Plural Machine

Thanks to all who watched the event on Friday, we all enjoyed it and were really pleased with the response, we were only sorry not to have more time for questions and discussion. Ludmilla Andrews did a great job of executing the film at great speed in lockdown conditions. My commentary for the film was written in haste over the New Year and recorded in the following week. It's a snapshot of the transition from 2020 to 2021 through the prism of Test Dept's work and Fisher's response to it. 

Tonight I'm taking part in this hybrid event hosted by Goldsmiths. Entitled Notes from the Underground , it's a hybrid format rather than a traditional lecture. The first part is a new film, produced at speed and under lockdown, followed by a Q & A. The film blends Test Dept archive footage and some of my local photography   with reflections from Paul Jamrozy and my own theoretical commentary. The commentary explores Test Dept's legacy and relates their work to some of Mark Fisher's concepts. The full text is below.  You'll be able to watch the event live  this evening and youtube users will be able to pose questions.  If you prefer to use Zoom, please book a free ticket .  Commentary: Test Dept Notes from the Underground DS30/Sailing the Industrial Styx  An ex-industrial site is supposed to be mute. It should know its place in the symbolic order of sedative post-imperial heritage that Test Dept have always confronted. It should be picturesque, but not ...

Five years have already passed since the fateful NSK exhibition From Kapital to Capital  in Moderna Galerija. During the weekend of the exhibition symposium there was a Laibach Kunst gramophone performance on the steps of the gallery. To commemorate, here are my recently unearthed photos of the occasion.

A brief review I've published on the Goodreads site of an interesting recent book. It's relevant to a critique of hauntology that I'm currently working on ... Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a haunted and haunting book haunted by its own absences. The personal story it relates is moving and borne out of cycles of family tragedy. Yet this aspect of the book is sometimes at odds with the collective "haunted country" it seeks to describe and sometimes prevails over it. Ultimately, this is somewhat more of a personal and family memoir than a work of cultural and landscape analysis. The author's knowledge of ghostly fictions and the landscapes that have inspired them is not to be doubted. Yet oddly this knowledge sometimes promises more than it delivers. More than once, when he seems about to "grasp the nettle" and confront the dreadful "it" that animates a particular story, h...

One of my photographs of the fabled sound mirrors at Denge has been used as the cover image for Eden Grey's new recording, an atmospheric, modular synth-derived soundscape. Taken on a close, ominous July day in 2014, the photo fits the sonic atmospheres well.  Listen here .

Despite its undoubted cultural vitality, Glasgow has often had a grim reputation, especially south of the English border. Yet the very bleakness, exacerbated by epic mismanagement, aggressive deindustrialization and sectarianism has also made it a site of constant and sometimes tragically over-ambitious attempts at utopian regeneration. This can be seen in the now highly poignant film Glasgow 1980 , which was already being quietly forgotten and surpassed by harsh reality even before the city had reached the year the film is supposed to depict. It poignantly promised a gleaming, post-industrial future in which "muscle gives way to automation." Yet in between the completion of the film and 1980, the oil shock and economic slowdown shattered the dreams of its makers and backers. Relatively little of the utopian plans (which to some already seemed dystopian) was ever built and many of the hopes of the "white heat of technology" era came to nothing. Other buildings...

Last Saturday I join a pan-European group of friends and c. 700, 000 others on the People's March. As I explained to a Japanese journalist, we were there as we felt we had no choice. I have the sense that many in the country feel that if they just keep their heads down and give the Brexit People what they want, then they'll be satisfied. This is a huge mistake. The elite mob of disaster capitalists, neofeudalists and kleptocrats may not be unstoppable, but they are absolutely insatiable. Ultimately, nothing will satisfy their lust for blood and power, so it is better to make a stand now while it's still possible than to have to wrest back control from them amidst the Hard Brexit chaos they dream of. The most hard-hitting banner: Farage as English F ührer  I've been on 2 previous marches on this subject, but this was a huge increase in numbers and energy. Apart from a tiny pro-Trump mob outside Brexerspoons on Whitehall, there was no opposition. The weigh and spiri...

Join us for the London launch of the English/German book Gesamtkunstwerk Laibach , a collection of new perspectives on the work of the group. Co-editor Uwe Schütte will present the book and this will be followed by a panel discussing their own selections of Laibach videos: Alexei Monroe will analyse  Mi kujemo bodočnost 1983 Simon Bell  will analyse  Opus Dei (Life is Life) Michael Goddard  will analyse  Wirtschaft ist Tot Uwe Schütte  will analyse  Germania Codex Europa will play a selection of rare and lesser-known Laibach pieces, alongside a few classics. Tickets are available on the door or f rom the venue website .

