Project & Blog: MOUTH (Edia Connole & Scott Wilson)

 

As the academic spotlight shifts from the effects of eating - demonstrable in renewed interest in areas such as fat and anorexia studies - to the affects of eating (the posthuman, vibrant matter, sensory studies, etc.), the very tactility and phenomenal nature of such sensory activity sometimes seems in a crisis of disappearance under the weight of its own glosses. Enter, however, the collaborative project MOUTH, comprising of Edia Connole and Scott Wilson, which stubbornly refutes this fear through a challenging and unique mode of praxis. Slated as "an actionist art project in culinary divinomics", MOUTH currently performs provocative and spectacular gastro-theoretical fea(s)ts in Ireland and the United Kingdom.

 

MOUTH's most recent project of June 2013, teaming up with artist Jessie Pressley Jones and the Korean Society of Ireland under the umbrella of Dublin public art initiative The Prosperity Project, saw them co-host and co-cater the paradoxically sumptuous Scarcity Banquet. Entitled "LAND", after iconic Korean writer Pak Kyung-Ni's 25-year literary production of the same name (Toji), the culinary experiment radiated from the concepts of hunger and famine which haunt both the Irish and Korean cultural memory. LAND explicitly engaged with the Korean notion of han, which is "formed from sentiments of loss and rage at the severance of wholeness and continuity between self and history", in order to offer a radical restaging of hunger, dining, the social, the political.

 

In the pointed absence of famine, a lush dining hall in Dublin's centre bore witness to dish upon dish of things-we-do-not-eat (grass, acorns, ox heart) and things-we-dare-not-eat (worms, rat) served with artistry appealing to the contemporary gourmand and defiantly celebrated across long, festive tables. And to intensify the experience/ordeal and capitalising upon the multi-sensory nature of the event, Wojtek Doroszuk’s short film Festin - featuring the gradual, seemingly inexorable consumption of a heavily-laden, seventeenth-century banquet by a host of non-human actors - looped endlessly against a back wall in a warped reflection of the night's consumption.

"Hunger changes the world, transgresses the taboos that structure social identities and hierarchies, radically changing perspectives on what should and should not be eaten, and with whom one can and cannot eat. ... Moving from han to MOUTH, then, in the wake of the dead and insurgency of the land, this the latest installment of The Prosperity Project marks the desire for a banquet in which living and eating well is the best tribute and revenge."

Further information on LAND can be found at The Prosperity Project website. More on MOUTH and upcoming projects can be found via their MOUTH blog, which also accommodates records of past events, including some texts from the P.E.S.T. symposium of 2012 (which we blogged about here), and a talk given by Michael O'Rourke at the LAND event (forthcoming). Previous banquets include: "En Soiree Culinaire par Georges Bataille, pour RLII", exploring the ecstasy on the cusp of horror (and vice-versa) of Georges Bataille; a sacrilegious "Blackened Mass for Quentin Meillassoux" in which the mouth plays divinity; an irreverent "test of faith" in the ascetic tradition; and others.

 

Blog: Dataisnature

Dataisnature is the exciting blogging labour of Paul Prudence, an audio-visual performer and installation artist whose intimate addessal of "computational, algorithmic and generative environments" ensure that his finger is very much on the digital pulse of contemporary process- and procedure-generated artistic creations and creators.

The blog, which has been publishing on and off since 2004, contains samples of some truly hypnotic graphic, sound, video and generally multimedia works, including in the relatively recent past the eerily fleshy sound-video multimedia piece Aequa by outfit Idrioema and Leondardo Solaas's abstractly seething series Affinitive Swarms, as well as works by earlier artists such as, most recently, Nicolas Schöffer's "Spatio-Lumino-Chronodynamic" sculpture.



Leonardo Solaas, part of Affinitive Swarms series (2011)

While exploring the various nooks and crannies of this long-running blog, follow the links listed under the "innerspace" menu to the left to Paul Prudence's own experimental audio-visual works.

