New Moon • 1st October 2016
4.30PM - 12AM ∆ Text for Location
'Sweet Talk: The Achatic Rites' links divinatory systems and ritual to the evolution of technology, the commodification of spiritual traditions and collective experience, to propose new systems of self-care that support our personal and social transformations.
Contributions from:
Federico Campgana
London-based Italian writer, political activist and long-term collaborator of italian Marxist theorist and activist Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Federico Campagna will lead a discussion around Scepticism and the Miraculous.
www.federicocampagna.euRecording
DiY Collective
As the transition of the event moves from day to night, you are invited to dance to music provided by the DiY Sound System, a Nottingham-based electronic music collective created in 1989.
Between free parties and club nights around the East Midlands and beyond, the DiY Collective brought together a number of “tribes” from urban ravers to crusty warriors, to create a cohesive, collective, political front against the prevailing anti-rave legislation that was beginning to come into force at that time.
In 1992, DiY played a key role in hosting the largest illegal rave ever staged in England, which subsequently led to the Criminal Justice Bill coming into legislation.
The DiY Sound System - Wikipedia entry The Raving Crew Who Were Named 'The Most Dangerous People in the UK' - ViceLisa Gates
Official Astrologer to The Duchess of Rutland, East Midlands-based Spiritual Counsellor, Healer & Astrologer Lisa Gates will perform a live reading of the Sweet Talk network and its connection to the location of the site of The Achatic Rites.
www.redmilestudio.co.ukRecording
Patrick Goddard
London-based artist, writer and current doctoral researcher in Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art and University of Oxford, Patrick Goddard will perform a reading to set the tone for the day.
www.patrickgoddard.co.ukRecording
Candice Jacobs & Erica Scourti
Founders of Sweet Talk, a new artist-led network. Candice Jacobs & Eric Scourti have collaborated to curate 'Sweet Talk: The Achatic Rites', the network's first event.
Jacobs & Scourti have also collaborated on a new video work, combining open source images from the hubble telescope and a hacked Microsoft screensaver created by a 13yr old in the late 1980s (who now runs one of San Francisco's most well-known techno clubs). The work also uses text taken from @empathydeck, Scourti's 'bot with feelings', a Twitter bot commissioned by the Wellcome Collection that generates content from a mix of her diary entries and therapeutic texts.
Candice Jacobs
Nottingham/London-based artist. Lecturer of Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and Near Now Studio Member.
www.meaningfulmeaninglessness.info
Erica Scourti
London/Athens-based artist and Near Now Fellow.
Recording
Listen to a recording of Erica Scourti's introduction to 'Sweet Talk: The Achatic Rites' below, or read the transcribed version.
Jake Kent
Nottingham/Manchester-based artist, co-founder of the Nottingham art space Losers Gym, co-founder of Nottingham based publishing house Triple OG, and graduate of The School of the Damned, a peer-to-peer led alternative unofficial Fine Art MA (initiated as a direct response to the problems of the current higher education system).
Jake Kent has created the brand identity of Sweet Talk. Looking at early DIY club night promotional strategies combined with anarchist aesthetics, Kent explores the regurgitation of culture and its role in the production of Capital, cynicism, apathy and emotion in the neo-liberal age, and the authenticity and effect of the subcultures he finds himself in.
www.jakekent.co.ukKei Kreutler
Berlin-based experimental researcher in open source development, applied autonomy, and networked practices for distributed communities.
Kei will lead a fire ceremony as both an introduction and closure to our day of fireside chats.
www.keikreutler.ccRecordings
Beatrice Loft Schulz
Glasgow-based artist Beatrice Loft Schulz will talk about her ongoing research on writing [as a technology that erases preceding forms of knowledge], [the nature of] a drug, and the pharmakon [at once a poison and a cure], moving through the Ogham Tree Alphabet, Plato's Pharmacy, and Hildegard von Bingen's Physica. Part of this research is being developed together with Alice Brooke for a forthcoming film.
Recording
Alicia Mersy
Israel-based French-Canadian-Lebanese artist Alicia Mersy will screen her video 'How Many Licks', a film that questions online representation, social media aesthetics, the circulation of information, internet communities, data consumption, privacy hacking, the industry of likes and the power of posting.
HOW MANY LICKS from Alicia Mersy on Vimeo.
Carina Namih
London/San Francisco-based creative technologist and Near Now Studio member Carina Namih will discuss how our identity and its presence online can be altered and manipulated as an act of witchcraft or voodoo doll magic.
www.twitter.com/carinanamihRecording
Paul Purgas
London/Berlin-based artist Paul Purgas (one half of British music project Emptyset) will discuss the connection between ancient drumming rhythms and patterns and their connection to repetitive electronic music and techno.
paulpurgas.com