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Into the future: An interview with Steven Alexander of the Dance
No full textSteven Alexander is an American artist who makes abstract paintings. His work is held in private and public collections worldwide and has been featured in more than one hundred exhibitions, most recently in one-person shows at Spanierman Modern in New York, and in numerous solo and group exhibitions and art fairs throughout the US and abroad.
In the late 1970s and early '80s, Alexander also composed, performed and recorded original music, collaborating with John Cale, Arthur Baker, Chandra Oppenheim and others. He performed frequently at CBGBs, Max’s, Hurrah, Danceteria and other important rock venues, as well as at Carnegie Hall in 'The First Concert of the '80s' along with Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, John Cale and others.
I had been following artist Steven Alexander's Instagram account and reading his website journal for several years, but only recently did I connect the name with the musician who was part of Model Citizens, an obscure New York new wave band who released Shift the Blame in 1979 and then split up. Whilst one half of the Model Citizens became Polyrock, a minimalist art-rock group who signed to RCA and released two albums produced by Philip Glass along with a mini-album – Polyrock (1980); Changing Hearts (1981); Above the Fruited Plain (1982), the other half, including Alexander, became the Dance. As their name suggests, their post-punk music drew on mutated funk rhythms, and having recorded a 12" EP, Dance For Your Dinner in 1980, the group released two albums on Statik Records: In Lust (1981) and Soul Force (1982). These, as well as a new compilation of singles, b-sides, and unissued tracks, Do Dada, were reissued by Modern Harmonic in 2022. A similar compilation of Model Citizens' live recordings and their John Cale produced Shift the Blame EP was also released in 2023.
It's always interesting to find out more about previously neglected music, and to get some information about what was happening 'over there' in NYC by those who participated, so I thought I'd ask Steven Alexander about his memories of the music, city and venues back then
'Guerilla' Publishing on Feminism Today: MAI Feminism & Visual Culture
No full textIn this case study on film & feminism publishing today, introducing the story of an open-access, independent online journal, MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture (maifeminism.com), its editor-in-chief shows how the late bell hooks' vision of gender politics motivated her and Professor Anna Backman Rogers to start the website in 2018.
Sparked by their collaborative effort, MAI soon attracted a global collective of artists and scholars who now help showcase the best of feminist creative and academic work from the field.
With its popular bi-annual journal and now a book publishing label under Punctum Press, MAI has become a success story of what elsewhere may be considered an ironic fit of guerilla and academic feminist publishing—rigorously peer-reviewed yet sitting outside the corporate research publishing market.
The chapter covers how several MAI issues and articles, particularly those focussed on films, television and video art, have fed into propagating scholarship and practice-based research.
The text will outlines the intersectional feminist agenda, which MAI editors of both genders hold dear, and how that translates into the journal's evolving operations, vocabulary, rationale, educational hopes and global outreach
Media Richness in Metaverse: The Effect of Immersive Emporium on User Presence and Enjoyment
Full text linkThe purpose of this study is to examine the effect of media richness in shaping user presence and enjoyment within the immersive metaverse environment. With a focus on the impact of metaverse emporium on user experience, this research explores how multisensory cues, spatial design, and avatar embodiment influence communication and interaction and user experience. A user experience questionnaire on a Likert scale, followed by user interviews, measured the effect of metaverse content on Pakistani users. The immersive emporium in the metaverse was compared through two modalities: a mobile-based 360 virtual interface and VR headset. The research illustrated how intuitive, accessible design increased the acceptance of immersive technologies within the Pakistani context. The findings contribute to discourse on digital equity, emphasizing that high-quality immersive content can be delivered through economically sustainable design
Polygon Palm for Piksel25
No full textPolygon Palm for Piksel25 extends Polygon Palm’s Time Space Transmat Wrong Biennale embassy exhibition into Piksel’s hybrid ecosystem, where translation, teleportation and transmogrification across media expose the creative potential of glitch—the revealing errors that surface when signals cross between times, spaces and substrates. Rather than reproducing a web exhibition in a gallery, the project turns Piksel’s IDLE into a live transmat: an infrastructure where online actions, code processes and audience presence actively shape the physical environment and return as data to the virtual space.
Across practices spanning networked performance, computational voice, liminal portals, critical mis-use and post-digital fabrication, the participating artists articulate how mechanic and computational translation mutates meaning. In IDLE, these works become processual nodes: streams, patches and interfaces that can be tuned rather than simply viewed—foregrounding error, drift and latency as aesthetic method. This curatorial approach aligns with Piksel’s commitment to artistic and technological freedom and its hybrid model for co-present online/onsite collaboration.
Within the IDLE system, Time Space Pixel Transmat will be reimagined as an experiential network of glitches — a living feedback system between physical and virtual environments. Works like Yichu Li's RAVE CINEMA (https://www.yichuliart.com/general-3) will be reimagined and teleported through the IDLE system. The works will not appear as fixed installations, but as temporal crossings, where data, light, and sound leak between platforms. The exhibition invites the audience to move fluidly between the online and physical spaces, encountering disruptions, echoes, and distortions that reveal the underlying fragility of technological mediation.
