Over the last few weeks, I have attended an online residency with Six Minutes Past Nine/Hybrid Realities 2. We were encouraged to work in a 3D space called New Art City, which some of you may know. The developers collaborated with Format’s 2021 International Photography Exhibition. For me, Room 15, The Preserving Machine was by far the most interesting space to visit there, as it didn’t try to be a white cube gallery online – always a missed opportunity.
During the residency, I installed material generated by interactions to Sense and Reason. I wrote about the project in previous posts. In short, it is an ongoing work in which others are invited to respond to three ‘text-images’ that I created earlier this year. The material generated is then folded back into the project and used to generate or alter earlier elements. The residency is coming to an end this week, and the participants are sharing work tomorrow evening.
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Find out more below:
If you can’t make it, most, if not all the spaces will be available to everyone from tomorrow. They are very much worth visiting.
Sense and Reason as a 3D space remains a WIP, not least because it has yet to manifest as the zine. Taking the materials into the space to play with them, allowing relationships between materials to emerge, has been incredibly valuable. Currently, there is no audio, and the space probably needs it – ideally, my voice reading some of the responses to Sense and Reason or even some rambling about my children growing up on devices and their relationship to aesthetics and the image; but given I’m doing jury service this week, that’s unlikely to happen by tomorrow! And who knows when the zine will be made? Watch this space.
In the meantime, I’d like to suggest some theoretical books which contain concepts that correlate with the desire and impetus behind Sense and Reason. What brings these texts together for me may be summed up in the following somewhat academic paragraph from the blurb for Beech’s The Intolerable Image: (I hope my project will, in time, demystify some of these important concepts.)
“Developing out of the idealism of theological-sacral art, sustained in Romanticism, and entrenched by poststructural antirealist critiques, the notion that art is opposed to reason defined the political and social hopes of the avant-garde, was manifested in the crisis of a self-conscious conceptualism, and remains implicit in the ontologies of immanence, anti-representationalism, and new materialist theories of affect championed in contemporary works today. But the grounds for art’s autonomy as nonreason have never been secure, Beech argues, and are associated with a tragic sensibility and ultimately with naive and conservative beliefs about the nature of the image.”
Further Reading List
- Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial by James Voorhies MIT Press, 2023. A work of aesthetic theory that argues we need to move beyond traditional ways of thinking about art that emphasise immediate visual experience of autonomous art objects, and instead embrace cognitive connections with ideas that unite art and knowledge production. MIT Press (Thanks to Chris Michael from 6/9 for this recommendation).
- Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh Verso Books, 2024. An analysis of contemporary cultural style that examines how today’s emphasis on transparency and instantaneity is connected to economic “disintermediation,” arguing that our current obsession with immediacy and immersion comes at the cost of needed mediation, collective will, and deliberate construction. Verso
And yet to be published, but I am very much looking forward to these: - The Revenge of Reason by Peter Wolfendale Urbanomic, 2025. Explores Neorationalism as a philosophical trajectory, examining the possibilities of Prometheanism, Inhumanism, and Enlightenment while making the case for unbinding rationality from “petty naturalism” and fixed patterns of thought. Urbanomic
- The Intolerable Image: Reason, Realism and Art by Amanda Beech Urbanomic, 2025. A philosophical examination of how modern and contemporary art have often defined themselves against conceptual and linguistic mediations of reason, with Beech challenging the orthodoxy that art provides more direct access to reality than reason. Urbanomic
I am also reading the following, which is proving immensely relevant: - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt Penguin, 2024 An investigation into the decline of youth mental health in the era of smartphones and social media, examining how the shift from “play-based childhood” to “phone-based childhood” has affected adolescent development and offering solutions to address the resulting mental health crisis. Penguin Random House
In other news, I have just sent a zine to print titled The Circular Life and Death of Images, which I’ll be selling at the Peckham Bigger Book Fair and putting on my site next week. If anyone is in London, it would be great to see you. I’ll do another post about that soon!