Mark Sheerin – criticismism

early film

Behold the bioscope

March 4, 2026

Like a steel tiffin box the size of a small packing case, the bioscope gleams in the fairy light ambience of an artisanal market in the centre of Delhi. On its polygonal front are circular portals the size of pickle jars with tin lids hanging on chain. Hurdy-gurdy handles sit atop, used to stir whatever it might contain. And a patient operative waits, patiently, confident in the appeal of his strange cargo. The night air is alive with swinging Indo-psychedelia. The track on his speaker was identified to me as ‘Yamma Yamma’ from the 1980 Bollywood movie Shaan.

I pay 50 rupees (about 40 pence in UK money) and take my seat. It’s a squat toy-like stool, that invites me to regress a little as I put my eye to the nearest porthole with irresistible curiosity. Inside glows and, somewhat upstage from my view-point is a scrolling frieze of images that now move for me, left to right, at unhurried speed. Each photograph or painting seems animated by the music, the magical light, and the stately procession of a spooling roll of thick paper which is tattered, spliced and sellotaped in a way that reflects the age of this technology.

The device, a bioscope, was once used to provide some of India’s most rural villages with a proto-cinematic experience. Of course it calls for some suspension of disbelief. But even as a twenty-first century smartphone owner, whose life has no shortage of striking colourful images, there was a wow factor to this rudimentary display. The bioscope scroll, as fragile as a holy relic, is charged with the historic pleasures it must have given to many a screen-free household.

There was no narrative for me to worry about, not even any clear sequence, and the only link between the images appeared to be that all of them are in some way representative of this epic land that is India. There were tigers. There were Hindu gods. There was a portrait of a beautiful actress, and next to her a cobra. The Taj Mahal was to roll across the golden stage, as was Q’tub Minar. I was also surprised to see a photo of the current Indian PM flanked by ministers. This updated bioscope is clearly adapted for our divisive, populist times.

The presentation finished and I was moved to applaud the eccentric contraption. And to think it was devised for an audience who would value images on the strength of visual or thematic appeal, rather than those viewers of contemporary film and television who, like me, tend to watch for the sake of the story. As such the bioscope is a fine, and globally diverse, example of the filmic attractions that were to inspire western avant gardes from surrealists to expressionists via futurists. As such, it reminded me of Tom Gunning’s influential paper and the film theorist’s argument that cinema was once valued for pure visuality and self-conscious awareness of looking.*

This location is one of the Indian capital’s less hectic spots, and it seems as if no family visit to New Delhi is complete without a couple of hours in this market, Dilli Haat. I haver been more than half a dozen times but, distracted by the shirts and the scarves, the paintings and the carvings, the spices and ceramics, plus the chai and the chilli flavoured momos, I had never noticed the bioscope before. Now I might never forget it.

* Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde (1986)

contemporary art, Uncategorized

The cave is basically the data safe: interview with Julius von Bismarck

February 23, 2026

A colour photo of an illuminated network of mine tunnels with a flash lamp in the foreground — Julius von Bismarck, Landscape Painting (Mine), Installation view, Dossena Mines, 2025, as part of the project “The Orobie Biennial – Thinking Like a Mountain”. Photo: Nicola Gnesi Studio, Courtesy of GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo and VG Bildkunst, Bonn 2025

The Orobie Biennial, to be found in the Bergamo Alps of Northern Italy, draws together and curates a rolling programme of many peaks. Exhibitions, installations, interventions are all set among some of Europe’s most scenic mountains. Interesting venues for visual art, in this region better known for hiking, have included a deep chamber in a disused iron and fluorite mine used now for tourism and the aging of local cheeses.

It was here that German artist Julius von Bismarck staged a piece of site specific painting that disrupted the entrance to two or three tunnels by a repetitive pattern of uniform, tight black lines which follow the contours of the walls but which create a remarkable illusion of flatness.

Stand back and, as the corresponding photographic artwork reveals, it could be an art historical etching. Walk inside and, working on viewers like some prehistoric abstract parietal work, it must heighten awareness of one’s body, as well as an effect of proximity to the Underworld.

Given this blog’s interest in what gets called ‘cave art’ and how that relates to contemporary, immersive art environments I was keen to read about this work. But seeing as not much commentary has found its way online yet, I thought it would be useful to interview Julius, virtually, from his studio in Berlin, and he was kind enough to give up his time..

MS: Dürer, Friedrich, Klee and Cezanne have all been cited as influences for this series, but Landscape Painting (Mine) (2025) made me immediately think of parietal works from prehistory. What are the points of difference and similarity with ‘cave art’ and this rare sub-genre of that, which we might call ‘mine art’?

JvB: Yeah, I think that’s a coincidence. Even if cave painting wasn’t a thing, I would have done the mine painting or drawing or etching. The fact that cave painting exists and not just once but over the whole planet and done by different humans in different ages is of course a very interesting layer of the work, as it opens up the question as to what would cave painting be today? Caves were not the only places where humans started to paint or draw what they’d seen (which of course is a very important step in human evolution.) It’s probable they did it somewhere else but it washed away, everywhere except for caves. So the cave basically is the data safe which, by accident, humans have used — without planning — to make these drawings that lived thousands and thousands of years later. It’s a kind of a random archive of human development.

