07/11/2020
UNDERGROUND MANOEUVRES NOW STREAMING
Our sixth show Underground Manoeuvres is now streaming on our site (link in bio)
Underground Manoeuvres attempts to haunt an online space with places and instances which have become lost or otherwise inaccessible. These include grand designs, gone dawns and dusks, our own cellar space and the sun that is a stranger to it.
In The Poetics of Space (1957), Gaston Bachelard talks of the cellar in distinct opposition to the attic & other spaces in the house. According to Bachelard, the attic is a space of rationality, as “a roof tells its raison d’etre right away: It gives mankind shelter from (...) the sun he fears”. The cellar lacks such an irrefutable function, instead its holders find uses for it; It is rationalised, rather than rational. This is not to dismiss the cellar as useless, but rather to define it as a creative space.
A cellar is the habitable husk of the dirt that once occupied its capacity, and it is haunted by it's denseness. The undisturbed darkness and strange specificity of the cellar allows for deep rumination and dreaming “in harmony with the irrationality of the depths”.
Cyberspace is also a space of dreams, one step further from the subterranean, Cyberspace is non-terranean. In A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996), the poet and cyberlibertarian John Perry Barlow refers to cyberspace as “the new home of mind”. The internet has since strayed far from, and grown out of this idea. Like real space, today's cyberspace has no one shape or aim; it is hostile, surreal, gorgeous and unfocused. And as in real space, dreamy corners and haunts can be found.
Through internet spaces we allow the distant and illusory to haunt us into cosiness. Recently I have reached for archived Just Chatting streams to fill the gaps in thoughts and augment my times alone. These archived streams feel like being alone and hanging out alike, like an annex in the home of mind.
Allow this space and the spaces that haunt it to augment your own. Take in the live stream, choose a username, and haunt one another through the chat.
See you there,
Soft Spot
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