In Conversation With Gary Zhexi Zhang
Catastrophe Time! Book Launch
Goldsmiths, University of London
Professor Stuart Hall Building (LG02)
80 Lewisham Way
London SE14 6NW
Sunday 11th March 2023
14:00 - 18:00
Join us for an afternoon of talks and readings to celebrate the launch of Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023), edited by Gary Zhexi Zhang. With Bahar Noorizadeh, Klara Kofen, Jamie Sutcliffe, Suhail Malik and Gordon Woo.
Once, financial practitioners plied a hybrid trade as hydrologists, star-gazers, and weather-watchers who sought to discover the natural laws of value and exchange as they did the divine order of an unchanging nature. Today, corporate firms hire trend forecasters and scenario planners to play out strategic fictions in virtual worlds. Hurricane insurance markets simulate a turbulent climate to offer investment instruments to hedge against the risks of the stock market. And for financial astrologers operating in the city of London, celestial motions provide a cosmic map that orients the mood of terrestrial markets.
Bringing together artists, researchers, and interstitial practitioners, Catastrophe Time! pays attention to the conditions of speculative knowledge on an increasingly volatile planet. Traversing a gray zone between rigorous research and operative science fictions, its contributors question how practices of speculation may transform, undermine, and at times exceed, the worlds they set out to model.
Edited by artist Gary Zhexi Zhang, Catastrophe Time! explores the power of temporal technologies—whether currencies, conspiracies, or simulation models—to shape reality through fiction. By bringing together researchers and writers working at the boundaries of temporal practices, including Diann Bauer, Philip Grant, Bahar Noorizadeh, Habib William Kherbek, Klara Kofen, Suhail Malik, Kei Kreutler, Bassem Saad, Gordon Woo and Aslak Aamot Helm.
Catastrophe Time! is published by Strange Attractor Press and distributed by MIT Press. Its publication is supported by Gaia Art Foundation and Art Gallery of York University. The launch symposium is supported by Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Art.
Black Coud Highway (still), 2023, Lawrence Lek
Lawrence Lek In Conversation With Jamie Sutcliffe
Sadie Coles HQ
London
Saturday 3rd June 2023
14:00 - 15:30
On the occasion of London Gallery Weekend 2023, join Lawrence Lek in conversation with writer and editor Jamie Sutcliffe at Sadie Coles HQ's Davies Street gallery on Saturday, 3 June 2023, 2pm.
The conversation is presented as part of 'Black Cloud Highway', Lawrence Lek’s second solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, is a new site-specific iteration of Lek’s CGI-film 'Black Cloud' – the subject of the 4th VH AWARD Grand Prix – at the gallery’s Davies Street location in Mayfair. The work is the latest episode in his continuously expanding Sinofuturist universe, following his feature-length science fiction musical 'AIDOL', shown at the gallery in 2019.
Pandemonium, VR, 2023, Ami Clarke
Ami Clarke In Conversation With Jamie Sutcliffe
Banner Repeater
London
Saturday 29th April 2023
14:00 - 15:00
The exhibition The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete, curated by writer Jamie Sutcliffe and artist Petra Szemán, programmed as a precursor to the publication of WEEB THEORY (Banner Repeater '23), comes to an end on the 29th April.
Please join us for a finissage event and launch of the hotly anticipated book: WEEB THEORY on the 29th between 12-6pm, where the book will be on sale, and available for signing throughout the afternoon. (You can also purchase the book online here).
Following theorist Deborah Levitt’s suggestion that developments in commercial and industrial animation have defined a new techno-political continuum in which the relationship between body and image has been irrevocably complicated, WEEB THEORY asks how animated images might produce, pollute, or populate our emergent media-saturated lifeworlds, inducing multi-planar reveries and hybridised forms of perception. The result is an edited volume of artists’ texts, interviews, and essays that interrogate the inter-media resonances of contemporary animation produced by popular cartoon shows and video games, animation theory and artists video.
Pandemonium: do androids dream of? VR - Preview with Ami Clarke.
During the afternoon a sneak preview of the new VR work: Pandemonium: do androids dream of? by Ami Clarke, will continue an ongoing conversation between the artist and writer Jamie Sutcliffe, that began with The Underlying that appears in WEEB THEORY. Realised during a Beyond Matter residency at ZKM, Germany, Pandemonium furthers Clarke’s enquiry into concepts of emergence within surveillance and disaster capitalism. Pandemonium is currently exhibited in Immerse at Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia, curated by Corina L. Apostol (Tallinn Art Hall) and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás (ZKM, Karlsruhe).