Some years ago, when humans came to picture their surroundings, they created a medium. They created a language, right? One dog barks to another dog; one wolf sings to another wolf; a stag is bellowing to show off his power: language has existed between many different animals, including humans but it was something that only existed in the moment, when it was spoken by our prehistoric ancestors. However, the drawing is an important step in making this medium of communication last, which is a completely new quality of human power in some way. I think it’s really interesting to find out why humans were able to have such a massive effect on their hosting planet or on the biosphere that made them.

Landscape Painting, is a series of projects: The first one I did in Mexico, then I went on to do it in different natural environments, different cultural zones, collaborating with different humans. It’s an ongoing project that I will keep on doing, and the whole project is what you’d call media critique or an experimental media archaeology. I’m trying to find out what it means to depict the world and what change that makes in the world.

My theory is this: if you draw a mountain you will change that mountain. By depicting something you change what you depict. For example, recently you can see it very easily with influencers; influencers can take a selfie on a mountain peak in some National Park and next year there’s thousands of influencers queuing up to recreate the same shot. Thus the act of depiction influences the subject being depicted. Maybe even those early depictions of some bison in a cave painting might give us not only the idea that these bison existed in that time, but also a retroactive effect on the bison, because maybe one day we’ll come up with the idea of remaking the local species from some DNA that we find in the cave. Inspired by that cave painting we’ll bring it back to life!

MS: What specifically entailed you to make work underground

JvB: My Landscape Paintings are always historically inspired because I’m trying to look back and forward at the same time, trying to make sense of what’s happening visually. And yes, many artists before me depicted quarries and mines. It’s a typical sujet of landscape painting, and of etchings that were printed and circulated worldwide in newspapers and books or sold as individual prints. I’m talking about the time before photography was invented, when printing was one of the primary visual mediums through which we understood the world, especially in colonial timeframes.

For example ships were being sent to the other side of the world but these places weren’t known through photos and videos — we encountered these ‘foreign’ lands through etchings and paintings. This work attempts to reimagine that world because mines, caves and quarries were so often the scenes depicted. Humans were fascinated with the power of what they could do. Making a mine is akin to moving a mountain. So it’s an early visual effect corresponding to ways that humans came to affect the surface of the earth

MS: The work raises fascinating questions about perspective and immersion. At Orobie it was presumably in 360 degrees. On screen, it is in two dimensions. Like a cave painting it follows the relief of the subterranean wall, but when photographed it collapses into 2D, looking uncannily like an engraving. Would you prefer it to be seen in reproduction? Are perspectival engravings the first immersive art experiences or is that too simplistic?

JvB: With media tech you can make magic happen, you get that with Van Gogh Live and similar experiences which I find all very interesting. But often they are used in very uninteresting ways: mainly to create a simple ‘wow!’ effect, although admittedly that can sometimes be very nice. Even a selfie-media show can be interesting because you start to question your senses in a way you haven’t done before.

In this case I didn’t expect the landscape painting to feel so intense in person, because I thought it needed the step of being two-dimensionalised again. When you first look at it, it reads one way; but if you look at it for longer it shifts into something else and this transformation is what I’m interested in. When you go into the cave, you obviously know you’re in a cave and you know you’re looking at a drawing, so I didn’t anticipate the effect to be that strong. But standing in there it ‘s as if your brain keeps insisting “Drawing, drawing drawing drawing!” though you know you are inside the cave.

So far my Landscape Paintings have always been very temporary because they’re outdoors and I knew the effect would be short-lived. As soon as it rained or snowed, or there was wind or sun, everything deteriorates. I’m working with organic paint which is not the most durable and will simply wash away. But the cave is the opposite case, because you still have these many-thousand-year-old cave paintings done with paint that would not have lasted long outside. For me permanence was never essential but it’s a nice additional layer and one can only wait to see what happens.

Also the way people encounter the work is not really under my control. The mine is accessible: people come on tours, they wear helmets, it’s almost like a historical site you visit, which is a strange context for an artwork. And I don’t know if this will become a selfie spot or something that people find intrusive. Perhaps they’ll think the cave would be more beautiful without those ugly lines, which is also a completely valid response.

MS: What was your process and what were the physical challenges in making this work? Dark underground spaces can play tricks on the mind after all. Were you aware of any self-conscious heroism coming into play as you entered the mountainside and altered the rock face? As you made this piece what was your awareness of hardship and bodily risk?

JvB: I get this question a lot. Wildfires and hurricanes and Antarctic regions are places not normally known for their comfort. But I don’t experience going there as a heroic challenge. In fact, the idea of “conquering” the world, being a hero by getting to places that are hard to get to feels like an anachronism. People climb mountains to reach the summit. I enjoy that too, as a hobby. But I do it because the view is amazing, and it’s nice to have a personal challenge. I love it because I get to go through totally different climate zones, walking up a mountain. It’s similar with going into a forest fire; it’s intensely compelling because these environments contain so much interesting information you can’t access otherwise.

