist Beth Collar about the dark ages, gruesome death, and trapped wind.

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A guided meditation on bitterness, mediocrity and inertness. A chance to journey through past aggravation you can’t forget, and future revenge that never seems to arrive.

Commissioned by The Bad Vibes Club and supported by Arts Council England.

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The Bad Vibes Club welcomes new co-host Beth Bramich as she speaks to the artist Sophie Mallett about radio, collaboration and nationalism.

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Matt talks to the artist Erica Scourti about art, twitter bots and self care.

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Radio Anti present a mixtape of entropic words and music.

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A day of talks and screenings exploring the power of negative emotions in politics.

What do Brexit, Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, Marine Le Pen and Islamic terrorists have to do with each other? In one way or another, they all utilise or appeal to what Sianne Ngai calls ‘Ugly Feelings’ – feelings that are seen as minor, negative, and unsavoury in social situations and modern democracies.

Why are these feelings so present in contemporary politics? Where do they come from and why are they so powerful?

Taking place the weekend before the UK general election, the day will be an opportunity to explore some of the psychological, emotional and ideological forces behind politics, and an opportunity to discuss the bad feelings we all have when we undertake political activity ourselves – whether that’s activism, discussing politics with friends and family, shouting at the radio or firing off angry tweets.

Free and open to all.

Supported by Arts Council England and Open School East

Matt talks to Joe Fletcher Orr and Sam Venables – artists and curators from Merseyside, about art, class, family and work.

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An audio essay about philosophy, with sampled music.  First given at the ICA as part of ‘Realisms and Object Orientations: Art, Politics and the Philosophy of Tristan Garcia’, 2014.

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Unluck is a podcast about chance, probability and luck. Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau speaks to people who have been struck by lightning and been in plane crashes, as well as hearing more everyday tales of chance events to explore the contemporary meanings of luck and chance.

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The Bad Vibes Club presents a night of performances involving the use and abuse language as part of Bedwyr Williams’ exhibition The Gulch at the Barbican Curve. Artist and stand-up Sian Robinson Davies spins a convoluted tale, the clairvoyant life-coach Mr. Ferris presents his mind reading system iMagic, Holly Pester & Emma Bennett present a short play with statues, and the spoken word and sound collage collaboration duo Reet Maff’l meet your ears with noise of mouth and music. Your host is the artist and Great British Poetry Slam Off 2015 winner, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau (played by Daniel Oliver).

Following on from the success of Decommissioned, a series of lecture organised by Stephen at the ICA earlier this year, his lecture addresses examples of artists withdrawing, refusing or closing down and hints towards a future politics of invisibility and reproductive care.

Daniel will talk more about awkwardness, dyspraxia and over-idenitification in participatory performance, referring to his own performance ‘Weird Seance’ and Slavoj Zizek’s concept of the ‘Performative act of retelling’.

Daniel Oliver is a performance artist, researcher and teaching fellow at Queen Mary University of London

Image credit: Daniel Oliver, ‘Weird Seance’, SPILL Festival of Performance 2014, photo by Guido Mencari

Join Beth Bramich and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau of The Bad Vibes Club in the Kathy Rae Huffman Archive Reading Room at Res. to read Huffman’s CYBER INTIMACY: From Net Nookie to Coffee Talk (1995) alongside a screening of excerpts of moving image works from Huffman’s programme of the same name.

In this talk Lisa Baraitser investigates practices of survival, and the need for social projects and affective strategies that maintain some tenuous relation to situations that can still bring us hope, pleasure, satisfaction and optimism, in relation to what Lauren Berlant has called the frayed fantasy of the good life.

Building on his article ‘Happiness Inc.’, published in Art Monthly 391: November 2015, JP will pull in contemporary art’s fascination, too, with alternative belief systems such as Zen and witchcraft in recent exhibitions such as Beatrice Loft Schulz’s ‘Living Arrangement #’ at Arcadia Missa in 2015, Lucy Stein and France-Lise McGurn’s exhibition ‘NEO-PAGAN BITCH-WITCH!’ at Evelyn Yard or Harry Meadley’s ‘Moments of Zen’ at Turf Projects, both in 2016.

Jonathan P. Watts is an art critic and editor based in London. Jonathan is a regular contributor to frieze magazine, and writes for Artforum and Art Monthly. With seven friends he is contributor-editor of a magazine of new art writing called A-or-ist.

Image Benedict Drew, de-re-touch, 2015, installation view at Charing Cross

Andrea Francke and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau explore awkwardness – from a micro-history of the awkward turtle hand gesture, to the potential of awkwardness as a queered mode of politics.

