A World Without People Photo Essay

Link

A World Without People Photo Essay

Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to vanish from the planet altogether. Collected here are recent scenes from nuclear-exclusion zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence, unsold developments built during the real estate boom, ghost towns, and more

 

Dark Materialism

Excellent collection of links to the audio of papers given at a symposium in 2011 at Kingston University, London, about Dark Materialism. Including papers by Eugene Thacker, Reza Negarestani, Dorethee Legrand and so on.

 

From the website:

It assembles unique and multidisciplinary reflections on the idea of darkness in its relation to matter in diverse locations, namely: physics, astronomy, ecology, mysticism, speculative realism, psychoanalysis and literature. As a conceptual framework, dark materialism engages with matter at the thresholds of its annihilation and disappearance beyond the topographies of ‘base materialism’ and at the very edges of forms of thought where the objects, things, Things and no-things on which it depended exert their independence. Darkness, in matter, energy, ecology and life itself, in black holes in the universe and in the mind, emerges as baseless and founding, exterior and interior at once. It leaves thought in the void, enabling disruptions and speculative realignments of diverse concepts and the real itself, reshaping not only the world of ideas but also the very order of things.

 

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/01/dark-materialism/

Gilda Williams in Conversation with Jane & Louise Wilson

The ICA in London always manages to incorporate horror into their programming. Tomorrow (March 6)  they have Gothic-lover and art critic Gilda Williams (who wrote on Warhol and monster-making for Gods and Monsters) in conversation with Jane & Louise Wilson

Culture Now: Jane & Louise Wilson in Conversation with Gilda Williams
Jane and Louise Wilson’s latest work, the Chernobyl Project (2010), featured at the Dundee Contemporary Arts Centre, was commissioned by Forma to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the nuclear disaster that took place in 1986. The exhibition features two of their projects; a selection of photographs under the name of Atomgrad (Nature Abhors a Vacuum) andFace Scripting – What Did the Building See?, and a documentary about the assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhou in 2010.

16 March 2012 at 1:15pm
£5 / Free for ICA Members

The Shape at Generator Projects

Gods and Monsters contributor Darren Banks will be included in an exhibition called The Shape this month at Generator Projects (UK) alongside artists Lachlann Rattray and Ben Robinson. The new works were produced in consideration of the correlation of chance and determinism in their implementation found in European horror cinema.

Darren Banks will present Bloody Dreams, Visions & Tourism; a multi-screen installation using found footage and analogue television sets. Each television will be given its own horror movie trope; through a process of selection, isolation, editing and looping, new objects are formed. Recurring horror motifs take on new meaning formally and thematically – horror starts to manifest itself structurally into the work as object and film become interwoven. 

The Shape:
Lachlann Rattray 
Darren Banks
Ben Robinson
24 MARCH – 15 APRIL 

25-26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate 
Dundee
DD1 4JG 
+44 (0) 1382 225982