Blog: BibliOdyssey

BibliOdyssey, a blog curated by Paul K (a.k.a. pecay), features a marvellous, extensive and ecclectic scanned aggregation of "visual materia obscura" including  illustration, diagrams, maps, prints and bookart. Archived at BibliOdyssey in no particular chronological order but tagged under general categories and fully searchable, are illuminations from medieval monster encyclopaedias, zoological and anatomical engravings from the nineteenth century, fifteenth-century alchemical illustrations, Modernist posters, and various other downloadable pictures with no noticeable connection other than that they are curious and/or obscure.

Since its inception in 2005, this blog has garnered widespread popularity as a respository for high-quality digitised imagery, producing (somewhat contrarily) its own textual artefact - the book BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, published by Fuel in 2007.

In an interview with Elatia Harris at 3 Quarks Daily, Pauk K explains his process in this online archiving adventure:

"the democracy you see on the blog is really a product of combing through all the relevant material and saving what I find attractive. I have an acreage - print art - and I try to be assiduous in plowing all its constituent parts. You may well describe it as attempting to assess the visual scope of culture but that's not essentially where I come from. I'm looking for the outlandish, the intriguing, the bizarre, the beautiful, the breathtaking ..."

Blog: David Kishik, Notes for the Coming Community

David Kishik, author of Wittgenstein's Form of Life (Continuum, 2008) and translator of two texts by Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (2010) and What is an Apparatus? (2009) makes his mark "on the interweb" in the blog, "Notes for the Coming Community".

Kishik offers some cogent and incisive extrapolations on Giorgio Agamben's texts, sources and excerpts from published material relevant to his own work, and comments on various current events. Spanning over a range of subjects, from examples of modern détournements to the concept of violence and nudity, generally framed within the theme of biopolitics, Kishik's thoughtfully formulated, if somewhat sporadic, posts provide interesting supplements to a variety of texts by Agamben and others. See, for example, a four-part comment "on the concept of form of life":

"It may be assumed that the power of life is merely a reaction against the growing power over life. But it is also possible to reverse the genealogy and claim that it is actually the various apparatuses of actualized power that are the ones reacting against the potential power embedded in the multifarious ways we live our lives. While it is usually assumed that 'life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object,' I would like to turn Deleuze’s formulation on its head: power becomes resistance to life when life takes power as its object. If the power over life is what we usually call 'the powers that be,' the power of life is what we may call 'the powers that become,' or 'the coming power.'" (First Thesis on the Concept of Form of Life)

Also of particular interest is a post on "Foucault's Utopian Body", which provides a handful of evocative excerpts extracted from a translation of a radio lecture delivered by Foucault in 1966 and published in Sensorium (MIT, 2006):

"My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewheres of the world. And to tell the truth, it is elsewhere than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged. It is in relation to it - and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign - that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere. It is at the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their place, and I negate them also by the indefinite power of the utopias I imagine. My body is like the City of the Sun. It has no place, but it is from it that all possible places, real or utopian, emerge and radiate."

Blog: Centre for Medical Humanities Blog

Durham University's Centre for Medical Humanities Blog has been going strong for over half a year now with postings which address developments in the burgeoning field of the medical humanities, including introductions to the research conducted by members of the Centre, relevant calls for papers, reviews, updates on interesting events and opinion pieces.

The blog is aimed at complementing the University's current research initiative which explores the relationship between medicine and broader social ideas of "health, well-being and flourishing" through diverse networks of interdisciplinary collaborations. Its programme of resesearch diverges into five identified research clusters: Imagination and Creativity; Practice and Practitioner; Mind/Body/Affect; Transfigurings; and Policy, Politics and the Collective. The Centre defines their titular pursuit:

"‘medical humanities’ isn’t the name of a further humanities discipline, but is simply the name of a field of enquiry. ... The disciplines actually involved in it are familiar humanities and social sciences disciplines, having in common both an interest in individual experience (which in this context means individuals’ experiences of health, illness, disability, diagnosis, treatment and care), and a recognition that subjective experience can be a legitimate source of knowledge."

Events of particular interest include an upcoming presentation given by Sara Ahmed on 11 May entitled "A Willfulness Archive" at Durham University. Further details for the night may be found here.