The attitude of, ’Oh yeah, I’ve been in this deepest cave or mine in the world!’ is really not what motivates me at all .Historically, that may have played a role for many, but if you go back to Humboldt [nineteenth century German geographer, naturalist and explorer] and read his diaries you also see that he didn’t go to these places in order to conquer them but it was predominantly for scientific research. Later on mountaineering became more about proving you could get somewhere, less about gathering any information

As for working in the mine: It wasn’t comfortable at all. It was 10 degrees and super wet in there, which meant the paint wouldn’t dry. lt was warm outside but inside it still felt like winter and we were not allowed to make a fire because nowadays people are concerned about fatal levels of carbon monoxide. (Even though people became what they are by going into caves and making fires; now we’re forbidden to make fires in caves). Anyways, it was cold and wet and the team that I worked with are the real heroes. Those thousands and thousands of lines could only be painted in a team effort.

MS: But I think certain feelings are inescapable. Exploring caves is adventurous.

JvB: Of course, since Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Centre of the Earth, that’s baked into us. Going into a mountain or going underground always carries a little bit of that feeling. When I was a teenager I spent quite a lot of time in the subway system in Berlin searching for secret tunnels. There was this big tunnel system beneath the Wall [the Berlin Wall, 1961 -1989] that had been sealed off to prevent people from escaping via subterranean passages.

It was an adventure going underground, like a secret underground world, and, of course, that fascination, and that romanticism along with it, comes from Verne.

MS: Finally, it seems to me that prehistoric parietal works (aka cave paintings) translate quite badly into two dimensions. They lack the illusion of depth whereas your piece creates the illusion of flatness. Technically how did you achieve this? Was there much experimentation with camera and equipment and were you surprised at any point by the results or lack of?

JvB: Thanks for that question, normally people never ask me that and I put a lot of effort into it so, yeah, it was a challenge. I don’t know how many photos I took, maybe hundreds. But in the end I used probably 50 of them and stitched them together. I took a flash system with several flash units that would bring enough light into the cave, to get a high quality of photo. The thing is, I wanted it to look like a drawing and a drawing has no blurry parts. With an etching, either its black or white; there’s no grey and for that you need very high image quality to not have grainy or blurry parts. That’s a big challenge in such a dark place, so we needed to use flashlights like studio lighting. Those lights make it possible to capture the surface sharply and at high resolution.

MS: Then there was the moment of truth. What was that like?

JvB: Just a lot of excitement because only at the very end it all came together. That was a stressful moment because I tend to use up all the time available and we had to hurry, since we allowed ourselves three days for the shoot and post production. I would spend all day in there taking photos trying to be concentrated, being super nervous because I loved how it looked. Translating that into a photograph was so difficult and it was something I really needed to do myself. Normally I am a team player but I have never met someone who would do that as precisely as I want it to be.

Julius von Bismarck, Landscape Painting (Mine), 2025, could be seen June to September in Dossena, at The Orobie Biennial – Thinking Like a Mountain, GAMeC, Bergamo, 2025.

immersive environments

CAVE in the heart of Cov

February 4, 2026

All at once I was on the hard shoulder of a motorway. Police were cordoning off the scene of disturbance. Lorries thundered past. Rain hammered down. Paramedics were on the scene. And, for good measure, a large dog was barking at me. This was my introduction to CAVE, a simulation machine and teaching tool at Coventry University in the UK midlands.

CAVE stands for Cave Automated Virtual Environments. I should admit were the topographical metaphor not telegraphed me by that acronym, I might have missed this particular immersive venue. But choosing to pay attention, I was fascinated by the potential and the resonance of this £1.5 million installation.

Primarily used for nursing at the moment, CAVE occupies three adjacent walls in a large seminar room in the Richard Crossman building, in Cov’s city centre. Each of these ‘walls’ is actually a jumbo LED screen where the action is amplified by surround sound. Which meant that my motorway encounter took place as vividly in my periphery and my ear drums as It did in my immediate field of vision.

What’s so useful about this is that paramedics can run through their paces in real world scenarios with some of the stresses and distractions they will come up against IRL. Their efforts can be tracked via a (non-virtual) digitally powered mannequin that tutors can put in position in the central floor area.

Or, in another hybrid scenario they can engage in role play with local mental health service users, who are among those most vulnerable to committing affray on the roads. Along with strokes or heart attacks, as a paramedic you might need to deal with emotions too.

The objects and populace of CAVE scenarios like this motorway are CGI. I was delighted to see extensive illustrated menus of characters and objects in a scrolling grid; these elements could be slid into a vector plan of what appears on screen, to create new imagery for a cave where nothing is set in stone. I was shown one or two more of these critical environments including a deafening night club and a hazard-filled hospital ward.

Perhaps even more impressive was the software that is used to train both physios and nurses. Loading a new application the room went black and on the far wall was a beating human heart, its beat all you could hear. I was handed 3D glasses, my guide wore tracker glasses; together we approached that livid, pulsating muscle and then entered the atrium and saw the major arteries from within. It was a trip.

