Not So Popular: OBJECT(S) ISSUE by Not So Popular

NOT SO POPULAR V: OBJECT(S)

in order of appearance 1. JESS BRAND 2. NASTASIA ALBERTI 3. RACHEL RIGBY 4. ROSIE SPENCE 5. BEN MCKERNAN 6. DARYL MERSOM 7. TJAY O’HARE 8. NATAŠA INDIANA CORDEAUX 9. JOHANNE M HAUGE 10. SARAH BOULTON 11. CATHERINE MADDEN 12. MUSTA FIOR 13. JADE FRENCH 14. DANIEL NICHOLAS 15. SAM STENSLAND 16. RUTH CONNOLLY

Editor’s Note

17. HUGH SMITH

This issue’s theme is OBJECT(S)

18. ELLEN ANGUS

Thanks to everyone who contributed to our fifth zine. We’ve had many incarnations since we started Not So Popular - a broadsheet printed newspaper, blog formats and website based writing. We’re hoping to combine all that by presenting work going forward as an online magazine.

19. CAJSA VON ZEIPEL 20. SAM O’HANA

The content for this issue is amazing. From internet inspired musings and Instagram photography, to isolated objects, talk of YOLO, beautiful photography, experimental poetry and the politics of porn . In each piece our writers and artists have taken the theme and took it to places we couldn’t have dreamt up. As always, thanks to everyone who has taken the time to submit work. Edited & Designed By: Jade French

Who Owns The Internet? No one. For better or worse, not one single person should lay claim to the internet. Not those who were involved in its creation like Paul Baran or Tim Berners Lee, not those of us who inhabit it daily and certainly not governments or other powerful groups with the means to control and snoop on the lives of netizens. I say no one should. In reality the free and open internet has long been tussling with those who control it in ways that are extremely alarming and harmful to users. ‘Ownership’ is worming its way inside the internet through corporate interests and the conscious effort for hegemonic control by those in power, particularly in the USA. This is dangerous for the future of internet freedom. In 2003 Timothy Wu came up with the idea of network neutrality, which is the need for oversight on those big companies, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), who give us broadband. An open internet requires all data to be treated equally by corporations but ISPs are essentially centralised monopolies that have the means to charge us all more for access and services, with even the capacity to block us from websites. Ultimately they can exert an unhealthy amount of control. Net neutrality proponents are attempting to check and balance this control. Centralisation is the key to internet ownership. Centralisation is also giving life to more sinister forces. Since the early 20th century America has been a global police force and in the digital age this equates to dragnet surveillance. Regardless of the morality of its ventures, the NSA has both unprecedented control over human relations and unprecedented access to the data of entire populations. Behind the scenes this ‘surveillance octopus’ is putting much of the internet into the hands of bureaucrats and powerful elites – exactly the types of groups those creating the net were trying to free themselves from. Whistleblower William Binney has estimated that the NSA has peripheral access to as much as 80% of internet traffic through fiber optic hubs. Even if human eyeballs touch only a small percentage of this (the equivalent to a dime in a basketball court apparently), Edward Snowden has shown how far their reach extends, from PRISM and Yahoo webcam images to Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. Snowden told Glen Greenwald “We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world.”

JESS BRAND

This poisons a free and open internet by killing anonymity and privacy. It reeks of imperialism and hegemony. What is the difference between the British Empire conquering nations and the NSA conquering the internet by collecting vast amounts of data and monitoring communications across the world? People thought the internet’s creation marked something revolutionary, a break away from control, social conformity and hierarchy. That idea is now tainted. The internet is not like the moon or newly discovered lands where men can stick flags in the ground and get away with proclaiming superiority over others. It shouldn’t work like that because it is a global platform where access is universal and free. All data should be treated equal. Discrimination and national boundaries simply don’t exist. We are freed from the ‘tyranny of geography.’ The internet has empowered billions because granting us access to each other, as well as information, really did seem to shift the balance of power. The surveillance state is a cold reminder that this balance has crept back. Centralisation is destroying the internet. Running through the internet’s veins is Paul Baran’s concept of a centrifugal network, where communications are transmitted from user to user and not from centre to centre. This makes control from a central force obsolete. It makes hierarchy obsolete. (This is quite ironic, I think, given that this was originally a solution for the American Government during the early phase of the Cold War to ensure effective communication in the event of nuclear attack. So the US government is, in a way, destroying a concept it helped to entrench.) The notion of user-to-user communication became a groundbreaking, radical mindset adopted in the 1970s by computer enthusiasts, hippies and students. In Silicon Valley groups like the Homebrew Computer Club became hubs for ideas where innovation triumphed (Steve Wozniak introduced the first Apple computer there). But, most importantly, they echoed Baran’s peer-to-peer concept and eschewed hierarchy and authority; each member was an individual authority since they could edit each other’s software, giving way to the perpetual beta concept. They also shunned social conformity and the ‘systems’ of major corporations like IBM.

