Joshua Whitaker, Artist Researcher in Residence: ‘Acid History‘
Joshua Whitaker, Artist Researcher in Residence: ‘Acid History‘
Joshua Whitaker (University of the Arts London, BSA Artist in Residence), ‘Acid History‘
Abstract:
‘Acid History’ is neither a record of psychedelic culture nor a catalogue of LSD experience. ‘Acid’ is deployed within the seminar, as Jeremy Gilbert has theorised it, as an adjective— a term that is both mystical in its practice and adamant in its materialism 1 . It suggests a methodology of history which employs ‘weirdness’ (in its oldest sense, of controlling fate, becoming, and bending) to radically rethink the
conditions of the past, and produce a future which escapes neoliberal politics. The seminar will link; St Paul, the Delphic oracle, fate, the Weird Sisters, puppets, collective joy, dance, and a ‘spirit of place’ using film, music, performance, and the conventions of a traditional lecture, as Avery Gordon puts it, 'to consider a different way of seeing, one that is less mechanical, more willing to be surprised, to link
imagination and critique, one that is more attuned to the task of "conjur[ing] up the appearances of something that [is] absent."'
