Possible Worlds

‘Fragments of Time and Memory: Matter, Media and the Modern Auditory World,’ in European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 15 (2011), pp. 19-29

This article looks at the emergence and development of the modern auditory world, its relation to time, space and the human body and how these may inform our understanding of material culture today. The first part explores the materialisation of time in phonographic sound as an instance of the fragmentation of modern life, and how this displaced the temporal experience of the premodern world. The second part looks at the impact of magnetic tape recording, which permitted sound artists to produce multitemporal audio collages. The essay concludes with a consideration of how the material culture of sound ends in the human body – its final materialism – just as the old sound objects of analogue technology appear to be dematerialised.

'Art / Waste' in Throwaway: The History of a Modern Crisis, ed. Christine Dupont, Stéphanie Gonçalves & Emma Teworte (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2023), pp. 126-143

The second half saw the growth of vast landfill sites designed to absorb the rubbish of everyday life, which were located on the margins of our towns and cities.

These hypertrophied extensions of consumer life remained, for the most part, comfortably out of sight to most of us, ensuring that we could easily forget what we were throwing away. At the same time as all this rubbish was being spirited away to these places, it was also being valued for other reasons by a wide range artists, and often associated with new aesthetic ideas that attached a different significance to the leftovers of everyday life. This article looks at the work of a number of European movements and artists.

'Raymond Moore’s Uncertain Places,’ Photographies, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022), pp. 225-239

This article examines the work of late British photographer Raymond Moore (1920–1987) and the ways in which his images of landscapes and objects allow us to understand his work as being driven towards encounters with what I term uncertain places, which is to say places in transition or between states of being that also point the observer of these images to that which lies beyond even photographically-aided perception.

‘Duchamp’s Wager: Disguise, the Play of Surface and Disorder,’ in History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 16: 3 (2003), pp. 1-20.

This article considers the notion of 'play' in the plastic arts as described by Johan Huizinga, its relation to the materiality of the art object, and how it could no longer be sustained following Duchamp’s introduction of the ‘readymade’. Duchamp's readymades force a re-evaluation of plasticity (and thus of Huizinga's definition of play), and introduce a permanent revolution of plasticity, which must be considered as the expression of an essential disorder underlying all appearances. I argue that Duchamp achieved this by employing strategies of disguise in order to lay bare the epistemic play of surfaces, and thus the contingency of knowledge and identity.

'Surf Life, ou l’excès à l’ère du numérique' in Techniques & Culture, Vol. 65/66 (2016): ‘Repair the World’, pp. 494-501.

‘Surf Life’ is term that attempts to describe some of the characteristics and consequences of what I suggest is a new ecology of remembering and forgetting. The forms it takes, and the consciousness it seems to give rise to, cannot be separated from the ways in which we come to live in, and with, time and place as they are conditioned by the new digital technologies that suffuse everyday life. In relation to the everyday habits of contemporary western life, in particular, this ‘surf life’ might be thought of as a kind of ‘surfacing’ – a disengagement from the consequences of living through an excess of present moments that are quickly rendered obsolete by the arrival of new fascinations.

‘The Language of Waste’ in Recycler l'urbain: Pour une Écologie des milieux habités
ed. Roberto D'Arienzo & Chris Younes
Geneva, MetisPresses, 2014, pp. 9-21
ISBN: 978 294040 6 94 4

While the language and terminology of ‘sustainability’ – which sees potential resources in waste – is commonly attached to large issues (the future of the environment, the planet, or human society thousands of years from now) the language of waste still allows us to comprehend more circumscribed or local ‘problems’ and solutions, all of which contribute to an understanding of how difficult it is, and has been to consider the possibility of a goal such as the goal of zero waste.