JESS BRAND

And what do we have now? Google is responsible for 40% of the world’s internet traffic. Is this ownership? Perhaps. Today’s tech giants may be cuddlier than IBM but they also hold a darker truth: they are beginning to own us. Our digital personalities, from Instagram photos to Google searches, belong to each company, not to us. Our personal information must be handed over to use their services and privacy becomes a selfish luxury. But something else has happened which is equally troubling: corporations want to use this data so that they can sell us what we really want.You’ll probably have noticed your online activity is stalked by adverts. Cookies capture everything meaning our online behaviour, even Facebook statuses, have an intrinsic commercial value and are never forgotten. In short, your thoughts are commodities. How does that make you feel? It makes me want to delete Facebook because that is not free thought. Marketers are so desperate for our data as it enables them to offer us ‘personalised experiences’ and they can sell harder and better for less. This phenomenon of behavioural marketing is quite frankly a parasite. Worse still, it has entered the realm of politics so that political campaigns no longer present the whole picture but will instead tell us what we want to hear, just like the Facebook algorithm (which Twitter will soon be adopting). Everything is tailored for you. Just like a nightmare utopia where your interests are the only ones that matter. Mark Zuckerberg once said “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” Suddenly this filter bubble, this controlling of what is relevant to you, presents the world in a very two-dimensional light. The internet is now a highly effective tool for predicting human behaviour – voting, shopping, thinking. We have only to look at the recent revelation that in 2012 Facebook successfully conducted a news feed experiment, which manipulated the emotions of 689,003 unknowing participants by changing the number of positive and negative posts they saw. Part of a psychological study or no, thought control is not something companies or governments should dabble in lightly. We need to steer the internet away from this pathway. Are we being controlled 24/7 by the internet? Is the question not ‘who owns the internet’ but ‘does the internet own us?’ Undoubtedly it is a magical platform for communication but it is also the apparatus of a surveillance state. That is the reality. There is no way we can overturn the likes of the NSA but we can fight for reform and, by simply engaging in the debate and asking question, we are taking a step in the right direction. European data protection regulations need to go further. We can challenge internet monopolies with the movement for net neutrality. We can even take matters into our own hands by, lame as it sounds, learning to code. We can have some positive ownership over our own data and human relationships by encrypting our communications and using programs like TOR. Privacy is not a selfish luxury; it is the human antidote to an internet used for control.

JESS BRAND

KATY DILLON

Baby it’s dark outside...

NASTASIA ALBERTI

The Importance Of The Sugababes, Laurie Penny & Our Right To Tweet & Speak One of the things that we have established with regards to gender and the media is that the birth of new attitudes and ideas does not necessarily guarantee the death of old ones.The most recent example of this contrast of modern and archaic attitudes is the recent success of UK Feminista’s “Lose the Lad Mags” campaign, with nationwide stores taking lad mags off their shelves. However, the recent flood of misogynist threats and abuse that has descended on so many women via the internet seems never ending. A while ago, Laurie Penny wrote an article for the New Statesman regarding the threat she received, and how it affected her. Online abuse directed at female scholars, journalists, and any woman with the courage to speak out against m isogyny has become unprecedented. Penny illustrates the startling contrast that exists between the opportunity the internet offers in giving anyone the chance to express themselves (regardless of gender, ethnicity or religion) and yet also providing opportunity to threaten and terrify others into silence. Penny describes how the internet homes a “deep well of unkindness, of recrimination and refusal to listen [...] It is disturbing, and it’s exhausting”. This “refusal to listen”, yet ability to shriek and broadcast abuse is particularly clear in the dispute between rapper Tyler, the Creator and Talitha Stone.Tyler took to Twitter to encourage his fans to taunt Stone after she spoke out against his misogynist lyrics. Stone tweeted a brand Tyler would be representing, and the rapper himself to protest against the misogyny in his music, she also appealed against his appearance in Australia. Tyler retweeted Stone to his 1.7 million followers, and didn’t hesitate to broadcast his anger at a following concert. In concert the rapper called Stone a “fucking whore” and said that he hoped her children would “get some messed up STDs”. His twitter following was responsive, as was the crowd at his show, and Stone was subjected to endless abuse online. An even more sinister example of a woman being made to feel afraid to speak out because of the internet is the case of the girl who was raped by two boys in Steubenville, Ohio.The defiling was filmed, with the boys smiling and laughing at the camera. They were arrested and charged, but there were still people broadcasting online that the victim was in some way responsible for being inebriated at the time.

