Category: Past Events

Screening :

Session One : 26 July 2024 Friday 6:30pm

Session Two : 27 July Saturday 4pm

Session Three : 27 July Saturday 6pm

Session Four : 28 July Sunday 4pm

Session Five : 28 July Sunday 6pm

Free Entry | 6 places each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for a place

---

Running Time : 1 hour

Nick Land’s Meltdown AI-fication (2024) by Kosmas Giannoutakis (US) was selected from the DIVFUSE / INNOVATE 2024 Open Call.

This project vivifies by means of AI-generated audiovisual media the seminal essay ‘Meltdown'(1995) written by the “father of accelerationism,” controversial philosopher Nick Land. This early accelerationist essay speculates a technocapital singularity that leads to an AI apocalypse that renders humanity obsolete. All sentences of the text are used as prompts for text-to-image, text-to-video, and text-to-music/sound ML models. Nick Land’s voice is cloned and deep-faked from one of his online interviews to generate an artificial narration of his own text. The assembled hour-long schizofilm has a satirical/Dionysian attitude and chimerizes elements of music video, video essay, sci-fi, and documentary.

The conceptual ramifications of this artistic project are various and ambiguous. It aims to clarify to the proponents of Effective accelerationism that accelerationism is a critical, nihilist, and anti-humanist worldview in contrast to the utopian, techno-solutionist, and Promethean ethos that is driving the current AI renaissance.

This experiment delves into the interplay between Nick Land’s theory-fiction and contemporary Large language models, aiming to unravel the nuances of their inherent biases alongside their potential for progressive conceptualizations. Framed as a hyperstitional artifact, this project is conceived as if commissioned by a future AI imbued with Landian philosophy, with the intention of its eventual assimilation prompted by the possibility of the film’s internet virality.

The resulting film serves as a translation of the Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalytic rhizomatic method employed in the original essay into a cinematic language. It boldly reimagines notions of subjectivity, desire, and the (dis)organization of society. Additionally, it ventures into Nick Land’s machinic practicism, an experimental philosophical approach that advocates for a departure from representation and abstraction in favor of a materialist immersion.

Screening

12 April 2024 Friday 5:30-8pm. Free Entry

An Ear to River ~ recovering landscape 2023

A film in collaboration with Ross Adams. Running time: 33 minutes.

This film arises from the fertile bed of Channelsea river, and the mud banks of Channelsea island. After the bend there’s a dead end, an ecotonal community alive with self-seeded inhabitants, effluent overflows, waste waters, mud, industrial detritus, people in search of rest, tidal flow. On the island birch, alder, bramble and buddleia make slow steady progress demolishing the former chemical works buildings, young holly and holm oak forecasting the evergreen future of the land. Light, wind and rain remember their way in.

The sounds have been gathered by Blanc Sceol through their on-going site specific work there. A somatic score creates a space for participation, the field recordings and poems were recorded and written during and after encounters at different times of day and night, hydrophones witness tidal flows, a voice recycles the word ‘waste’ on a tape loop, a waterphone filled with river water and a song slide around one another, and self-created instrument ‘Orbit’ is played inside Abbey Mills pumping station. Ross Adams’ wide-eyed visual reflections circumnavigate the island as a solitary, exploratory flowing eye. This witness reaches around, above, inside and through its contrasting elements – the detritus of the abandoned landscape in conversation with dense new growth.

The film came out of an audio-visual performance collaboration created for the EnCounters x Music and Other Living Creatures series, curated by Helen Frosi and Cafe OTO Projects.

Also on display will be a Tide cloth – calico dyed with river sediment which was created in collaboration with the Channelsea river as part of the Spree~Channelsea Radio Group project 2023, as well as 2 x text scores written for Channelsea Island.

Listening Circle

Session One : 13 April Saturday 4:30pm £10

Session Two : 14 April Sunday 4:30pm £10

£10 | 8 places only each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for ticketing

Duration: 75 minutes approximately

Access to the Channelsea river is closed throughout April, in preparation for the final connections to the Tideway tunnel due to be made later this year. As a result of this period of works, the Channelsea will once again be subjected to regular pollution events from the Abbey Mills overflow pipes. Join us to listen in live to the soundscapes of the river via an open microphone situated on the banks, tuning in as a way to be with the contemporary and historical pollution this waterbody has been expected to dilute. The circle will give us space to reflect on current and local ecological concerns through an embodied connection to our own inner waters. 