Strange Attractor Journal Five Launch
Camden Art Centre
London
Thrusday 27th April 2023
19:00 - 21:00
Join Strange Attractor Press at Camden Art Centre on April 27th to celebrate the publication of our latest anthology, Strange Attractor Journal Five, after 11 years of silence.
Journal Five is a characteristically eclectic new collection of high weirdness from the margins of culture. Covering previously uncharted regions of history, anthropology, art, literature, architecture, science, and magic since 2004, each Journal has presented new and unprecedented research into areas that scholarship has all too often ignored.
The launch event will feature three presentations taken from the new collection:
William Fowler on the strange story of Hungarian painter and decorator Joseph De Havilland, who had himself crucified on Hampstead Heath in 1969. Was it an act of queer mystical masochism, or high-concept performance art?
Karen Russo presents her short film, and an introductory lecture on Haus Atlantis in Bremen, a 1931 monument of esoteric fascist architecture that combined Nordic mythology, fringe-science and futuristic architecture with the aim of restoring “the self-esteem of the German people”.
Ken Hollings, David McGillivray and friends read scenes from “Let Me Die A Monster’ their un-filmed 1996 film script imagining the tortured last days of Nick Adams, would-be film star and reputed lover of James Dean and Elvis, as he filmed a kaiju epic for Toho Films in 1965.
Books and exclusive ephemera will be available.
Antraal (still), sentient AI program, 2019, Sahej Rahal
On Animatics: From Anime To Animacy
Sahej Rahal and Cole James Graham In Conversation With Jamie Sutcliffe and Petra Szemán
Banner Repeater
London
Thursday 6th April 2023
18:30 - 20:30
In conjunction with the exhibition The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete, the curators and editors of the soon to be launched publication WEEB THEORY (Banner Repeater '23); writer Jamie Sutcliffe and artist Petra Szemán are joined in conversation by artist Sahej Rahal, and writer / art historian Cole J. Graham, to discuss animation, fandom, and the peculiar routes through which they loop back into the production of artistic and theoretical work.
More information and booking here.
Alternate Presence (installation view), Seventeen, London, 2023, David Blandy and Petra Szemán
Alternate Presence
David Blandy and Petra Szemán In Conversation With Jamie Sutcliffe
Seventeen
London
Wednesday 22nd March 2023
19:00 - 21:00
“Alternate Presence” is a two person show composed of four films, two by each artist, displayed over a wallpapered landscape by Petra Szemán. Similar concerns and strategies link the two artists’ output, one being their use of a digital version of ‘themselves’ within film. This can range from the effective and commonly used first person narrative voice that as viewers we are familiar with, to generating a digital or animated avatar that then performs on behalf of the artist. This representative, named Yourself in the case of Szemán, or a majestic Cormorant in one of Blandy’s films, can then be filmed within a landscape, whether thats a pre-existing digital environment generated for another purpose or a geographical location captured on camera.
Szemán presents two films from their Monomyth: gaiden cycle. Departure (2018) and Master of Two Worlds (2020) explore the artist’s relationship to their digital avatar, Yourself, as well as the processes involved in the creation of a multi-layered image world. As a self-aware protagonist moving along the frayed edges of fictional and real worlds shaped by narrative traditions, Yourself attempts to navigate landscapes that have become oversaturated with movies and fiction. Starting with the statement “I am both myself and a character that looks like me” the avatar makes a journey, progressing through static landscapes then floating multiplanar images and eventually crossing in and out of the pictorial plane itself.
The narration also implies an interplay of roles between the Character and the Player, describing how visual decisions such as clothing or piercings might be driven by either party, at one moment recounting how their ‘real life body’ had to be changed in order to better represent the latest, levelled-up version of the avatar.
How to Fly (2020) is one of several works by Blandy that employs the form of an online video tutorial to explore ideas around patterns in nature and existence. Each of them begins with the artist giving a step-by- step tutorial explaining how to make a short video about a specific subject, using only the tools available via a computer – through the Internet and video editing software to video games. This very practical tutorial at first playfully undermines an audiences faith in the sanctified process of creation. Within the Grand Theft Auto V cinema mode, one of the tools favoured by Blandy to generate work, he talks the viewer through the process of quickly generating script, roughly capturing a scene finally selecting the seabird as an avatar in order to fly. The work pivots elegantly, having shown the viewer behind the curtain, the ironic detachment is abandoned and the narrator delivers a monologue with unexpected sincerity and meaning. Made in 2020, reflecting the recent period of collective tension, the work offers insight into the spectrum of artifice and sincerity, without having to abandon sincerity itself.