RACHEL RIGBY

This was not the odd nutcase taking to twitter, it was reflected in the attitudes of the mainstream media, many picked up on the coverage of CNN reporter Poppy Harlowe after the boys were convicted: “incredibly difficult to watch as these two young men who had such promising futures, star football players, very good students literally watched as they believed their life fell apart [...] alcohol is a huge part in this”. Harlowe places emphasis on the ‘promising futures’ of the young men, failing to consider the future of a rape victim. Harlowe mentions the role alcohol played, as the victim is perceived as responsible for drinking, but the perpetrators were not seen as responsible for what they did when they were inebriated, a sinister irony. The fear that Penny describes in her recent article, and the way it made her feel alienated from her place in the media and the internet, is rooted in the same problem as many of the cases that have been explored in this article. Tyler, the Creator, the onslaught of twitter abuse and the media’s reaction to the Steubenville rape case all have one thing in common. These events are a symptom of the transitional point in equality, where women have access to social media. Anyone can have a Twitter account or a Facebook profile, women can express their opinions publicly, they can be journalists and writers.Yet, these opportunities come at a price. When they speak out, refusing to abide by patriarchal norms, the women I have spoken about are subject to endless defamation. Its enough to drive us to passivity, not to bother. It encourages us to write the kind of articles you find on ‘Femail’, with pictures of babies taken as if they’re in giant cups. But Penny is an ambassador to those who refuse to give in: “Imagine that you’re a professional dancer and you have to dance down a street where men are screaming abuse at you, throwing things, leering, sending threats. Do you stop dancing, even if you know a little part of your soul will die if you do? No, fuck that.You keep on dancing; even when your bones ache and your head rings from the relentless cunt bitch stupid girl attention seeker sellout whore.You keep on dancing, but there’s a cost. Don’t ever imagine there’s not a cost”. Laurie Penny isn’t alone, there are thousands of women that feel empowered by her resilience. Nor is she the only one that will be silenced. Mutya Keisha and Heidi said it best when they said “Bet you never thought I’d get out of bed/ Cos of you, boy/ such a fool, boy”. Laurie Penny, Sugababes, Talitha Stone, UK Feminista, they’ve got it spot on when they remind us how satisfying it is to carry on, no matter whats being hurled at you to keep you quiet.

RACHEL RIGBY

For Miley

Splintered souls step within this space and indulge in the fears and fantasies that circulate with haste forming pathways that dictate the motion of their minds their actions of disgrace the ones that hang heavy the ones they don’t care to embrace. Sacks of cells scatter themselves on the floor and pass looks that cause multiple chemical reactions to occur synapses spring as the serotonin swims through tissues and veins to the rhythm of the bass a pattern of vibrations that feeds their frustrations and causes a wave of en mass gyration. A pulled thread. The edges of her mouth frayed with age she says, I like dancin’. Do you youngsters go dancin’ these days? Yeah. Sometimes. I’d relay. I used to meet all the fellas dancin’ in Covent Garden during the war. Do you do the Charleston? The Foxtrot? Or the Fishtail You know, I always liked that move more… I never knew how to put it. How could I tell her that those moves were dead? And that now, when we go out, we scout and grind and twerk and dip in our attempt to attract an intoxicated tongue, which rolls and wriggles and promises hope, once our bodies have been ringed and prodded and groped.

ROSIE SPENCE

“Taking pictures on my phone has always only been for practical reasons. Using it to keep track of ideas was perhaps the main reason. I guess I was always weary of instagram and pretty late to the game. But personally its been a bit of a revelation. I like that you don’t have to be so precious about it. My subject matter varies so much. Either I’m documenting what I’ve been working on, or find colors, patterns and interesting subject matter on the street. There’s a particular kind of photo that I like to take that New York is really great for. There’s so much happening on the streets, there’s so many strange objects. I really like to create a kind of tension in my photos, whether it looks set up intentionally or it doesn’t.”

