Tuesday 26 February 2013

Lectures 2012


Most of my lectures took place in academic environments during the course of 2012. Over seven weeks between October and December 2012 I was again asked to present my lecture series to MA Communication Design students at Central Saint Martins. The themes were Media, Machines, Networks, Spaces, Dreams, Events, Cognition, following the same basic pattern as in previous years, but the lectures were also greatly expanded incorporating screenings of extended movie and documentary clips, breakout discussions and seminars. To expand the depth these still further I also presented a series of ‘Networks’ workshops to students on the Central St Martins MA Innovation Management course. Other lectures were given at Middlesex University and the University of Brighton School of Art. In addition to these I was also invited to speak at the following events:

October 11
A lecture on Ludwig II of Bavaria, alchemy, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson as part of the English Heretic AGM held at the Masonic Hall in Bath

May 4
Late-night lecture delivered as part of the Sonores festival in Guimaraes, Portugal  - the talk was streamed live from the Sonores website and was available as a podcast for the dureation of the festival.

March 25
Lecture in the Wellcome Library on William Sargant, behaviour modification and neuro-terrorism, introduced by Quentin Cooper, as part of the Wellcome Institute’s programme of talks ‘The Thing Is…’
See also:

Events and Performances 2012

Most of 2012 has been spent completing work on The Bright Labyrinth, my new book for Strange Attractor Press. The book is based on lectures and readings I have been giving over the past four or five years – however, the material also required a great deal of my time and effort so I made a decision to forego my usual live schedule and work in private for greater part of this year. The following events proved to be exceptions.

November 5
A live reading specially created for The Cage Rattling event at Kings Place to commemorate the centenary of John Cage’s birth. This text was commissioned for the event and was completed but for last-minute scheduling reasons  was not performed.

June 9
A live reading  of material from Welcome To Mars with audiovisual accompaniment at the Café Teater in Oslo as of ‘Only Connect’, organized by Ny Musikk for the promotion of avant-garde music and performance in Norway

May 5
 A reading of a new text sequence, taken from The Bright Labyrinth, as part of the Sonores festival in Guimaraes, Portugal 
May 3
‘Invading Present Time’
Reading from The Bright Labyrinth, organized as part of the opening to the Savage Objects conference, at the Sociedate Martins Sarmento, Guimaraes, Portugal 

April 26
To launch Tony White’s new book Dicky Star and the Garden Rule (published by Forma Arts and Media) to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, KH was in conversation with the author at the Free Word Centre, London

Sunday 24 February 2013

Print Media 2012


December
KH’s essay ‘Spaceship UK’ appears in a limited-edition booklet The Twilight Language of Nigel Neale, designed by Rob Carmichael and edited by Sukhdev Sandhu published in conjunction with the Cathode Ray Séance event in New York on November 17, 2012. The volume is now available via mail order from Strange Attractor Press.

August
‘Spirit Horns’
Online publication as a PDF download from Metasound  of KH’s ‘Spirit Horns, Parts One and Two’, originally composed as blog posts describing an afternoon spent with some Edison phonographs in the company of Michael Esposito and Aleksander Kolkowski. A direct link to the PDF can be found hereThe author profile on the Metasound platform can be found here.
The Aleksander Kolkowski ‘Phonographies’ recording of KH reading from Welcome to Mars into an Edison phonograph can be found here.

May
‘Living in Space: A Sequence of Texts’
This specially commissioned essay for the catalogue to the Sonores Festival in Portugal was published in both English and Portuguese as a parallel text in a perfect bound volume, Sonores: Sound Space Signal, (OOPSA, 2012).
See also:   Sonores 2012: Live and Online
Alien Transmissions at Sonores

January
‘The Image Demands to be Heard’
Essay on Cabaret Voltaire's use of film and video in their music production as a booklet insert for the Johnny YesNo DVD/CD box set released by Mute Records.

Audiovisual 2012

January
The video of KH’s lecture on John Cage’s influence on language and sound originally delivered at the Off The Page in February 2011 at the Palace Theatre as part of the Off the Page Festival is finally made posted on Vimeo. After Boing Boing posts a link to it on their site, the video receives over 5,000 hits. To watch the film, please click here.

Print Media 2011

December
Short story about the Kennedy family, the Space Race and the Nazis included in the New English Heretic Library anthology,Wyrd Tales 2

October
Introductory essay for the volume The Art of Worms, published by Touch/Bookworm to catalogue the designs for their Tapeworm cassette-only release label – cover art by Savage Pencil.

