Mike Nelson at Camden Arts Centre, 1998/2010

Studio Apparatus for Camden Arts Centre – An Introductory Structure: Introduction; a lexicon of phenomenon and information association; futurobjectics (in three sections), mysterious island*, or Temporary Monument *See Introduction The full title of Mike Nelson’s work is so verbose there’s no room for anything else in that opening paragraph. It…

Joseph Young of the Neo-Futurist Collective: The End of Listening (ReAwakening of a City #5), 2011

Here is an urgent response to so-called Neo-Futurism: criticismism feels obliged to vehemently oppose it, although I realise this blog is probably doing a minor service to Joseph Young and his colleagues by doing so. Nevertheless, it is to be condemned. The original futurists were seductive right wing agitators who…

Ben Washington, I Will Eat This Sleepy Town (installation detail), 2011

For all the world you expect this image to move. It is a back lit screen with a casing as substantial as a cathode ray tube. We have come to expect computerised tablets to sing and dance, why not this? But no matter how long you watch, the piece is…

The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell

“If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel…it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s”. So speaks American novelist Richard Ford on the topic of recent bestseller, The Interrogative Mood. Yes, that is the novel written entirely in questions. Indeed, there is question after question for…