BEN MCKERNAN

The impossibility of YOLO when working a nine to five, or: Being present Whilst stuck between a water cooler and pencil sharpener for eight hours a day it seems hard to believe that anyone could truly believe in a philosophy of living in the ‘now’; whether that be the inane philosophy of YOLO or the seething of the Lawrencian ‘now’. The former unashamedly proposes that if you don’t stay for another Jaeger bomb you may miss your future wife (an ethos perpetuated by ‘How I met your mother’ and the end boat scene of ‘The Inbetweeners Movie’); the latter proposes a new mode of utterance - a ‘secular afflatus’ (to use Sontag’s phrase out of context). I make this loose comparison to highlight the fact that YOLO has weight behind it: we all know that there is a large body of writing on the ‘now’. But again, it is hard to live for the now when you are doing something you do not enjoy. This is where the idea of objects/objectives comes in. When thinking about objectives at work I thought about how they are bound up with objects and space. It is no coincidence we consider our goals in terms of getting to an object. The spatial goal posts in our lives are making someone money: a new car, house, pint of lager, Bristol, a t-shirt. And this seems to be the sad consumerist thread that underpins YOLO, a lifestyle based on delayed gratification. But it works! In Christianity gratification has been delayed until after death. This kept us happy for a long while working at heaven, at least until Brian Cox told us that God was dead live on Channel 4. Now, in our sec-u-lah society (because only Kultured people know God is for idiots) we work for the weekend. Now, There is a funny link here to an essay by Borges where he points out that the problem with looking forward to the future is that before you reach an hour ahead you must reach a minute, before that, a second, before that, a 100th of a second, and so on forever. Thus, we can’t go forward because we have to get past infinity. This is a thought that should haunt everyone who watches the clock at work. Returning upon myself (if time is recurrent then YOLO really is fucked) I would like to talk a bit more about objects/objectives/objectification. We all know that we live with the ‘anticipation of retrospection’ (phrase borrowed from a seminar with Mark Currie) taking photos so we can look back straight away; watching gigs from the future. But has anyone thought that one day we might look forward to our objectives only as objects: photos; passport stamps; texts? Only! The word ‘only’ embedded in YOLO is important here: only once, once only. Once is enough for a lot of people. Just look at what Brian Cox did with his once - becoming an achieved musician and disproving the existence of God. Rather than suggesting that once is precious because it happens one time, once seems to act as a license to be a bit of an idiot: being rude about a woman is somehow less vile if it happens once, if it happens repeatedly you are labelled a twat for objectifying women. P.S. I have a lot of respect for Brian Cox but he should be criticized for his polemics on how God is for the uneducated. In the last sentences I hope to echo David Brent to make a point.

DARYL MERSOM

NASTASIA ALBERTI

TJAY O’HARE

The Politics of Porn: Erotic Red By distinguishing the female erotic as separate from mainstream phallocentric pornography, Audre Lorde provided a potential female gateway for women to begin discovering their sexual autonomy in sync with their own bodies and independent of the patriarch’s gaze, camera lens and erection. “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual place.” Taking Lorde at her word, women must start realigning their conscious, psychological sexuality with the workings of the unconscious, physical body – we may like to begin this erotic quest by actually listening our own body’s natural rhythm and cycles opposed to the forced sexual shrieks and tacky mainstream scripts which permeate not only the internet but the minds of both men and women. Constructing female sexual desires from androcentric pornography is not only unnatural, but can actually alienate women from their bodies which contain the potential for pleasure. The woman who masturbates to mainstream pornography does so through the perspective of male sexuality: (i). arousal (ii) climax (iii) relief. Whereas the female erotic, as described by Lorde, facilitates an all-inclusive stimulation where the vagina is allowed to experience multiple orgasms regardless if she is ‘prepped’ for sexual activity: by “recognizing the power of the erotic” woman can experience her own sexuality, in her own terms. It may thus be argued that pornography (in most contexts) segregates woman from both her vagina and ovaries dictating when we are allowed to feel sexy and/or aroused and when we are not. Women “are taught to separate the erotic from the most vital areas of our lives other than sex” – the male, mainstream pornographic idea of sex that is. Hair and menstruation are prime examples of ‘vital areas’ in being female that have been isolated and exiled from association with sex and sexiness. Statements such as these are not uncommon, and damage how we view ourselves as sexual beings: “A sexy woman is a hairless woman”; “you can’t feel sexy or have sex whilst on your period”. It is the presence of the patriarchal gaze and His stamp of approval of a hairless, ‘clean’ porn star that infuses these self-deprecating perceptions. That is pornography has made not only its male audience so aware of the visual element of sex, but consequently pornography has become a spectre which haunts women in both their day to day and sexual lives. Due to society’s explicit acknowledgement of the normality of men watching pornography, we are extremely conscious of the extraordinary numbers of men who divulge in porn (to the extent that in Britain today it would be surprising to find out that a young man does not watch porn). Hyper sensitive to the fact that heterosexual, mainstream male sexuality is informed by their education and experience with watching porn, many women have evolved a consciousness of how their sexual body is viewed aesthetically.