‘Dissonance’ is a way of talking about the ways that our communications – our efforts towards generous exchanges and relations – inevitably produce harsh affects. The inevitable ‘want of concord or harmony between things’ is important. Important to maintain as part of, not antithetical to, generosity and our efforts toward possibly generous relations.

Target Markets was part of the the Interruptions project, commissioned by Field Broadcast.

Every inventor or owner of media technology wants you to use it in a particular way. But what happens when people ignore these terms of use and want to test media’s boundaries? This talk will examine how specific forms of information and behaviours are considered to cross the line of legitimacy in media technologies. By looking at examples such as noise and spam, this talk will show what are the political forces behind such processes of categorisation, what are the consequences for humans and non-humans, and the way that you understand and engage with media technologies.

Elinor is a PhD candidate at the Media and Communications department at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her research topic is “Don’t you want me? The power and politics of unwanted forms of information in media technologies”.

Hamish talks about when politicians or protesters start dancing. Times when untoward movements interrupt the expected choreographies of western politics. He also talks about when politicians fart and puke and other times that our bodies involuntarily interrupt social hierarchies.

Hamish MacPherson is a choreographer who makes performances, installations, workshops, games, writings, images and other things. Often relating to the embodied aspects of politics and philosophy and from a heterosexual, white, cis-male perspective.

Bodies of Interruption was part of the the Interruptions project, commissioned by Field Broadcast.

Responding to the title ‘Bodies of Interruption’ this talk draws on previous work in which Lisa Baraitser has argued that the particular encounters with others that we could call ‘maternal encounters’ hold open the potential for a radical form of ethics that runs counter to capitalist modes of productivity, temporality and exchange through their capacity to interrupt or throw us ‘off the subject’.

Bodies of Interruption was part of the the Interruptions project, commissioned by Field Broadcast.

An online essay about loops, gifs and death. Made for the Interruptions project, commissioned by Field Broadcast.

A film lecture about the practice of interrupting screens. Made for the Interruptions project for Field Broadcast.

In one of his final essays, The Exhausted, a reading of Samuel Beckett that was published as an accompaniment to a number of Beckett’s works for television, Gilles Deleuze characterised the adoptive French Irish writer’s combinatory poetic style as a “relentless Spinozism” with little further qualification. The figure of the exhausted and the operation of exhaustion that Deleuze follows throughout Beckett’s writing culminates in a stance towards language that is, as critic Raymond Bellour has noted, “utopian”: “blanks for when words gone.” Taking Deleuze’s essay and its slightly cryptic reference to Spinoza as its starting point, this paper will explore the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of exhaustion and the concept of refusal to which it is related.

Andrew Goffey runs the Centre for Critical Theory at The University of Nottingham. He is the co-author with Matthew Fuller, of Evil Media, the coeditor, with Éric Alliez, of The Guattari Effect and with Roland Faber, of The Allure of Things. He is the translator of Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre’s Capitalist Sorcery, Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Lines of Flight. For Another World of Possibilities. He is currently working on books on Guattari and on the micropolitics of software.

Unluck is a podcast about chance, probability and luck made for Rhubaba in 2015.

Through interviews, music and discussion, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau explores the contemporary meanings of luck and chance: faith, myth, folklore, language and psychological coping mechanisms. He speaks to people who have been struck by lightning and been in plane crashes, as well as hearing more everyday tales of chance events.

He talks to the psychologist Adam Moore, artist and musician, Jenny Moore, provides a musical re­telling of Stuart Bell’s brushes with bad luck, and the Rhubaba Choir explore the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, helping us understand the limits of knowledge through a vocal arrangement of the Tractatus Logico­-Philosophicus.

ally O’Reilly will be talking about ambiguity, placing it in a historical ground of modernity and then considering its deployment in 20th century linguistics, literature and art, as well as its notable use in management strategy, political rhetoric and the constitution of hyperobjects.

Writer Sally O’Reilly publishes and distributes text in conventional and expanded forms, from art magazines to performance lectures to opera. Her diverse subject matter spans such abstractions as rhetoric and ambiguity, as well as more concrete phenomena such as noses, the history of technology and shopping receipts. This apparently erratic practice is a means to conduct a more thoroughgoing investigation into how knowledge is generated, circulated and expressed.

Besides contributing to several art magazines and numerous exhibition catalogues, she has written the libretto for the opera The Virtues of Things (Royal Opera House, 2015), a monograph on Mark Wallinger (Tate Publishing 2015) and The Body in Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson, 2009). She was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11), producer and co-writer of The Last of the Red Wine, a radio sitcom set in the art world (ICA, London, 2011), and co-editor of Implicasphere (2003–8), an interdisciplinary broadsheet.

