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Showing posts from September, 2010

Text Festival 2011

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The new Text Festival website goes live today. http://www.textfestival.com Over the next month more events will be added.

Back to Finland

It's been an intense few weeks as the Text Festival moved towards having some sort of shape, so I haven't had time to blog. The first wave of the programme will be officially announced in the next few days - there'll be more to follow. Meanwhile I am returning to my favourite (so far) place in Finland - Tampere. Primarily I am seeing purdah to write "The Tragedy of Althusserianism", which assuming I finish it, will come out on ifpthenq in November. But I am looking forward to seeing Karri Korro again and meeting Satu Kaikkonen for the first time. The first thing I'll do on arrival is attend an exhibition opening at TR1 http://www.tampere.fi/tr1/english.htm Through the week I'll also be meeting various local curators to talk about future projects. I am not sure I will have internet access.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

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I remember that there were only two artists at Sevilla Biennale 2008 whom I found interesting; I can't recall one without looking back to my journal but the other was the Mexican-Canadian electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer . He also caught my radar at Basel Art Fair in 2009. So I am pleased to see that he has a solo show called Recorders at Manchester Art Gallery. It features seven recent pieces of which I think I recognise a couple from the previous installations. Lozano-Hemmer’s artworks depend on the participation of visitors to exist and develop, as the artist describes: “In Recorders, artworks hear, see and feel the public, they exhibit awareness and record and replay memories entirely obtained during the show. The pieces either depend on participation to exist or predatorily gather information on the public through surveillance and biometric technologies.” Highlights of the exhibition include Pulse Room, on show in the UK for the very first time. Premiered in Puebla, Mex

A Single Man’s Inception

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I rarely mention film here and I am going to do what Ron Silliman in his review of Inception said one shouldn’t and that is consider that film’s implications as a medium of serious thought. Like Ron, I thought Christopher Nolan’s movie of dreams within dreams was a ‘kick-ass summer film to trump all summer films.” And I probably would have left it at that until I caught up with last year’s Tom Ford film A Single Man while in Malta. There may not seem an immediately obvious connection between the two films. Inception is a ‘colossal digital artefact, a virtual reality sci-fi thriller set inside the dreaming mind, with brilliant architectural effects and a weirdly inert narrative inspired by Philip K Dick and Lewis Carroll’ (Guardian). In the distant future, the technology of industrial espionage allows snoopers to invade the dreams of CEOs and steal commercially sensitive information. Leonardo DiCaprio is Cobb, a specialist who both carries out these hi-tech brain raids and trains exec

And the Award for the Best Poetry Dog goes to…

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I have a dilemma in writing about the Manchester Literature Festival which has launched its programme for this October: I have noticed that my blog readership doubles when I critically blast some aspect of UK literary banality – so if I comment on the MIF programme in the way that most of my readers would expect I will increase my hits; on the other hand I also notice that the Manchester Blogger Awards are situated within the Festival, so if I say something less critical maybe I’d increase my chances of a Blogger nomination. So prostitute myself for blog-reader popularity or sell out for an Award nomination? I jest, of course. I couldn’t get a Manchester Blogger nomination because I am too negative about too many things Manchester. This is not because I have particular pleasure in denigrating the city; rather it is because I am fond of Manchester, because I like living here and therefore want it to be what it could be. I want Manchester to be an international city, and am saddened th

Busy even on holiday

I've not really had time to blog this last week or more due to the Text Festival curating. Between now and early November is the busiest period of organisation. It is such a big labour that it has to be done in phases. The Text Festival website should be back live any day now with the first announcements of what and who's on but in the meantime there is now a Text Festival Facebook and Twitter. This coming week I am off to Malta for a break - except while I am there I will be finishing my article for the Shortcut Europe Conference publication, the sleeve notes for Ben Gwilliam's disc of 'molto semplice e cantabile' , my Nono sound-poem for the Luigi Nono Project, and my forthcoming collection for ifpthenq " The Tragedy of Althusserianism ". I have a couple of long blog rants also on the go which may make it up here when I get back.