Projects

  • Joseph Beuys in Practice and Thought

    Joseph Beuys has been a recurring presence in my intellectual life for nearly two decades. Not always in the foreground, and not always comfortably. I first encountered Beuys almost by accident while on a working holiday in London in 2002. Tate Modern was hosting a major retrospective of his work and, not knowing anything about

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  • Notes on Visual Participation

    One of the more interesting developments in the Dr Amblyo trainer over the last few sessions has not been a dramatic leap in “vision”, but a growing sense that the system is beginning to recruit my weaker eye more actively into the task itself. The recent left-eye-only cueing changes feel subtle while playing, but noticeably

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  • Fatiha Practice – 15 May

    Continuing with the Lo Fi ‘listen and repeat’. Again, not distracting myself by referring to a written version while reciting. I think it improves my pronunciation, but the recording ends up choppy becasue I have the memory of a gnat and I can only hold a few syllables in my mind long enough to repeat

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  • Fatiha Pratice – 13 May

    I’m happier with today’s attempt. I was quite discouraged after my version of the 11th and couldn’t bring myself to practice yesterday. Today I went back to the Lo Fi audio and did a ‘listen and repeat’, but without the distraction of trying to read a transliteration whiel I did it. I’m still strugling to

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  • Fatiha Practice – 11 May

    Deeply unsatisfactory practice today…I tried a cold read from another transliteration. This one arranges the syllables in an odd way and added vowel sounds at the end of each line that don’t fit with my other experiences of the text.

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  • Dev Log: Pushing the Optical Challenge

    Up to this point, the game has relied on a left-eye-only ghost piece — a subtle way of encouraging the weaker eye to do more of the perceptual work. It was effective, but only for a while. After enough sessions, I noticed something had shifted. The challenge was still there in theory, but in practice

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  • Problems of Method and ‘Working Through’ in Joseph Beuys

    Few 20th century artists provoked as much debate around the merits of their art as Joseph Beuys.  In spite of the volumes of art historical and critical work dedicated to his legacy, there remain numerous gaps in the interpretation of his work. As many have noted, these gaps exist in part due to Beuys own

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  • The Birds and the Bees (and Basalt and Trees) of Joseph Beuys

    The Birds – Natural History in Beuys and Deleuze/Guattari Beuys’ work shows his attempts to make tangible the philosophic and political post modernism that we now identify with Deleuze and Guattari. Where the two philosophers rely on examples from natural history to work out pre- and para- political theories, Beuys attempts to work out and

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