Following further disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, For k-punk 2022 takes itself online once more.
To celebrate five years since the publication of The Weird and the Eerie, we are proud to present the premiere of Robin Mackay’s By The North Sea, followed by a conversation between Mackay and writer and theorist Amy Ireland.
Intended as the fifth annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture, this event is now being hosted independently in support the Goldsmiths UCU strike. You can donate to the strike fund here.
By the North Sea
In the week immediately following the death of Mark Fisher in 2017, I returned to the archives of a project that Mark and I had embarked upon to make a film about Dunwich, the East Anglian town that disappeared into the sea. In 2001 we took one trip to Dunwich during which we filmed and conducted interviews, but it went no further. We periodically talked about reviving the project but it never happened.
The Dunwich Project became a focus for asking questions about finality, about things that could now never happen, about the possibility of continuing, and about a distant friendship marked by depressive absences and constantly deferred promises to spend time together.
I soon realised that I was returning to what had already been an attempt at the repetition or recovery of an intensity of engagement and creativity that had met with an abrupt end, and which we must both have felt the loss of.
In this ‘definitively unfinished’ audio version, our actual trip to Dunwich becomes just one timeline in a convergent wave of intensity. Across a series of embedded hyperstitional narrative shells, what emerges is a common task pursued by Stillwell (1949), by Templeton (1968), by the two of us (2001), and then by myself in the wake of Mark’s death (2017). A search for a mode of time where nothing passes definitively but can, with the correct procedures, be accessed, resynthesised, recast, producing something new and unprecedented.
— Robin Mackay
Participants
Robin Mackay
is a philosopher and director of the publisher Urbanomic, which aims to engender interdisciplinary thinking and production.
Amy Ireland
is a theorist and experimental writer interested in questions of agency and technology in modernity. She is a member of the techno-materialist trans-feminist collective, Laboria Cuboniks.
for k-punk 