NATAŠA INDIANA CORDEAUX

However, it goes beyond this – it is not just the women in these films that feel the patriarchal gaze upon their own bodies, but subconsciously the ordinary woman who have also become shadowed (or perhaps shadows of) the ‘other women’ in these pornos when engaging in sexual encounters. The focalised gaze on the ‘perfect porn stars’ have forced women to direct their gaze onto these women as well as themselves. Consequently, whether intentionally or not, porn has become a kind of mirror, and the porn stars are our morphed reflection.They represent us and we signify them. Yet we are inextricably connected to these women, and more specifically, we are tied to how these women are viewed under the male gaze. The fear of the aesthetics of menstruation and hair, and mainstream British society’s deeming of it as unattractive, challenges women’s sexual licence to experience their sexuality whilst hairy and menstruating – a social taboo. In light of this, it seems that a female erotic (which Lorde’s triumphs as key to sexual empowerment) is emerging in the cyberspace within the niche erotica of menstruation. Although the line between fetish porn and the erotic can often seem blurred, Lauren Rosewarne’s sub-chapter “Menstrual Porn” in Periods in Pop Culture: Menstruation in Film and Television provides us with explicit examples distinguishing the ‘blood bath’ depictions of periods as ‘taboo’ and ‘humiliating’ which create the ‘shame narratives’ which are key to the realm of fetish porn vs. the natural process of menstruation and being aroused whilst ‘on’. ‘Erotic Red’ (www.eroticred.com) is a current, living example of Lorde’s view that the erotic can empower and allow women to display their sexuality without shame, even online. Furthermore, the political importance of using the female erotic as a resource to counter Western patriarchy’s suppression of woman’s sexual nature is acknowledged by the website’s founder, Furry Girl: ‘I stand firm in believing that Erotic Red is an important [web]site to open- especially in a time when we’re in a sexually repressive environment in the US.’ This is one example of how the female erotic is finding a voice amongst the phallocentric virtual pornland, taking the necessary steps down the long road to female sexual empowerment. It is through the appropriation of our own vaginas and by synchronising our sexuality with our natural cycles and emotions that women can truly begin to comprehend herself gynocentrically and assert our sexual autonomy. Ultimately in doing so, we can attempt to deconstruct woman as a signifier of male pleasure/ejaculation, thus replacing the distorted mirror by viewing the body as it is truly reflected.

NATAŠA INDIANA CORDEAUX

Compliments Paid To Me By Young Men Your eyes, they’re- oh. That was a beautiful miscarriage The way your body ejects the way your bread broke extraordinary I read a book about this once I read other men’s minds and they saidI forgot. You’ve lost weight, just here, where the hair starts no, I like it, animal kingdom crown And your pupils dilating rows of plump students watching a carrion film Look at what I did there, what I said look at the bread But your eyes, they

JOHANNE M HAUGE

Whittle While You Work

In my time as a figurehead I was jealous of the sailors they shaved each other on deck with knives it was erotic and I wanted a knife as well I wanted to whittle off my cellulite (I disagree with the carpenter on a lot of things) whittle little drawers into my hip and be useful but I float really well in seawater I’ll give myself that I have time to think and I use it to think about what’s more useful: being smooth and full of drawers or floating really well in seawater