But CAVE has potential for fun too. I was later to be shown a scenario best described as an autopsy in a thunderstorm. This is one they pull out at Halloween for a group of brave students. They also run escape rooms in which participants escape from the back of the room and are rewarded by reaching the CAVE space.

It did not escape me that while the room was dormant, the panoramic screensaver, running across some 15 metres of wall, featured mountains, sunrise and, wow, mist. CAVE may be highly utilitarian (or even on occasions highly entertaining), but it retains a little of the sublimity of German Romanticism, as seen from above this ‘sea of fog’.

More serious though was the simulation of a new patient with sepsis. Here a highly interactive bedside setting allowed my guide to show how one might gather vitals and spoken testimony in order to reach a diagnosis. CAVE can also surround you with powerpoint presentations, run multiple choice quizzes with gameshow levels of interactivity.

I was blown away by CAVE and it’s given me a lot of food for thought. I will not forget my session there, especially the journey into a literal heart in the literal darkness. Thank you Assistant Professor Sam Clark for showing me around.

***

It’s over a year since I wrote this post on the National History Museum with a focus on a model whale and a replica sauropod skeleton. Well, last Wednesday I found myself face-to-skull with that skeleton, which has earned the affectionate child-friendly nickname Dippy.

Dippy has been on tour, from the National History Museum in London to some of the UK’s regions and now Coventry, where Dippy is in the Herbert, which sounds like the plot line of a claymation animation with a trombone soundtrack.

She or he (I’m not sure about Dippy’s pronouns) shares an atrium space with a jacquard loom. The loom has close connections with this city whereas Dippy’s original bones are from Wyoming. And yet he/she/they certainly fit with the space in so far as this is a family friendly museum.

A 26m dinosaur will have brought many families through the door, but through those doors the Herbert was also offering a couple of exhibitions you might want to see while you’re here: a wonderfully staged show about the experience of Indian migrants in Britain and a smaller photo show dedicated to Team GB skateboarders at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

And I learned something new. I learned that natural historians and skeleton custodians are not above a bit of osteopathy. Following research in the 1960s, Dippy had its neck raised; in the 1990s, its tail was raised. Prior to these postural corrections, the nation’s fave pet dino must have looked a bit depressive.

Briefly scientists were to speculate that Dippy moved with low-slung lizard belly, legs shooting out to each side. It is probable that curators, researchers, museum directors, and technicans feel more confident manipulating a remnant made, not from organic material, but from plaster of Paris.

Uncategorized

Play it again and again: Rick’s Café in Casablanca

January 12, 2026

There is a city which seems only to be famous for the film named after it. Aside from an epic mosque, Casablanca has few other claims to fame.* But the claim to have inspired a movie which some still consider to be one of the greatest of all time is strong. The connection is set in stone by a commercial recreation of that film’s most pivotal location: in 2004 a plush bar known as Rick’s Cafe opened on the seafront. Here, a short red carpet, two elegant palm trees and as many spruce doormen now flank the entrance to a fictional dimension where it is forever 1942, the year of Casablanca’s US release.

Many are the visual, sonic and gastronomic cues that situate the visitor in the space where one of the silver screen’s most famous couples fall victim to crossed stars and geopolitical manoeuvres. Bar owner Rick and his not-quite-ex Ilsa are played of course by Bogart and Bergman. In case you need a flavour of the chemistry between these two icons, the two can be found smoking and drinking their way through a loop on a large but discreet plasma TV, built into the wooden panels of the establishment’s upstairs gambling den.

It was here that my wife and daughter ate apple pie (because what could be more American?) and a New York cheesecake (named after Rick/Bogart). I was the only person to destroy the illusion by asking for tequila, which, as far as I can recall, has no bearing on the narrative or the atmosphere which is so powerful in the Academy Award winning film. As we quietly imbibed our orders in the bar, feeling underdressed compared with the many diners, a party of five or six Chinese tourists also broke the fourth wall by crowding round the roulette table and photographing the framed promotional posters nearby.

Prices were definitely present day, but I made a foray through the restaurant and found that the balconies, balustrades, and riad-shaped floorplan all offered transport to the universe of Rick’s ‘original’ bar, even if that bar itself was largely an invention of a set designer. And meanwhile waiters in white linen, and fez hats, low lighting and soft cutlery clinking, along with a generally quiet dressy clientele, went some way to recapture the glamour of golden age Hollywood. On some level we were all extras in an immersive performance.

There was a grand piano in the courtyard, same make, model and vintage as that used by a supporting character played by Arthur ‘Dooley’ Wiison: the Sam whose repertoire included “As Time Goes By”, a song he was famously asked to play “again” (even if that most famous of lines is a conflation of dialogue spoken by Ilsa and not a direct lift from the script).**

Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca is not a pure replica and not peopled by replicants. Instead it is a hybrid recreation which blends many details from the filmset with a carefully constructed ambience that perpetuates an image of a city in which tourists can feel less like tourists for a moment and more like, well, members of a transient demimonde each of us engaged in our dubious activities in the shadow of war. At time of writing this wartime context was given added and unwanted spice by the vaunted threat of US imperial ambitions. In January 2026, Rick’s Bar could plan to open a franchise in Caracas.