September
KH’s essay on utopian architecture and films of Mika Taanila, originally published in the Migros Museum catalogue Human Engineering is published on line as part of the documentation for the Kassel Documenta

Essay published as part of a special newspaper supplement to Bare Essentials: the Best of Nude Magazine 2003-2011 – the essay had originally appeared in Nude issue 11 for Spring 2007
KH’s profile of Italian multimedia space  artists My Cat Is An Alien is the cover story in issue 331 of the Wire

August
Notes from my lecture ‘The Psychoanalysis of Trash’ are reprinted in Pretty – Ugly, a limited edition publication from Hato Press.

June
‘Temporary Storage: Notes on the Dounreay Fast Reactor, Citadel of the Future’
Specially commissioned essay published as a stand-alone pamphlet to accompany screenings of Gair Dunlop’s ‘Atom Town’ film project. An online version is later made available by the V2 Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam. For more information, please click here.

May
Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe: The Superhero as Camp Enigma'
KH’s essay on Flash Gordon, Ludwig II, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol is published in English in issue 2011.1 of the German academic journal Kritische Berichte, available from Jonas Verlag

A short interview with Simon Fisher Turner by KH about his soundtrack for the 1911 silent movie The Great White Silence in issue 328 of The Wire

April
Essay plus preliminary draft material for one of the chapters in the Bright Labyrinth (2013), dealing with Dali, The Dream of Venus pavilion, Martians and Modernism, published in Strange Attractor Journal Volume 4.

January
Essay on how the mechanical reproduction of sound has altered our sense of the past by creating a ghostly eternal present, published in issue 323 of The Wire 

Audiovisual 2011

November 23
Hour-long live broadcast from the Resonance FM studios of readings from The Bright Labyrinth’ with music from My Cat Is An Alien

May 27
Available online as a podcast from Little Atoms: the recording of the panel that took place at the Free Word Centre featuring KH, Angela Saini, Becky Hogge and Gia Milinovitch

May 16
A two-camera film of KH’s lecture delivered at the Ecole des Recherches Graphiques in Brussels on February 2 is posted on Vimeo as ‘Politiques de la Simulation’. To see the full video click here.
See also:

April 9
‘How to Archive Yourself’ Archive Hour on BBC Radio 4, presented by Toby Amies, produced by Sarah Jane Hall
KH talks about data networks, the uploaded self and virtual memories. From the show: ‘Ken Hollings has been described as both a genius and an alien. He is the kind of writer who looks up at a million points of light in the sky and starts to connect the dots.’
The programme can be found here.

April 6
The video of KH’s lecture for Neville Brody’s Anti-Design Festival on September 21, 2010, is posted on Vimeo by Ignite Creative TV – to access the video click here.

April 1
KH talks about Paul Baran, formerly of the RAND Corporation and the Institute for the Future, on his contributions to the architecture of the Internet.

March 21- March 25
A series of fifteen-minute talks on how networks have shaped, and will continue shape, human consciousness
Essay 5: Heads In the Clouds
Essay 4 I’m Your Orange Juice
Essay 3 The Networks Go to War
Essay 2 Victorian Search Engines
Essay 1 Welcome to the Labyrinth
To access the entire series of essays from the BBC Radio 3 website, please click here.

Events and Performances 2011

December 10
Backed by electronic sound artist Asterism, KH presents a reading of extracts from ‘The Storm Towers of Atlantis’, a short story published in the New English Heretic Library anthology Weird Tales 2, at Luminous Books in London

November 10
‘The Fear Factor’
Panel convened at the Bishopsgate Institute featuring KH, David Aaronovitch, Julie Bindel and Timandra Harkness, chaired by Little Atoms’ Neil Denny as part of the Institute’s ‘Whose Mind Is It Anyway? series

October 20
Special live music and spoken-word event at South Bank’s Bear Garden to celebrate the publication of Touch’s The Art of Worms booklet, featuring a specially commissioned essay by KH, ‘Parasitic Infestation: Some Notes on the Audiocassette Considered as a form of Technological Infection’
See also: Tapeworm Turns

June 23
A reading of extracts from Welcome to Mars as part of an event organized by Arts Catalyst for the first London screening of Gair Dunlop’s film ‘Atom Town’.

June 17
A reading of material from Welcome to Mars and The Bright Labyrinth as part of a live event at the British Library organized with the Radio Science Orchestra as part of ‘Out of this World’, the library’s exhibition of science-fiction literature and art.

May 23
Live panel event organized by Little Atoms at the Free Word Centre in London to look at the effects of networked technology on human behaviour – featuring KH, Angela Saini, Becky Hogge and Gia Milinovitch