Oliver Braid lives in Glasgow. He decided to ‘become an artist’ in 1997, at the age of thirteen, after visiting Sensation: Young British Art from the Saatchi Collection. Recently fired three times in twelve months and described on Twitter as a sociopath The Certainty of Insignificance is an introduction and overview of seventeen years-worth of ideas and artworks from Oliver’s studio; offering, through its accumulation, a deeper understanding of the artist’s ‘idiosyncratic’ approaches to people, objects and artworks. In Oliver’s own words; “What began five years ago in response to Antagonism has developed into reflections on 20th Century concepts of self-expression and an exploration into 21st century concepts of objects; in order to more clearly consider ways of living now, in the century after The Century of the Self”.

Oliver Braid was born in Birmingham in 1984 and studied at Falmouth College of Arts and Glasgow School of Art. He has previous made solo presentations of his studio practice at Collective, Edinburgh (2011-12), The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2012) and Transmission, Glasgow (2013). Alongside the artist Ellie Harrison he co-hosted the Ellie & Oliver Show through CultureLab Radio (2012-14) and was a founding member of the experiential therapy group for artists, Artists Anonymous (2012). From 2011 to 2014 he coordinated the Many Studios’ Graduate Residency Programme and worked as part of The Telfer Gallery team.

Originally presented at Glasgow School of Art, 2014. Commissioned by GSA Exhibitions and funded by Outset Scotland in association with YPO for Alasdair Gray Season: Spheres of Influence II. The Certainty of Insignificance was additionally developed with assistance from a Creative Scotland Artist’s Bursary.

Drawing on his recent online essay for dreamingofstreaming.com, Paul Kneale expands on his idea of the ‘new abject’ – the contemporary form of abjection that we experience in our daily use of technology.

Paul Kneale is a London based artist, (born Canada,1986). Kneale’s work typically explores language, material, and the networked mind. He produces paintings, videos, texts, sculptures and performances. These often address the location of their production.

The Bad Vibes Club presents The Unreliable Narrator, a film by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, with a talk by Karen Mirza.

The Unreliable Narrator
Video 17 min 2014
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler

The Unreliable Narrator by Karen Mirza and Brad Butler is a video work that revisits the 2008 Mumbai Attacks to depict the deeper battle for control over the event’s grand narratives. Enlisting an unreliable narrator the work destabilises these narratives by drawing attention to the absurd convergence of Bollywood dreams, twisted masculinities, religion, class and fear. Karen Mirza will talk about the themes of The Unreliable Narrator in the context of contemporary forms of terror and their representations in the media.

Mirza and Butler’s work spans filmmaking, installation, drawing, publishing and curating. The artists draw influence from critical moments of change, protest and debate. The Unreliable Narrator is part of a body of work entitled The Museum of Non Participation (2009-present). The term “non participation” for the duo is a device for questioning and challenging current conditions of political involvement and resistance. The Museum of Non Participation embeds its institutional critique in its very title, yet it releases itself from being an actual museum. Instead it travels as a place, a slogan, a banner, a performance, a newspaper, a film, an intervention, an occupation: situations that enable this museum to “act.”

Lecture with sampled music written and performed by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau of The Bad Vibes Club. First given at the ICA as part of Realisms and Object Orientations: Art, Politics and the Philosophy of Tristan Garcia, 2014.

A lecture with sampled sound clips from the 1998 Todd Solondz film ‘Happiness’, written and performed by Matt Breen and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau of The Bad Vibes Club, originally presented as part of You Can’t Win Them All, a radio project by Jenny Moore, 2014.

The Bad Vibes Club presents Robin Mackay
A lecture and discussion group, with food, drink and philosophy

Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.

In this lecture and discussion group, Robin Mackay will talk about orientation and futurity in the context of accelerationism, with particular references to Ray Brassier’s essay Prometheanism and its Critics.

Robin Mackay is a philosopher and editor and publisher of Collapse Journal of Philosophical Research and Development. His work addresses contingency and hyper chaos. He has written about, interviewed, translated and published the key thinkers associated with speculative realism and non-philosophy.

We will be reading Ray Brassier’s essay Prometheanism and its Critics in advance of the lecture. Email info@badvibesclub.co.uk to book a place and get a pdf copy of the essay.

What do we really know about rapists? Who are they? Why do they act as they do? What can we do to stop them? By looking at the way sexually violent people have acted and been understood in past societies, we can think differently about violence today.

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the prize-winning author of nine books, including histories on modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, pain, and rape. One of her books is Rape: A History from the 1860s to the Present (2007).

The reading for this lecture is Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860s to the Present (London: Virago, 2007), chapter2 and 3 (pp. 21-88).
Email info@badvibesclub.co.uk if you want to have a pdf copy of the reading.

A lecture about the curious empathy aroused by misunderstood monsters, particularly in film.

