I’m a visual artist, so this brief piece about Mark Fisher’s draft introduction to his planned book Acid Communism (sadly never to be realised due to his premature death) examines the concept from an artist’s perspective. As an immediate warning to the curious, I want to make clear that…
The problem with modern democracy is that it has thoroughly convinced everyone that you only get one chance to improve society every five years. Didn’t succeed this time? You’ll have to wait another five years before you can try again - that’s the rules. The way to start to change…
Read the rest of “Albion: utopianism and the post-apocalyptic pastoral”…
I’ve lifted the term “post-apocalyptic pastoral” from a book review by Goodreads user Terry from Toronto who effectively seeded my reading list by citing Richard Jefferies’ After London: or, Wild England (1885), Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), Richard Cowper’s The Road To Corlay (1978),…
Read the rest of “Post-apocalyptic pastoral and post-industrial”…
“The time for sending messages in bottles has passed. As seas toxify and rise over the shorelines, who will be left to read them? Nonetheless, we have to communicate. So we communicate. To anyone who will listen. Through the haze of wine, cannabis, SSRIs, exhaustion, overwork, climate depression,…
In a recent blogpost Ellen Rogers wrote of her current Gnosis project: It’s taken me 4 years to try and articulate what this project is about, but I felt like I was repeatedly going back to square one… Until recently all I really knew was that I was blindly following a feeling that…
Read the rest of “The Psychedelic Gothic in Acid Renaissance”…
I’m starting to see more people talking about the need to imagine the future, which is both fantastic and absolutely necessary. What follows is a series of quotes and outward links with some of my own opinions interspersed as segues between them, or, as this format was called back in the…
Back in the 1970s there seemed to be such a myriad of ideas about potential shared futures, exploring all aspects of the political, social, and cultural. The aim of neoliberal capitalism of the 1980s onwards was, and still is, to close down all these possibilities - as someone (Fredric Jameson?…
I've been thinking recently about how artists (and musicians and writers) use social media, about how nearly every “how to use social media as an artist/writer/etc” article talks about your “brand” and finding your “market”, framing everything in the perspective of neoliberal capitalism. It’s…
As work steps up on my new series of artwork, Acid Renaissance: Albion’s True Standard Advanced, it’s about time I provided an update on the ideas and thinking behind it. First of all, Acid Renaissance is not a fantasy series. It certainly borrows quite a few tropes from popular fantasy…
2018 has been my most financially successful year as an artist, primarily due to my England's Dark Dreaming book (fewer than 75 copies left at time of writing!). However when I say my most financially successful year as an artist please don't even think that I’m anywhere near close to being…