Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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Review: Jake Elwes, The Zizi Show – A Deepfake Drag Cabaret (Edinburgh: The New Real, Edinburgh Futures Institute, 2020)
Get PDFThe Zizi Show – A Deepfake Drag Cabaret (2020) is a virtual online interactive artwork combining Artificial Intelligence (AI) and drag performance. It was created by the British visual artist Jake Elwes with thirteen established, UK-based drag artists, kings, queens, and ‘everyone beyond the binary’, and with support from the Edinburgh Futures Institute.
‘Deepfake’, a portmanteau of deep learning or machine learning and ‘fake’, was popularized in 2018 when a modified video was circulated on social media of Barack Obama mouthing words contained in a separate audio track that appeared deceivingly like the ex-president of the United States’ own words. In our present age of Covid-19 conspiracy theories, fake news, and celebrity revenge porn, deepfakes are ranked as a ‘serious AI crime threat’ and ‘a threat to democracy’
Baudelaire\u27s Graves
Get PDFDespite my avowed rationalism, nothing could induce me to spend a night in a cemetery, but during the daylight hours, I am the one haunting the dead. I am, I have come to understand, a taphophile. To my mind, graves are a great way to get to know people, and when I teach Baudelaire, I often introduce students to his work through his graves. I say ‘graves’ in the plural because he has two, though one is strictly speaking only a cenotaph in the sense that it is an empty memorial with no body present
The Toy and the Cemetery
Get PDFBaudelaire is not to everybody’s taste, but he does touch a lot of people. I remember visiting his grave in Montparnasse, many years ago. I realized at the last minute that I very much wanted to leave a gift but discovered that only the only flowers I could buy nearby were in the form of lavish funeral wreaths. I didn’t have a lot of money, and after all Baudelaire had been dead for quite a long time; also, unlike him, I had never been of a naturally extravagant disposition. As a last resort, I went into a shop beside the graveyard and put a coin into a dispensing machine full of cheap toys in plastic capsules. This seemed an appropriate enough gift for a man who, in both his essay ‘A Philosophy of Toys’ and the prose poem ‘The Toy of the Poor’, recommends the supposedly innocent and amusing pastime of distributing cheap, mass-produced toys to street children for the sheer pleasure of seeing their eyes widen before they scamper off like cats with their prizes
Review: Martin Lockerd, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020)
Get PDFThe study of decadence and Christianity generates powerful and difficult contradictions. To focus in detail on any part seems always to risk misrepresentation of the whole. It forces the tradition’s major intellectual currents into open (and seemingly unresolvable) confrontation. To stress a Baudelairean aesthetic of original sin and evil is to edge out a Paterian aesthetic of relativism, with which it is almost completely irreconcilable. To stress the framework of Christian beliefs, symbols and rituals on which much decadent literature so clearly draws is to risk ignoring the tradition’s equally clear debts to a frequently anti-Christian Hellenism (a relationship for which it is very difficult to find a satisfactory conceptualization, save the old get-out ‘paradoxical’). To focus on theology dries decadent Christianity out, makes it too scholarly; but to ignore it makes it not scholarly enough, just another brand of subversive whimsy. And, of course, even to ask the question of whether decadent religion is ‘sincere’ or ‘insincere’, ‘serious’ or ‘aesthetic’ (and these types of question still unquestionably haunt the roots of this field) lumpenly enshrines the very hierarchies that decadence sets out to destabilize
Preface by the Editor-in-Chief
No full textDespite the continuing global pandemic and the imposition of new conditions for teaching and research, there have been some upsides to what can only be described as the end of the academic world as we knew it. Working via Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex platforms has become part of the daily routine, and what once seemed to be a rather sterile and uninspiring interface has become a useful way of collapsing time zones and meeting colleagues from all corners of the globe
Destroyer Flag-Flying Visits, Civic Ceremony, Empire and Identity in interwar Britain
Get PDFThe interwar period in Britain saw the Royal Navy performing multifarious duties aimed at reaffirming Britain’s naval supremacy and reinforcing a sense of national and imperial unity. As one of the most fascinating and versatile ships, the destroyer had grown to capture the imagination of the British public through tales of courage, heroism and daring. Destroyers conducted many post-war cruises and exercises, and visited numerous regional locations performing mock battles, lighting displays, launches, pageants, sporting events and commemorations. These were ceremonial and interactive events reflecting a symbiosis between naval culture and civilian society. This article explores these regional ceremonies and pageants which showcased the destroyer and considers the agency of the ship in forging symbolic links between local communities, the nation, and the wider empire
The Breath and the Line: an art therapist’s subjective account of drawing through illness
Get PDFOn the 22nd March 2020, on the eve of the National Lockdown, I sat down to a meal with my family; mid-way through the meal I started to feel strange