In Androids Dream, Blandy deconstructs the cyberpunk aesthetic popularised by Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) which has since proliferated becoming ever more ossified. Formed of multiple simulacra, the work involves Unreal Engine assets and uses scenes from Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher – itself a replay of Blade Runner in video game form – and even deploys an algorithmic likeness of the artist’s own voice. Breaking down the aesthetic form, the film in turn breaks down, repeats, refracts, and goes into reverse.
Petra Szemán, Screen Walks, The Photographer’s Gallery, 2021
Screen Walk With Petra Szemán and Jamie Sutcliffe
The Photographer’s Gallery
London
Wednesday 20th October 2021
6pm - 8pm
Petra Szemán presented a virtual studio tour, going through work-in-progress files and various inspiring bits of material, ranging from academia through anime to games. Petra was joined by their co-conspirator Jamie Sutcliffe – while exploring Petra’s working methods, references, storyboards and in-progress AfterEffects compositions, Petra and Jamie talked about collaborative creativity, class, weirdness, trans-cultural exchange, fandom, a shared appreciation of animation, and being a nerd in the art world.
Screen Walks is a new series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.
Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic
Whitechapel Gallery, London
September 18th 2021
14:00 - 17:00
The latest anthology in the Documents of Contemporary Art series, Magic deciphers the evolution of a ‘magical-critical’ thinking that productively complicates, contradicts and expands the boundaries of our increasingly weird present. This afternoon of conversations features guest editor Jamie Sutcliffe alongside chaos magician Phil Hine, post-human philosopher Patricia MacCormack, games designer and writer Porpentine Charity Heartscape and artists David Steans and Gary Zhexi Zhang.
Programme Schedule
2.00pm Welcome
2.05pm Jamie Sutcliffe introduces Magic
2.30pm David Steans – film presentation
2.45pm Phil Hine & Patricia MacCormack in conversation
3.45pm Break (15 min)
4.00pm Porpentine Charity Heartscape – film presentation
4.20pm Gary Zhexi Zhang – talk
4.50pm End
The Time Of Monsters
Nordland Kunst - Og Filmhøgskole
Organized by Katya Sander & Simon Sheikh
Friday 16th / Saturday 17th / Sunday 18th October 2020
We are living in morbid times, with widespread social unrest, the rise of right wing populism, economic recession, an ongoing refugee crisis, a global pandemic and the horrible slow violence that is global warming. Writing at a similar moment of crisis, the rise of historical fascism in Europe a century ago, Antonio Gramsci described his actuality as filled with morbid symptoms, as it was a period of interregnum, while the old world order was dying, but is dying preventing the new from being born. Recently many observers have revisited Gramsci’s notion of the interregnum to describe our current situation in the ruins of neo-liberalism, and calling our time the time of monsters. But who and what are these monsters, and why do they appear?
Guest speakers will address three interlinked contemporary notions of the monster: a) From ecological thought, the notion of Gaia as monstrous, and the ruined landscapes of the anthropocene; b) the theory of the interregnum where the new cannot be born as the old order is in its death throes, employed as a lens through which to see current political tensions and divisions around equality and race, and c) the beast as the sovereign, looking a the global success of so called strong man and their celebration of toxic masculinity (Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Duterte, Modi, Putin, Trump etc) and the zombie politics they propagate.
Speakers are:
Mike Davis
Ros Gray
Ayesha Hameed
Vijay Prashad
Sheila Sheikh
Simon Sheikh
Jamie Sutcliffe
In Conversation: David Blandy and Dr. Merline Evans, chaired by Jamie Sutcliffe
Focal Point Gallery
Event takes place at The Pod, South Essex College
Saturday November 16th
14:00 - 15:30
David Blandy will be joined in conversation with local writer and researcher Dr. Merline Evans, chaired by writer Jamie Sutcliffe, to discuss his new film, exhibition and table-top roleplay game ‘The World After’, currently on view at Focal Point Gallery until 26 January 2020.
‘The World After’ is a fictional tale which imagines a world after the Anthropocene era, a time in which humanity’s activities had detrimental effect on earth’s climate and environment. In this future world, human influence on the planet has faded following a catastrophic man-made ecological crisis, with those who remain having to find new ways to survive and form kin. ‘The World After’ takes inspiration from the unique post-industrial setting of Canvey Wick on Canvey Island, Essex.
As well as a new film and exhibition, Blandy has worked closely with gaming communities in Essex to create a new table-top roleplaying game. With creatures based on local wildlife and myth, the game follows a collective story that imagines new ways of living together.
