It is often difficult to succinctly capture the essence of an artistic practice, particularly in online spaces. This is a negative space to sit alongside my portfolio - something made with the research and reading that underpins my work. I hope that reading through this small selection begins to form a hazy outline; a narrative from collage, a blurry image floating to the surface in a darkroom.
“‘Everyone agreed that what these small [artefacts] did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.’”
“As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw.”
“The relentless search to discover origins (especially ones that aren’t there or are impossible to find) is an integral part not just of human cultures generally but of social theory and philosophy. [...] It is a problem which is metaphysical and philosophical, and this problem often dispenses with science and research. It is about understanding what we are as ideas and networks of humaness. [...] This question haunted the minds and cultures of the ancient world, and it continues to haunt us.”
““Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices [...] walking past on the other side.””
“While machine intelligence is rapidly outstripping human performance in many disciplines, it is not the only way of thinking, and it is in many fields catastrophically destructive. Any strategy other than mindful, thoughtful cooperation is a form of disengagement: a retreat that cannot hold. We cannot reject contemporary technology any more than we can ultimately and utterly reject our neighbours in society and the world; we are all entangled. An ethics of cooperation in the present need not be limited to machines either: with nonhuman entities, animate and non-animate, it becomes just another form of stewardship, emphasising acts of universal justice not in an unknowable, uncomputable future, but in the here and now.”
“The text needs its shadows; this shadow is a bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.”
“No text has one single author. To foreground this awareness as technique. Writing as dialog with previous and concurrent texts. A desire to see what happens at the edge: dimensions contained but hidden in the original contexts may shine”
“In centering my journey on the inheritance of knowledge, I must begin to discern: What constitutes knowledge? What does it mean to know something? Further, I must begin to interrogate the dynamics of knowledge: What is considered worth knowing? What are the approved ways of sharing that knowledge? And what power dynamics are at play in the passing down of knowledge? What are the parameters of considering whether certain ways of knowing are illegitimate or unworthy of acknowledgment?”
“...the summoning of ghosts is itself about a sense of experimentation. The medium literally acts as the mediator between the living and the dead in order to insist upon the continuation of a human’s nature beyond its actual physical extinction. [...] So what then is the estate, the domain, the enclave of the ghost? What is their landscape? In effect it is the same as ours - their labour happens in the same places as does ours.”
“I write to break out into perfect primeval Consent. I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history voices that are anonymous, slighted – inarticulated.”
“I prefer my new condition as monster to that of man or woman, because his condition is like a foot stepping forward into the void, indicating the path to another world. Here, I am not speaking of the living body as an anatomical object, but as what I call ‘somatheque’, a living, political archive.”
“The application of [an] online-versus-IRL dichotomy in the discussion of gender [...] online is deeply flawed. Such limits are bound up within a construct of ‘real life’, one that violently forcloses worlds, rather than expands them. IRL falters in its skewed assumption that constructions of online identities are latent, closeted, and fantasy-oriented (e.g. not real) rather than explicit, britisling with potential, and very capable of ‘living on’ away from the space of cyberspace.”