I would go so far as to say that this commercial dining establishment is — after celluloid, VHS and MP4, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, and a paperback copy of the script — really a whole new format for Casablanca (1942 – ongoing), bearing a relation to the film akin to an experiential night at Secret Cinema or a visit to the theme park that is Shakespeare’s Globe on London’s South Bank. Bruno Latour argues that the aura of an artwork can ‘migrate’, by appearing in new versions… like this one you can walk right into. Aura might not, as Walter Benjamin was to warn on the eve of Bogie’s war, diminish in the age of mechanical reproduction, it might just migrate and accumulate. In this way Rick’s Bar does as much for distributors Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. as it does for the Moroccan National Tourist Office.

Two people who I know would have loved to visit Rick’s Bar are my maternal grandmother and a husband we knew merely as Tom. Indeed along with a memory of the film, which I saw on video during the late 90s, my visit triggered a childhood recollection in which this rum couple dressed in matching trench coats and fedoras in an attempt to look like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Spoiler: they looked nothing like him, and on our way out of the house, this Tom was so embarrassed by a last minute wardrobe mandate that a row ensued. I honestly don’t know how often they ever went out to cosplay like this together. But I guess that Casablanca was such a powerful imaginative property for them that it lent itself to tribute and pastiche over and over again. Not to mention the repetition of many famous lines, which we now all own.

A filmic world, anchored in a lesser known city, has now given everyone the chance to participate in a shared nostalgia trip: I can report it is a trip-within-a-trip for anyone lucky enough to visit said city after seeing said film.

* Funnily enough, my hometown has both a strong 1940s movie connection in Brighton Rock (1948) and a secondary attraction in Brighton Royal Pavilion which was built to look like a mosque.

** Incidentally the evening we dropped in to Rick’s cafe, there were a couple of musicians installed next to this venerable machine and traditional Moroccan music was the fare. Perhaps these days, when the in-house pianist, strikes up the tune many people are waiting to hear, the simulation gets too intense.

contemporary art

Congratulations Nnena Kalu!

December 10, 2025

Protests around the Turner Prize, even if they have run out of steam in recent years, will have been put to bed last night, as the Prize went to Nnena Kalu. No one can really object to it. It is an event so cheering, it is strange to recall that this is the event that has been picketed by Stuckists, decried by Culture Ministers and jeered at by tabloids.

Art world insiders and the interested public alike have thrilled to Kalu’s work on display at Cartwright Hall in Bradford, where the Prize exhibition was held this year. The complexity is all in its form and colour. The ideas are not in the conceptual scaffolding or the artist’s written statement. Her show bypasses that.

But caution is needed. Kalu’s learning disability is not a fetish or a fad. And in a year when identity politics came to the fore, since all the contenders could claim marginality, the winning artist had nothing verbal to say about her own position vis-à-vis neurodivergence, race, gender or sexuality.

However, it bears repeating that Kalu is the first artist from a supported studio to win the prize. Kalu is the first such artist to even get near the shortlist. Having come to the jury’s attention, her energy must have swept them away.

And so this is the year that an unvocal artist with no formal training, but an unquestionable talent and a universalising aesthetic took the biggest prize in UK art. There’s plenty to say about that, inevitably, but none of it cause for protest.

I previously wrote about the artist’s inclusion in the shortlist for Disability Arts Online and you can read it here.

philosophy, Uncategorized

We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (2025)

December 9, 2025

In the remaining days between now and Christmas you can get onto Vimeo and stream a 65-minute film which covers capitalism, social media, Drum & Bass, rave cutlure, hauntology, hyperstition, Felixstowe, M.R. James, and depression. The film is titled: We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (2025). Few academic lives could draw together such a disparate array of themes.

WAMAFAMF (can I call it that!?) is the work of artists Simon Poulter and Sophie Mellor, also known as Close and Remote. It is a documentary containing a fictional conceit in which a guide dubbed Professor Parker finds a mystic flute, which kind of summons all subsequent footage. But his presence here seems unimportant, unless you are already a fan of ghost stories. Additional elements that conjure the late Mark Fisher include atmospheric footage of relentless surf on pebbles (relatable here in Brighton) and the mysteriously blazing lights of a seaport by night.

Mark Fisher is best known for the book Capitalist Realism, about life within an ideological system with no visible exit. Except that Fisher, who was public about his experience of depression, took his life in 2017, before he could see the left wing resurgence and pushback against fascism that is characterising the 2020s; athough that statement might, I realise, be an example of hyperstition: the common (media- and social media-) practice of hyping something wished for into being.

Fisher’s ideas are somewhat out of my purlieu. I still don’t understand Deleuze and Guatarri. And though I think I once understood some of Georges Bataille, and some of philosopher Nick Land’s spin off book Thirst For Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, I now wish I hadn’t gone there. Was it inevitable I would fall prey to Bataille’s ‘syphilis of the mind,’ as it has been called? As an undergraduate at the University of Warwick, my time overlapped with that of Fisher, who was doing his PhD there, and Land, who was a rockstar lecturer. Both were in a completely different department.