Conceptually, this reconfiguration turns IDLE into a site of temporal interference. The online exhibition — once static and screen-bound — becomes embodied, unpredictable, and sensorial. The audience is not positioned as a passive observer but as an active participant in a transmaterial performance: their movements, clicks, or signals create ripples through both the physical gallery and the virtual salon. In this way, Time Space Pixel Transmat explores the aesthetics of miscommunication — where meaning emerges not from perfect transmission, but from its collapse and recomposition.
The technical realisation will use open-source and freely available tools that complement this philosophy of openness and error. Generative visuals and data streams may modulate projection, sound, and light within Studio 207, while responsive algorithms link remote participants to real-time transformations. Fragments of 3D data, sensor feedback, and live code will blur distinctions between the local and the remote, the virtual and the material.
For Piksel’s audience, the experience becomes one of embodied dislocation — a sensation of occupying multiple realities simultaneously. As signals falter or overlap, participants witness technology’s imperfections as acts of creation, turning malfunction into presence. Time Space Pixel Transmat thus becomes not merely an exhibition but a distributed act of becoming, performed through the networked poetics of translation, glitch, and time.
Time Space Pixel Transmat — Polygon Palm for Piksel25
Curated by: Tom Milnes
Hosted by: Polygon Palm - www.polygonpalm.com
Part of: The Wrong Biennale – Time Space Transmat
Artists: Joseph Farbrook, Yichu Li, Kimberly Lyle, David Lisser, Micheál O’Connell / Mocksim, Tom Milne
Instructions for Angels
Full text linkA satirical poem offering notional instructions and encouragement to divine beings
Riff Monster vs The Wigout
Full text linkCD review of Catching A Fire, Elephant9 with Terje Rypdal (Rune Grammafon
The Attune project: Podcasts 2021 - 2025
Full text linkThe Attune project: Understanding the Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Adolescent Mental Health
Throughout the 4 year project we captured several podacsts from young poeple, researchers, communities and organisations all offereing their perspective on this topic.
The ATTUNE research collaboration explored the individual, environmental, social, economic, educational and geographical factors that influenced young peoples’ mental health.
ATTUNE aimed to understand the pathways of risk and resilience from Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) to adolescent mental health outcomes. To do this, it brought together a national consortium of academic, public sector, voluntary and community sector, and charity partners. The project used participatory, arts-based research methods alongside epidemiology and health economics.
ACEs are highly stressful or traumatic events that can have a lasting impact on health and wellbeing throughout a person’s lifetime. Almost half of young people experience at least one ACE, and one in ten experience four or more. Examples can include abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, substance misuse in the family and discrimination.
Through creative, co-designed research activities with young people, ATTUNE uncovered new insights into how these experiences affect mental health, and how support services can respond in ways that young people find meaningful and validating
LUSITANOS LET’S GO! From Banal to Joking Nationalism in Portuguese Esports Spectatorship
Full text linkThis study examines the role of national identity,
humour, and competition in esports spectatorship, focusing on
Portuguese viewers during the Overwatch World Cup 2023
Qualifiers. Using thematic analysis of Twitch chat and a postmatch
interview, we explore how nationalism manifests in ironic
colonial nostalgia, trash talk, and sportification. Viewers adapted
football culture, invoking Cristiano Ronaldo’s name and demanding
a national anthem moment. Additionally, critiques of
nepotism emerged, highlighting community concerns over team
selection. Findings suggest that esports spectatorship serves as a
space for performative identity negotiation, where historical and
cultural references are repurposed for competitive engagement.
This study contributes to discussions on digital communities,
nationalism in esports, and the intersection of sports culture and
gaming, offering insights into how audiences create meaning in
competitive gaming environments
Unsafe spaces: Coercion, control, and the domestic in the ghostly Gothic tales of E. Nesbit
No full textAlthough for the most part ‘sunny’, even E. Nesbit's famous children’s books include themes of loss and grief; families are torn
apart, ghosts return, and supernatural beings cause mischief. But
it is in her short supernatural tales that things turn really dark –
returning ghosts (both male and female) demand sex; there are
appalling ghostly rapes, and terrifying abductions. These terrible
stories of violence and revenge focus on relationships, marriage,
and the family. They are very personal stories of what can happen
when the familial ‘utopia’ shatters. This chapter focuses on these
explorations of the home and the family; on gendered relationships and an idealised version of patriarchal contro
Red Lake / Black Mine Book
No full textRed Lake / Black Mine is a new multimodal work by composer and visual artist Will Parker - formed by walking, digging and collecting in an area of inland Cornwall referred to as the ‘Carnon Valley’. A trapezoid of land enclosed by the A30, A39, A390 and A393 roads. The title is derived from Baldhu (translation black mine) and Wheal Maid, a former arsenic and copper mine, where the toxic drainage water has formed a crimson lake.
The work exists in correlative forms: album, book, and performance. A contemplative communion of sounds, images and text, interwoven from conversations, police reports, buried books, newspaper articles, historical sources and personal journals. Unearthing narratives, abstracted themes and emotional forces.
Offering a delicate, fragmented sound world with an intense ASMR-like proximity to the body - Red Lake / Black Mine is a confluence of diverse sonic materials. Modular synthesis meets environmental sounds, deconstructed hymns, opera and VLF recordings of pylons