Tickets are £4 each with concessions available. This event is free to all students of South Essex College. Book yourself a place at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/in-conversation-david-blandy-dr-merline-evans-chaired-by-jamie-sutcliffe-tickets-78148258545
Porous Bodies: Belladonna of Sadness
A screening presented by Adham Faramawy with Jamie Sutcliffe
Friday 27th September
Chaos Magic, Backlit, Nottingham
19:00 - 23:30
As part of artist Adham Faramway’s Porous Bodies screening series, writer Jamie Sutcliffe will introduce a screening of Eichii Yamamoto’s Belladonna of Sadness (1973) and Satoshi Kon's Paprika (2006) with a talk that focuses on the peculiar aptitude of animation in problematising our assumptions of what we might consider the post-human to be. Distinguishing between the cinematic and the animatic, the composite and the multi-planar, and the representational and 'productive', this talk will introduce a body of research devoted to exploring the implications of what Deborah Levitt has recently termed the ‘animatic apparatus’, in an attempt to map a techno-political continuum in which commercial cartoons, neuro-cinematics, deep fake image manipulation, and gene sequencing interfaces might allow image production to call new forms of life into being.
https://nearnow.org.uk/events/porous-bodies-belladonna
Strange Attractor Press Presents: Sonic Spectres, Fatal Magics
Tai Shani, Kristen Gallerneaux, Bridget Crone & Jamie Sutcliffe
Sunday 8th September
Whitechapel Gallery, Zilkha Auditorium
12 - 2pm
Celebrating unpopular culture since 2001, Strange Attractor Press is dedicated to publishing books that document lost, neglected, emerging and underground currents from areas including anthropology, psychology, science and magic, natural history, literature, sound and music, film and the visual arts. For London Art Book Fair editors Mark Pilkington and Jamie Sutcliffe will present and discuss their publishing activities, and introduce a performance lecture by writer, folklorist, and artist Kristen Gallerneaux, and a conversation between artist Tai Shani and theorist Bridget Crone concerning Shani's forthcoming collection Our Fatal Magic (2019).
A Plague Of Wizards: Magic, Chaos and Confusion in the Age of Reality Management
Susan Finlay in Conversation with Jamie Sutcliffe
With a contribution from Federico Campagna
Camden Arts Centre, 21st June, 2019
"Our own civilisation has moved into an epoch of permanent crisis and upheaval, and we are beset with a plague of wizards... "
- Phil Hine, Condensed Chaos: an Introduction to Chaos Magic
Taking the publication of her recent novel Our Lady Of Everything as an opportunity to explore the interrelatedness of magic and politics, artist and author Susan Finlay will discuss the paradigm shifts of magical consciousness from the Iraq War to the present with writer Jamie Sutcliffe, asking what happens to faith and meaning in an age of unprecedented indeterminacy. What might the post-modern reconsideration of occult practice in the 1980s and 90s be able to tell us about the ‘image victories’ and iconographic violence of Western foreign policy in the early 2000s? How might such histories help us better understand the rebirth of magic currently taking place in popular culture, while anticipating some of its more dubious applications in the era of the alt-right?
From the malevolent Chaos Gods of fantasy roleplaying games to psycho-cybernetic pathworkings, A Plague of Wizards will extrapolate some of the themes of Finlay’s new novel and include a pre-recorded intervention from philosopher Federico Campagna, whose new book Technic and Magic provocatively blends Islamic theology with theosophy to question the hegemony of scientific thought.
Playing In A World
Kitty Clark and Jamie Sutcliffe
Jerwood Space, 2nd March, 2019
Playing in a World is a role playing game led by artist Kitty Clark and critic Jamie Sutcliffe. Participants will explore and play in a scenario based on the imagined worlds that Clark’s artworks encompass. The players will become collaborators, working together for a session of experimental world building.
Art Monthly Talk Show
Resonance FM
April 8th 2019
With Kathryn Lloyd, John Parton, Jamie Sutcliffe & George Vasey
Presented by Matt Hale
Kathryn Lloyd, John Parton, Jamie Sutcliffe and George Vasey discuss exhibitions by Laure Prouvost, Callum Hill and Reinhard Mucha as well as the ‘Is This Tomorrow?’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Listen Here
Suite 212
Bomb Culture: Jeff Nuttall and the Sixties Counterculture
Douglas Field and Jamie Sutcliffe
Presented by Tom Overton
Resonance Fm
February 4th 2019
Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture (1968) was an unforgettably idiosyncratic document of Sixties counter-culture, looking at how the nuclear threat that followed World War II had shaped the mass consciousness. This week, Tom Overton talks to Douglas Field (author of All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin) and Jamie Sutcliffe about Strange Attractor Press' recent reissue of Bomb Culture, and Nuttall's place within various Sixties art scenes.