So perhaps I just read about Fisher, Land and the notorious Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) in i-D magazine. More recently I read about them in Simon Reynolds’ excellent piece on the Energy Flash blog. Now I feel like I get the picture. But the brew of occultism, rave visuals, eclectic pop culture references and brooding computerised music is not for me. Until now, until seeing this film, perhaps.

Thanks to some personable interview footage and a midweek screening at the University of Sussex, where director Poulter told us the Q&A was very much part of the film, WAMAFAMF puts Fisher within reach — whether or not you’ve ever been a cyberpunk, a psychogeographer, a pirate radio fan or a (shudder) accelerationist. Mark Fisher comes across as an individual who was channelling all those things but who remained human: a much vaunted theorist with a reputation that has grown since his death, and as a well published writer who gave the world a prolific blog.

Close and Remote have brought their subject nearer, less remote, and the film is a fascinating tribute which is expanding, getting made over, with each viewing. It’s like a virus, I guess. But a good one, like the double rainbow guy, rather than syphilis.

The film is available, via Vimeo, for £6.38, between 8 and 24 December 2025.

graphic novels, Uncategorized

Branded discontent: Tîn Droi by Bedwyr Williams

November 28, 2025

Can creative content be art? This question worried me as I picked up Tîn Droi by artist Bedwyr Williams. This book is published by the National Trust, commissioned by National Trust Cymru and promotes National Trust properties in Wales. So, I asked myself, whose beloved property is the end product?

The National Trust has had long association with artists, who generally emerge with their integrity in tact. Although conservative with a small ‘c’, they don’t make bombs or robotic soldiers: a good patron, then, much better in fact than, say, the Borgias.

But the Welsh artist is a prickly art world figure who, through longstanding use of a viral Instagram feed, has been using iPad drawings to satirise peers, along with the English, curators, second home owners, wearers of trendy footwear and, occasionally, writers. ‘No one is safe,’ observed an artist friend.

That IG feed is frequently hil.arious. In a style that is perfectly suited for the graphic novel he has now produced, Williams has developed a strong roster of characters and provides access to their inner lives. What they can smell, what they try to imagine, what makes them insecure but also too frequently what they hate. This contempt is absent from Tîn Droi. It would have to be.

The number of characters developed by Williams must number around two dozen by now. This book is a development of just two: a female airbnb cleaner and a male, plus size fashion victim. The longform was at first boring; no one to laugh at here/too much unpopulated scenery. But this unlikely collab, between a misanthropic bard and the marketing dept of a patriotic charity, ultimately works and goes deep.

Spending extended time with the cleaner as she judges and vapes softened me towards her. She is a curious, isolated woman, with a past of her own, searching for her place amidst these ruins. At the same time the ‘Man who absolutely loves clothes’, who has always made me chuckle into my phone, now has my sympathy. He too has enough love of life to get out and around to these historic properties.

And as if taking a break from showing masochistic cultural workers how the rest of the world sees them, via Instagram, Williams uses these 160 pages to show a heritage audience how two everyday people might see places of historic interest.

There are few dates, events, names or other historical facts. There are instead details you might at times overlook, from signage to cattle grids, tombstones to bench plaques, graffiti, electrical fittings, statues wrapped for winter, and of course the occasional antique. Perhaps by way of a nod to the origins of the project there are also plenty of smartphone interactions.

Rather than Can content be art? the question becomes Can art be content? On the evidence of this book, it is both content and discontent. In William’s intimate and honest audience survey — for a sample of two fictional characters — the customer satisfaction levels are ambiguous. That incalculability reflects well on both artist and client.

Tîn Droi is available for £14.99 here. Bedwyr Williams can be found on Instagram here. And there is a launch at Galeri Caernarfon on 5/12/25 at 6.30pm. The book’s protagonists might be there, in spirit at least.

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Commons – a film by David Blandy

November 6, 2025

Can an artist activate items in a museum collection, or do those items activate the artist in turn?

At the Amelia Scott Civic Centre in Tunbridge Wells, a rook, a fox, a kingfisher, a crystalline rock and a dinosaur bone have all triggered a new work by David Blandy. Each of these artefacts has been removed from a vitrine, filmed in a studio, and given a thought-provoking script and VO. In this way, you might say, they have also given the artist a voice, certainly a vision.

Taxidermy animals have an unusual status. They retain a preserved appearance, but they are dead. They let you get really close as a result, and they have those glassy eyes, which you will never look into in the wild. As they rotate, up close, against a cosmically-black background, in a black box viewing space here at the Amelia, they are, dare I say it, even a little bit comic. But are we not the funny ones for having once gutted these beautiful creatures and sewn stuffing into their feathers and fur?

There’s quite a lot of talk these days about objects having agency, stones having consciousness, rooms having memories and so forth. But if talking immobile, unbreathing, non-reproductive entities as having being, then a museum is a great place to test that. (A film such as Night at the Museum is an exaggerated narrative sure, but it does illustrate an imaginative truth for theories about artefacts and their souls.)