JOHANNE M HAUGE

SARAH BOULTON

The New Job We were just there because it was a busy time for the place, and the others had gone away, for a bit. They didn’t like me because of my habit of putting whatever I could get my hands on, in my mouth. This included things like staplers, the tickets and once the tanned, American hand of the C.E.O. Everyone laughed at me about this last incident especially. The bosses said that if I carried on doing this they might have to let me go. I had let them down; I had lowered things. I wasn’t particularly worried about this, as I didn’t believe them for a number of reasons. I knew that they only needed us new people temporarily and that they’d hired just enough of us for the company to survive, with no-one left over. Still, it was a shame. I didn’t have many friends at work anyway because of my loud feminist critique and the way I rolled my own cigarettes. Hand to mouth. I was paid every month for three months. In the third week of the first month I came on my period. I had to decide whether to buy tampons or breakfast for the next week. When I was crying in the kitchen you came in and looked at me. “Why have you got those tissues in your mouth?’ Now, I was embarrassed about everything. I tried to hug you, but you wouldn’t let me because ,really, you know what I’m like.

CATHERINE MADDEN

KATY DILLON

MUSTA FIOR

a new utopia. is hard to find. Dream world. Striving for perfection, but perfection is … We’re past post-modernism now, aren’t we? Every time we post a selfie or construct a flippent Tweet we engage in an ironic (laconic) eyebrow rising – these self-aware gestures reference ourselves within the larger frame of popular culture. |

Svetlana

Boym

talks

the

future

nostalgia

“The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future became outmoded, while nostalgia, for better or worse, never went out of fashion…” Is dreaming of a utopian future a fashion? A fad that we get caught up in, only to realise its unachievable nature. A never ending cycle of dream, rebellion, conservatism, dream? The status-quo settles eventually, does history have to keep repeating – doomed never to change? Although the past in reality is far from perfect, we shade our vision through the rose-tint of memories. Although we may plan for a utopia, or have certain criteria that we hope to obtain, the reality is we can never reach it – as we strive forwards, we always end up looking back. Each utopian moment crystallizes in time, holding the moment in a perfect equilibrium.

Within the four walls of the Internet come all the nitty-gritty bits of day-to-day life that grind Utopia down. The misogynist trolls, the homophobic groups, the out-pouring of racism on newspaper comment threads. Nostalgia takes hold. “In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” – Svetlana Boym We begin to lament the “good old days”.What happened to leaving your doors unlocked, smiling to strangers on the streets, holding the elevator for people? What happened to MySpace PC4PC’s, Facebook pokes, friend requests? We consolidate faster, we swipe quicker, we ignore better. But what would the utopian difference be? For me, it would be a harking back to 1945: a social community (that can exist with in/out the internet); caring for those around you; paying taxes to distribute through society; keeping our NHS nationalised; working in collectives; seeing new art; building new public spaces; keeping existing public spaces open; protesting against fracking; keeping the earth alive; being feminist; supporting those who need help abroad; an end to prejudice; living harmoniously to the mutual benefit of all. Things that could be possible, should be possible.

When the internet began to interlock our lives, we could have created something open – free – socialist – for everyone. But the ephemerality of the net is dependent on our physical lives, however much we may want to disassociate the two. When only 39% of the world’s population uses the internet, already there is a dystopian quality, an inequality, to technology. It cannot represent all things to all people.

“Nostalgia, too, is a feature of global culture, but it demands a different currency. After all, the key words defining globalism—progress, modernity, and virtual reality—were invented by poets and philosophers: “progress” was coined by Immanuel Kant; the noun “modernity” is a creation of Charles Baudelaire; and “virtual reality” was first imagined by Henri Bergson, not Bill Gates.” – Svetlana Boym

In the 1960s a Californian ideology sprung up, combining boho-hippy thinking and anti-authoritarianism that would come to define the 1960s (and eventually bring a whole set of nostalgic overtones with it) with a techno-utopia that was beginning to emerge. Evgeny Morozov coined the phrase “Cyber-utopianism”, and criticised the theory that this mass-communicating tool would favour the oppressed, rather than the oppressor. People threw the words “Karl Marx” and “communist society” into the air – only to watch them clunk to the floor. As technology advances it’s more likely that we become more wrapped up in these developments.

A “perfect world”, or utopia, cannot exist in the future. It can only exist in the past, within the realms of nostalgia. And to make matters worst, the word “nostalgia” is not a truly Greek word, as you might think. It’s only a word composed of it’s own nostalgia for the Grecian world. Swiss student Johannes Hofer coined the term, from his medical research. So the word falls away – poetry, literature, art have no place with nostalgia, cannot build that utopia – and yet…and yet…

JADE FRENCH

...

