Time

You have lived your whole life separated from Time. Your great-grandparents’ generation had a collective future. They had an understanding of progress. They would reach this future at all costs, no matter what. They were working towards a better world that they knew they mightn’t ever see. They wanted...

Study Group – Gutai

This week we looked at the post-WW2, Japanese avant garde art movement Gutai. Gutai was started by artist, critic, and teacher Jiro Yoshihara, along with Shozo Shimamoto with the instruction to ‘Do something no one has done before.” The word ‘gutai’ roughly translates into ’embodiment’ or ‘concreteness’ and the...

Study Group- I Am Sitting In A Room

I messed up this week and missed the first half hour. I was exercising and lost track of time! This week we listened to Alvin Lucier’s ‘I Am Sitting In A Room’. I’m interested in repetition and the unorthodox use of technology, so when I first heard this, it...

Study Group- Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore

This week in our independent study group we watched Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. I saw Mark Leckey’s show at the Tate Britain a few years ago https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/mark-leckey where Fiorucci was shown along with several other works of his. I’I’d only ever seen it on YouTube before, so...

New Bibliography

NEW BIBLIOGRAPHY Abele, R., 2022. Ben Stiller, Adam Scott on the claustrophobia of the ‘Severance’ set, Innies and Outies. Los Angeles Times, [online] Available at: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2022-06-08/ben-stiller-adam-scotton-the-claustrophobia-of-the-severance-set-innies-and-outties. Aylesworth, G. (2015). Postmodernism. [online] The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/. Bartleby, 2022. Do not bring your whole self to work....

Study Group – Jimmy Carr Destroys Art

This week we watched Channel 4’s show Jimmy Carr Destroys Art. I loved it! The premise: they take two piece of art both by ‘problematic’ people, they get two people to defend each piece (or explain why the other shouldn’t be defended), then the audience votes for the one...

Performing Being Us

Last night I had a very interesting Zoom discussion with several people who attended and presented papers at the Metamodernism conference in Seattle. After an initial ‘de-brief’ about the conference – what worked, what didn’t (it was a ‘hybrid’ conference, both in-person and online, and we talked about how...

Study Group – David Musgrave

A few of us decided to start an MA+ independent study group where we meet for an hour before our main MA meeting to discuss something we have all watched, listened to or read the previous week. The first week, I suggested a lecture called Thinking The Machine given...

Research Paper

I’ve been writing and re-writing my research paper for ages now. It’s been through several different permutations, always about the Real World/Digital World divide and about the Apple TV+ show Severance, but with a slightly different angle each time. I believe, however, that I am done now. There are...

Digital Alienation

American Rasputin Steve Bannon is still scheming. And he’s still a threat to democracy. From https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/steve-bannon-war-room-democracy-threat/638443/ There’s a scene I keep looping back to in Errol Morris’s 2018 documentary about Bannon, American Dharma. Bannon is recalling his Hong Kong days in the 2000s, when he was working for Internet...

Seattle Metamodernism Summit Sept 10-11 2022

I had a great time at the Seattle conference! I met loads of people I was very keen to meet and did my talk at the end of the first day on the Metamodernism in Popular Culture panel. My talk – like my research paper – is on the...

Hi, I’m Gia. I’m an artist.

In my previous newsletter I wrote about how I found it difficult to answer the question ‘And what do you do?’ after I stopped working in TV which provided me with an easy answer. My friend Elliot (one of the AWESOMEST people at Chelsea) WhatsApped me and said ‘Just...

Severance- Separation from Space

The representation of space in the Apple TV+ series Severance mirrors the strange relationship we have with our 21st century territory, which is split between the real and digital worlds and split between Modernist and Postmodern thinking. When we are in the grand, brutalist space of the Perpetuity Wing...

Severance – Separation from Time

In 2014, Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life [1]Fisher, M., 2014. Ghosts Of My Life. Alresford (UK): Zero books. wrote about the idea of a pining for ‘lost futures’- the idea that during the Modern era we had a collective vision of the future, but as postmodernity removed...

Us And Them

I’ve been very interested in cults and high-control groups for a couple decades now. One thing people don’t understand about cults is that for the most part they aren’t started by someone who says ‘Hey! It’d be great to start a cult!’ and then they study how cults operate...