Blandy might be pulling in allusions to the Canterbury Tales, that local epic, and this genteel town’s grazing lands in common ownership, as if the rook, the fox, the kingfisher, the rock and the bone have travelled here though space and time to carry one of the artist’s stories of post-apocalyptic recuperation. Except that this story could not have been told in this place without a very living collection of natural history and prehistory.

Shared commons, shared pasture, shared nature and, as the film puts it, ‘common knowledge’ and ‘common wealth’ are the ideas we need right now, as the climate collapses and the chickens of private ownership are coming home to roost.

Museums like the Amelia, with their impulse to share collections with then widest possible audience, are an enduring part of that ideal dynamic. I think that might be true to the extent that in this case a museum has operated as a medium for several characters, animal and mineral, to call out for an artist to tell their tale.

Commons illustrates how the holdings of a museum have a certain grip on the institution, and any artists invited to work with them, in turn.

David Blandy’s work can be seen at the Amelia Scott in Tunbridge Wells until 11 January 2026.

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Matthew Collings at Handel Street Projects

October 13, 2025

On my way to Handel Street Projects, the bus passed Abbey Road. There were about two dozen tourists by the iconic crossing, staging photographs and re-enactments. A negotiation between drivers and pedestrians takes place all day here. It’s a scene of celebration of visual culture, which set the tone for me as I travelled to The Matthew Collings Holistic Art Experience, due to open that evening (on a visit I made on September 19). Having ascertained I wasn’t from the Telegraph or the Mail, the curator, Fedja Klikovac, and eponymous artist, Collings, were generous enough to make a little time for me to poke around a few hours before the PV.

At the Marylebone gallery, I was led up an innocuous flight of stairs into a large gallery with four grey walls on which imagination and memory bring alive some 300 iconic scenes, with a cast of pop cultural figures, art historical figures and political actors posed for dreamlike snapshots from the pencil of Matthew Collings. These images fill the space, and look for any period of time and you will even see a Beatle or two. There are more characters than the cover of Sgt Pepper and the theatricality is just as vivid. Pop colours abound, but political messages, rather than cryptic ones are as black and white as they need to be in our times.

The artist sat in one corner of the room, writing lengthy expository captions directly on the gallery wall. Collings was happy to break soon and to chat with me about all of this. I had never met him, but he was little different from his online self-presentation. Spectacle frames heavy enough to be serious when paired with Karl Marx-like beard. And, in a recent unfortunate development, a patch on one eye to combat the discomfort of Bell’s palsy. The artist was as welcoming as you hope him to be; not only does he keep some rarified imaginative company – with some very great artists and some very evil world leaders – he has a common touch.

Let me just expand. There is a genocide in Gaza. There are fascists controlling the narratives on race in the UK. Trump is as mad as he is stupid. Contemporary artists are silent on issues which might hurt their careers. As a result there is no mainstream visibility for the ammoral billionaires and their hired friends in UK and American politics. In art we struggle with an absence of any cri-de-coeur masterpieces; there is no Picasso, Goya or Velasquez equal to the task of protest. The spirit of Philip Guston, who Collings tells me was perhaps our last great artistic social critic, has been confined by celebratory curators and museum people to the 20th century, with no notion of a KKK at work in America today.

Collings is obsessed with the art world and manages to be an outsider and an insider at the same time. In past decades he edited an art magazine, presented art television, made abstract paintings with his partner Emma Biggs (which he might still be doing). When I ask about such entanglement with what he decries as a right-wing capitalist racket, he compares art world people to family, because you can’t choose them, and you might hate them, but you are part of them.

With an ease of creating likenesses, a surreal gift for unlikely encounters, a sense of urgency that never lacks a sense of humour, Collings depicts an imaginary dynamics by which the famous dead, living celebs from art, music & literature, plus fiend-like political figures battle it out. The artist has described the exhibition as a portrayal of the content of his head, no more, no less. But if so, it is a landscape that feels both funny and familiar, not least because so many of these drawings have previously appeared on Instagram.

But if I was expecting to get a sense of déjà vu from this exhibition, that was confounded. because each drawing here looks more richly and artfully executed in real life and the effect of hundreds of these across the entire gallery space is really overwhelming. I stepped into the space and uttered a word I had not anticipated from a crop of IG posts, “Wow!”

I noted in the visitor book that Collings really has art world ‘surrounded’. I was not 100 percent sure who it was who ever was said to have said that they had America ‘surrounded’. Help me out in the comments if you know. But for me the phrase is a mad, ominous, messianic promise. Was it Timothy Leary or one of the Zippies? Either way it is an episode from twentieth century history of the ilk to be found in these historical drawings. These trenchant works, in this 360 degree space, have the capacity to turn heads and, I hope, change minds.

The Matthew Collings Holistic Art Experience can be experienced at Handel Street Projects, London, until 24 October 2025.