Jonathan Rigby is the author of five books, among them English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema (2000), American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema (2007) and Studies in Terror: Landmarks of Horror Cinema (2011). In 2010-12 he collaborated with Mark Gatiss on the three-part BBC Four documentary A History of Horror and its one-off follow-up Horror Europa. He’s also an actor, best known for playing Kenneth Horne in various stage, radio and TV revivals of the classic comedy series Round the Horne.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Rigby

Reading: All Caliban scenes in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Various thinkers have proposed accounts of guilt that either make the concept itself modern (which is arguably what happens when Ruth Benedict contrasts guilt and shame), or which argue for a specifically modern version of guilt (e.g. Paul Oppenheimer). There is something in this. And yet our thinking and practice with regard to guilt is haunted by concepts that, on the face of it, belong to the remote past, such as pollution, collective guilt and original sin. We will explore the forms and significance of this haunting both for our concepts of guilt and in order to problematize modernity.

Samantha Ashenden is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her current research focuses on guilt, violence and conditions of political legitimacy.

James Brown taught film and literature at Middlesex between 1992 and 2011, and politics and sociology at Birkbeck from 1997 to 2011. He is an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck.

They co-ordinate the work of the Guilt Group in the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

The reading for this lecture is René Girard, ‘Oedipus and the Surrogate Victim’, in Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), chapter 3
Email info@badvibesclub.co.uk if you want to have a pdf copy of the reading.

From its roots and throughout its evolution, metal music has always been an outsiders game. Tracing a manifest sense of social alienation, broaching the personal, political and social struggles of its participants, it has become a beacon of musical negativity, resentment, and violence. This lecture will cover how metal, in its various incarnations since the late 60s, has embodied this alienation, and subsequently rejected perceived societal norms and embraced wholesale negativity, not only in lyrical content, but in its musical presentation, imagery, physical participation, and social networking.

Jill Mikkelson is the full-time in-house promoter at The Unicorn in Camden, University of Toronto History graduate, long-time musician and has regularly contributed to several extreme music publications, including Terrorizer, Zero Tolerance, and Exclaim!, since 2002.
http://www.facebook.com/theunicorncamden

Further watching: ‘Until the Light Takes Us’, a documentary about the history, ideology and aesthetic of Norwegian black metal – available to watch on Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l5Hbu_Fm9s

This lecture will follow a trajectory of anti-vitalism from Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death in the 1970s through to Nick Land’s extraordinary theory-fictional texts of the 1990s. The lecture will argue that – despite Land’s avowed anti-leftism and the ambivalent political orientation of Baudrillard and Lyotard’s books – a contemporary leftist politics of desire has much to learn from these texts, all of which centrally involve the figure of the death drive that introduced Freud in Beyond The Pleasure Principle. The lecture will maintain that the anti-capitalist left is compromised by its commitment to a vitalist metaphysics. However, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Land’s texts only provide a limited alternative to this metaphysics, because their ostensible negativity amounts to an inverted vitalism. In place of the fevered energetics of this cosmic libertarianism, the lecture will argue for a cooler vision of desire – in which libido is not assumed to be some force inimical to all structuration, but something that can be designed, manipulated and engineered.

Mark Fisher is the author of Capitalist Realism (2009) and Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014). He was a founder member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru). His writing has appeared in many publications, including The Wire, Frieze, The Guardian and Film Quarterly. He is Programme Leader of the MA in Aural and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and a lecturer at the University of East London. He has also produced two acclaimed audio-essays in collaboration with Justin Barton: londonunderlondon (2005) and On Vanishing Land (2013).

Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Desire Named Marx’, in Libidinal Economy (Indiana University Press, 1993); Nick Land ‘Meltdown’, in Fanged Noumena (Urbanomic, 2011).
Email info@badvibesclub.co.uk if you want to have a pdf copy of the reading.

In this talk, awkwardness is celebrated in its position as an ugly cousin of antagonism and a tolerated guest in pursuits of conviviality. Taking a Žižekian approach to participatory performance, I align awkwardness with acts of over-identification and with unstable relationships between artists, participants and big Others. My focus will be on moments of awkwardness that arise in the participatory practices of art group Reactor and performance artist David Hoyle.

Daniel Oliver is a performance artist and PhD candidate in the Drama department at Queen Mary, University of London. He focuses on awkwardness, desire, and otherness in participatory performance.  He has worked as a solo performance artist and a collaborator across the UK and overseas since 2003. His performance practice experiments with site specificity, incapability and uneasy modes of interactivity. Along with his long term collaborator, Mr Ferris, he is currently reworking a series of performances based on life-mentoring programmes and labyrinths and bringing forth the future through binaural audio action art.

The reading for this lecture is Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) (Introduction, pp. 1-37)
Email info@badvibesclub.co.uk if you want to have a pdf copy of the reading.