Quatermass is a story of the future ... but perhaps only a few years from now. What might be in store for us if our civilisation were to come under terrible unforeseen strain. Nigel Kneale, 1979. I saw the final Quatermass TV series as an impressionable 10 year old. Like many of my generation, it's stayed with me ever since. The earlier Quatermass films and TV series are more respected critically and writer Nigel Kneale himself had reservations about the way the 1979 instalment was realised. Yet however imperfect it is, it does have great poetic dystopian power. At the time, the urban warfare and mad cults it depicts were (correctly) taken as Kneale's somewhat bitter look back in anger at the social and political chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. It's forgotten that Kneale was looking forwards as much as backwards. In a feature for the TV Times to promote the series, he argued that the near total collapse of civilisation that he foresaw might be just a few years awa...

Title slide of my presentation. Image of the doomed Birmingham Central Library, June 2015. Photo by A.M. Last week I spoke at the Nonument Symposium in Ljubljana, focussing on the way that 'Brutalism' is used and abused in contemporary culture. The renewed cult popularity of Brutalism is a phenomenon I've been observing with a mixture of fascination, enjoyment, ambivalence and disgust for some time and the lecture had a packed agenda. It was an attempt to try and decode the various agendas and interests circling around Brutalism and to track them. I analysed a range of examples, from internet culture to contemporary design to industrial music to science-fiction.  Brutalism as a (life)style or even an attitude is arguably more 'sexy' and, for some, virtuous than ever, yet many of its most iconic structures are now being demolished or de-brutalised through cladding - a term now synonymous with the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire. Image of the doomed Birmi...

18th November saw the opening of the first ever British exhibition by Autopsia. It also marked the publication of my 2nd book,  Autopsia: Thanatopolis , the first extended study on the work of the group. I devised the Thanatopolis (city of death) concept while working on the book. It seemed highly appropriate, given Autopsia's artistic focus on death and the destructive, if not fatal, social and economic forces that roam freely in Neofeudal London. The conclusion of the book speculates on the technologically-driven future of art and culture in a Thanatotic city and culture. Autopsia had its roots in the Punk and industrial scenes of late 1970s London and so it was natural (and long overdue) the project should symbolically return to the city that helped inspire it. The exhibition featured several new works and worked well in the cold, gloomy interior of the Horse Hospital. Early 1980s works were featured ... Alongside Autopsia's latest sardon...

For the past few years I've been working intensively with Test Dept and Peter Webb on a comprehensive archival book documenting their work and its impact. I've contributed an introductory text and two shorter texts on the group's work. Full details of the book and where to buy it will be available soon. Total State Machine will be published by PC-Press on April 23rd and this will be marked by a special event at The Ritzy in Brixton . A premiere screening of DS30 , documenting Test Dept's monumental 2014 installation and video project on the River Tyne will be accompanied by a selection of Test Dept archive material on film and video. This will be followed by a Q & A with founding members Graham Cunnington, Angus Farquhar and Paul Jamrozy. Special DJ sets will be provided by Scanner and Shelley Parker. www.testdept.org.uk
 www.pc-press.co.uk

I have a major new text, in this excellent collection edited by Marc James Léger. ' Sponsored by Self-Management? Re-Constructing the Context and Consequences of Laibach’s Monumental Retro- Avant-Garde ' looks at the subject through the prism of pre- and post-war Yugoslav architecture and features rare Laibach illustrations. Full details on the book can be found on the Manchester University Press website .

I've been working intensively on the publication of Total State Machine a book on the history of Test Dept, which I've co-edited with the group and Peter Webb. I've also written the introduction to the book, which contains a wealth of archival photos and documents plus tour diaries, new texts and exclusive interviews. More information on the  P.C. Press  website.

Pluralni Monolit/WAT launch event, Vila Bled, 07.09.2003 The first edition of my book on Laibach and NSK was launched exactly 10 years ago to the day at Vila Bled, Slovenia, in a hall used by Tito for diplomatic receptions. This is an edited version of my presentation at the launch events in Bled and Ljubljana... This all began twenty-three years ago in Trbovlje when posters briefly appeared with a black cross and the word “Laibach”. No-one then could have imagined we would be here today, presenting this , but in the end time always catches up with itself. What would the former resident of this place have made of this gathering and his place on the cover of the book? Perhaps the situation seems even stranger because this book is not by a Slovene author. What right does a foreign author have to come here and present your history? The same right that Laibach and NSK had to respond to the cultures and symbols that intruded on their space. These artists took for themselves a rig...