JADE FRENCH

my wife-my car

For Some People I’m Thinking of a Barrel Didn’t have to plan its position still sat just waiting for passing comment on a motive,

an uncharacteristic point of view, white pain and sickness brought up on cue, my wife-my car-in debt-in love, the truth is far from death above, the minute hand the minutemen wind, belongs in thongs for piece of mind, your micro jazz is in my eye, you’re picture perfect/vanilla sky.

Their internal wranglings were only two Apparently its enough simply to sit here, still, just waiting, sometimes catching enough light, at other times not catching enough light. Of an hole wave of problems, and they Couldn’t have remnant meaning unless the eye intermingled amongst other people’s leaves. Couldn’t have fully feeling unless the eye Now left, right on cue, to an own device Next to this thing is another thing, and pulling up a chair becomes an act of engagement, down on one knee, and out, and the dump houses all manor of liaisons. Queries? None. Envelopes? A few. Too many. She licks a stamp with all the fervent fever of kittens introduced to a surrogate mother, knowing only that the letter will never get there, and knowing also that: “This has full feeling” ‘ “This has some feeling” ~ “This has full feeling” +_++++_ “This has the hallmarks of a complex mind” > “This has tradition on its side-table” \ “This has never been realised” } { “This has less feeling” ~ “This has an apartment above a solicitors” ^ “This has never felt” ¬ “This has always enjoyed iced tea” , “This has been a fine day” ( “This has a daughter” $ “This has trust in others” : “This has roundedness” | “This has full feeling” >>>

DANIEL NICHOLAS

SAM STENSLAND

I am interested in the idea of the replacement of memory with an object, the replacement of memory with a photograph and the replacement of an object with a photograph. I am particularly interested in Roland Barthes’ idea of a memory becoming a ‘new form of hallucination’ when replaced by a photograph and applying this idea to the replacement of memory by an object. Which, if any is real? Does one hinder or help the other? It began with a tricycle. A rusted tricycle, no longer functioning, it remained permanently in my parents’ back garden. The children who once rode up and down the driveway have since grown up and the tricycle has lost its importance for them. So why keep the tricycle? The desire to hold onto an object with no function other than to remind us of the past demonstrates the epitome of nostalgia; a mixture of pleasure and sadness, a longing for the way things used to be. By photographing the tricycle, I replace the object with a photograph, preserving it in the way a memory is attempted to be preserved by the photograph. After I took the photograph, I sent it home to my father in the form of a postcard. He put the postcard on the fridge and immediately threw away the tricycle. The photograph of the object serves the same purpose as the object: as a preservation of a memory. Once the photograph had been taken, there was no longer any purpose for the object. It began with a tricycle and developed into a photographic project in which I returned to Ireland throughout the past year, photographing a fragmented memory of home; the shadow of the our kitchen blinds thrown onto the kitchen wall, a clothes line, a dog running. Like the tricycle I have attempted to preserve my own memories in the form of photographs, in the failed manner of which a family album attempts to capture the notion of the ideal family. Like memory, the photograph is flawed. We know it can never truly transport us back home.Yet we continue to try.

RUTH CONNOLLY

Katrina & The Waves You can tell is from how: water is the love of your lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s love when totally melted and in a glass shaped like a body drinking from it, water. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m walking on sunshine and the sunshine is walking on ice: beneath that and stupid, you flow.

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RUTH CONNOLLY

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Cajsa Von Zeipel’s project Zoo Collective brings a multi-faceted view to the theme of object(s). These female figurines are svelte and sexual, they’re in bondage-like, PVC-like clothing. They are there to be stared at. But fuck that. These figures don’t care if you look at them. They have elements of the grotesque that slip in, they’re nose pickers and tongue stickers.You are caught in the act of watching as they move.The playful elements of the animal poses subvert the stances.These sculptures rebuild an uncompromising vision of the female body… smooth, flawless but with injections of essential humour. The viewer is given permission to objectify. And what else is viewing art but an act of voyeurism? We can circle around these figures and rake over them with our eyes - but ultimately the power lies with the sculpture.It is a solid object.It cannot be pushed over,and even if it is and smashes into fragments it can be rebuilt. Text: Jade French

CAJSA VON ZEIPEL

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