The live stream is part of the live soundmap project operated by Locus Sonus.

Screening & Performance

Session One : 22 March 2024 Friday 6:30pm

Session Two : 23 March Saturday 4pm

Session Three : 23 March Saturday 5:30pm

Session Four : 24 March Sunday 4pm

Session Five : 24 March Sunday 5:30pm

£5 | 8 places only each session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Running Time : approximately 21 minutes plus 25 minutes performance and discussions

---

1. Exercise in Conscious Listening: Maple, 2021

Film. Running time: 10:26

‘Maple is the third instalment in the Conscious Listening series. The performance took place in Tottenham Park Cemetery as part the of Be-coming Tree International Performance Event. These exercises bring attention to the importance of listening and communication in order to un-learn built-in hierarchical modes of relating, and to build a more harmonious relationship with other species. Using non-lingual communication methods, such as touch, sound, and movement, I attempt to tap into the tree’s communication system. Trees use vibrations in their roots in order to send and receive messages through a fungal network linking them underground, by using my voice and limbs, I hope to create vibration patterns that allow me to tap into this wonderful system. The audio is a representation of the conversation which took place during the performance, using manipulated field recordings and vocals.’

2. Infinite Breath, 2022

Film. Running time: 9:37

Infinite Breath is a meditation on the role of the atmosphere within human and other-than-human connections through time and space. The artist wearing her listening device attempts to respond to the sounds and airflow using movement as a communication tool.

It is through the atmosphere, through the act of breathing that we are connected to all things, past, present, and future. Since the dawn of the planet the atmosphere has been a space of circulation for all elements, forms, and beings, “the metaphysical space of their conjunction, the unity of all things, measured by the coincidence of breath.” Coccia (2019)

Film Screening

Session One : 23 February 2024 Friday 6:30pm

Session Two : 24 February Saturday 4pm

Session Three : 24 February Saturday 5:30pm

Session Four : 25 February Sunday 3pm

Session Five : 25 February Sunday 4:30pm

£5 | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

Running Time : approximately 25 minutes plus discussion with artist about the work

---

Conversations 2024

A collection of personal moving images and sounds woven together in digital video, with the intention of some kind of non-sense narrative. An attempt to find connections, distortions, patterns, plot, rhythms, cycle, rambling, pulse, unhinged. Conversations series is an ongoing project.

Originally from Singapore, Lynn Loo has been based in London since 2004. She began making films in 1997. Her works include single-screen to multi-projection and installations. She has participated internationally in festivals, galleries and institutes such as Yebisu International Arts Festival in Tokyo, 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival in USA, Art Central Hong Kong, Tate gallery and Cafe Oto in London.

www.dewfields.co.uk

Photo by Lynn Loo

Film Installation Exhibition:

16 February 2024 Friday 5 – 7pm

17 & 18 February Saturday & Sunday 2:30 – 5:30pm

Suggested Donations : £2

Artist’s Talk:

Session One : 16 February 2024 Friday 7 – 8pm

Session Two : 17 February Saturday 5:30 – 6:30pm

Session Three : 18 February Sunday 5:30 – 6:30pm (Full)

£5 | 8 places only per session | Please email divfuse@gmail.com for tickets

---

‘I first studied painting and was drawn into film by the possibilities of visual movement. 

This show is a chance to develop ideas that began in those student days when I was projecting rhythmic frames of pure colour film onto paintings, and watching the shapes dance about. The DIVFUSE project space will become my first three dimensional canvas on which to try out ideas of colour light on painted surfaces.’ – Guy Sherwin

For the talk, the artist is going to project the original standard 8 film, using a standard 8 projector, onto some of his sketchbooks made in 1970 which were the start of his experiments in colour and film. He will then talk through his journey of arriving to the work that is being displayed today.

---

‘I have been making films since the early 1970s and these have taken various forms: silent black and white series (Short Film Series); projection onto special screens (Paper Landscape); longer form films (Messages); multi-projection performances with visual sound (Vowels & Consonants – made with Lynn Loo);  looped installations (Three Trees). 

What links these diverse approaches is the impulse to find out what happens when a new idea is tried out. It’s the process itself that largely determines the direction the work takes.’

Photo from Guy Sherwin