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Dance like no one (else) is watching

July 1, 2025

In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats at the Barbican

In 1989, a well-produced VR experience based on the current UK rave scene would have been unimaginable, and not only as a result of the technical limitations of the era. Acid house was an underground movement, with no clear potential for curatorial mainstreaming; warehouse parties were characterised by sweat and basslines, two earthy qualities which should not translate to what you might expect to be hands-off disembodiment and isolating virtuality.

However, ‘In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats’ by artist Darren Emerson is enjoying an expanded world premier at the Barbican. Between now and August 3rd, you can, by booking in and checking in, see and feel how surprisingly well this piece evokes the excitement, danger, subversion, highs and MDMA-inspired camaraderie which led 1989 (or, some will tell you, 1988) to get labelled by the music press as the Second Summer of Love.

The content below was originally paywalled.

The technology is stunning. Along with a lightweight headset that fit easily over my glasses, the staff at Barbican were to kit me out (along with five other visitors) with handheld controllers and haptic vests. Suiting up was a little like dropping a pill: something was clearly going to take effect, but given all this unfamiliar, disorienting paraphernalia a possibility for things to go awry also concerned this reviewer.

Perhaps I should foreground my own expectations for a moment. I was 16 in 1989, too young to join rave convoys, intrigued but ultimately wary of psychedelics. I stretched my curfew to attend two pop-up raves at repurposed venues within the city centre of Cambridge. And on Mill Road, I once witnessed a car passenger yell “Aci-eeeeeed!” at me as he sped by. It was mid afternoon.

So my 60-minute experience at the Barbican, despite the distancing special effects of prosthetic tech and artificial vision, was to provide me with what are now my clearest memories of that culture, time, place and lifestyle. It was a journey and an education, but also a playful event, during which one felt only slightly stupid to be moving to the beat in a sensory black hole. Staff will be used to the spectacle of half a dozen silent disconauts vibing to an unheard tune.

The experience was broken into chapters, and there is a real feeling of ‘coming up’ to the first of these. Using my handsets, I put a black 12” single onto a waiting Technics deck and, as the music took off, I was able to fly above the groove and then descend into the vinyl canyon and follow the stylus towards whatever might be in-store ahead. In another head-rushing sequence I was to find myself floating at high speed down a motorway at night. Then upon arrival at the rave there came an electrifying game in which, in co-operation with other visitors, we were able to capture a giant all-seeing eye with fizzing blue energy beams – Ghostbusters-style.

Interspersed with these sensational moments are info-taining scenarios where, for example, one can join a trio of CGI mates, first at home in the early stages of a Friday night. As you explore the flat, rave fliers speak to you, spliffs are passed around, and EQ levels dance on the stereo. Or you can hang out by the red Golf, by a payphone at a service station: when it rings, you had better be ready to go. Or… in a moment which is quite a bad trip… you can find yourself helping West Midlands Police build up an incident map. But reflecting about my ten minutes spent in a drab police station office, I have to say that, as I was to pin photos and fliers to the map, it conferred glamour and notoriety rather than guilt and criminality on the party organisers.

All of this scene-setting culminated with a party sequence. My handheld controllers became glow sticks and I began a mid-life shuffle. Thanks to the body suit, I was able to feel this party in the chest. Several nights like this during the late 80s could have transformed me, as they did so many people andI was within touching distance of a euphoria that might yet have changed my life. But in this case I could not forget my plastic ski grips, my fully-wired vest and my comfy but bewildering goggle set.

Cue an elegiac epilogue in which one must gaze down on the aftermath as dawn breaks over the party-haunted fields of the rural midlands. This artwork offers a quasi-religious experience for those who were there at the time, an amazing opportunity to relive and reflect on the all too brief nights of youth. I would have liked, of course, to feel the same way. But protected from my fellow Tuesday morning ravers by a visual bubble, my hour-long re-introduction to a landmark moment in dance music culture was something of a voyeuristic one.

The music was, and remains, great. Joey Beltram and Orbital tracks stayed with me for the rest of the week. But the VR rave experience is not really a case of ‘Dance as if no one’s watching’, as it must have been at a party like Amnesia at 3am. It is rather, ‘Dance as if you are not fully there’. The kit and the contrivance of it all rendered me actually quite shy about getting on down. But I still had to dance; one absolutely had to. It would’ve been unbearably stiff-necked to explore this subculture, to end up in a room full of shadowy bodies and light shows, yet remain stock still and unmoved.

When I returned to reality I got talking to the visitor who had shared my quadrant of this virtual zone: he was a German veteran of techno clubs for whom this secret party phenomenon was equally distant. It’s not usual to leave an exhibition happily chatting to a stranger, but that is how I saw many people leave this particular show. It is a bit special that way.

Does it deliver anything like the live experience? Not altogether. My actual memories, though limited, are a bit more visceral and wild. VR technology is by contrast slightly atomising and removed from the real. But as a museum ready presentation of a key moment in recent cultural history, there can hardly be an equal of Darren Emerson’s epic creation. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to fire up an evil music streaming app and listen to the official playlist: to find my way into a past I can dream my way into if nothing else.