I have, of late, been wittering on about radical visions of the future. It started in November with No one dreams of England’s future any more, and then The Ghosts of Christmas Futures which was followed the next day by a bit of Twitter fun called The Collective Imagined Future England where you all told me who you were in an imagined post-apocalyptic England after the Dark Dream has come, where a new society is slowly being built that is a strange mix of pastoral and future-modern.
All of this, as I’ve mentioned before, is preparatory work for my new series of artwork that I've been planning over the past few weeks, and it will probably take a couple of years to finish. It—sort of—follows on as a natural progression from England's Dark Dreaming. It will use several different media. It will be called Acid Renaissance: Albion’s True Standard Advanced and my work on it starts in earnest on Saturday.
There are references in the series title to The True Levellers Standard Advanced, Gerrard Winstanley’s 1649 pamphlet about the Diggers, and to the late Mark Fisher’s planned book Acid Communism, of which sadly only a rough draft of the introduction exists. Neither of these references will be surprising to those who read my posts here with any regularity. And as is usual with such things, the references in the series title are helpful pointers, not constraints. They are just two of several starting points, and I will be taking them and running with them in my own chosen direction.
The first session of artwork will start on Saturday and should, if I get everything organised in time, produce a combination of drawing, photography, and video which will surface at some point during the next few weeks, probably under some variation of the name Children of Winter. I also have a trip to Avebury planned for a few days in February with video camera in hand (Derek Jarman is, as always, an influence), a set of three or four linoprints sketched out ready to cut and print, and a note/sketch book pleasingly filling with scribbled ideas.
It has begun.