Johnny Golding

Healing in Human Silver Halo Seats of the Muses, a limited-run publication with texts exploring the ideas of ‘healing’ by cross- disciplinary contributors edited by Andrea Jespersen. It was published in connection with Andrea Jespersen exhibition Human Silver Halo at Medical Museion in Copenhagen (Denmark)

Friendship names the raw, sensuous, delicate, multi-dimensional, secret intelligence shared by sentient beings at the moment of their extended encounter. It requires nothing of identity politics, selfhood, social agency, though its very expression enables and indeed solidifies, all this and more. Unlike companionship, it generates a strangely emboldened shared knowing, a suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness without recourse to an old-fashioned ‘mastery’ or ‘authority’ or binaric split between ‘self and Other’. This is not a suspended aliveness as in ‘freefall’ or some kind of nihilistic relativism that generates an always-already ‘in between’ or ‘transitioning’ state of affairs. Leastwise it is ‘romantic’, though its irruptions have launched over a thousand delicious plateaus. Friendship requires a wholly different logic of senses, emotions, libidinal economies, calculations and intentions, closer to the Socratic parrhesia (truth) and its reinvention by Foucault in his Courage ...

Taken from the text: “Seduction is not a passive form of incitement.” M. Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 95-6 Toward the end of his third volume on the History of Sexuality, where upon he expressly links the “art of living”with the care of oneself, Foucault invites us to think through the moral and ethical implications of such a connection. It is a troubled connection, indeed, a dangerous path, and we are forewarned of the trouble ahead. “...[A]s the arts of living and the care of the self are refined,” says Foucault, “some precepts emerge that seem to be rather similar to those that will be formulated in the later moral systems. But one should not be misled by the analogy. Those moral systems will define other modalities of the relation to self: a characterization of the ethical substance based on finitude, the Fall, and evil; a mode of subjection in the form of obedience to a general law that is at the same time the will for a personal god; [...] a mode of ethical fulfilment t...

Asked as Guest Editor for the penultimate issue of parallax at the close of the century, Golding presented a question to 15 contributors: what holds together the social when the information age takes root? Curiously the answer came back as a kind of Code -- though not just 'any' code, but that of a Code inundated with a kind of ethicality one might call: honour. Taken from the Preface: This prissy little headmaster, this concept ‘honour’: so much the stuffings of soiled reputations or deeply-awaited recognitions. One might think nostalgically of a chivalry long ago past, or of the earnestly given ‘promise’ around the keeping of one’s word, action, deed. Whatever else it seemed to be, it seemed highly unlikely that it was anything less than a moral indictment, plea, command, say, to ‘work hard’ (puritan version), have ‘good manners’, to love, obey and respect (God, family, good government), remain neat and tidy, keep the nose clean. (True, it seemed often to maintain strange ...

Invited artist/poet on the occasion of the 100 years of suffrage for women in Austria, this was a performative poetic read at the Austrian Cultural institute amidst an extended exhibition (sculpture, painting, video, photography, sound works). The piece was read in the virtual dark, save for a light on the grand piano. Earlier version "Anatomy Lesson: An Open Letter to Sigmund Freud (in Friendship) held at the Freud Museum as part of the Solitary Pleasures conference (April 2019). In this poetic, the Rude Girl letter was read aloud to the piano, the latter of which was standing in for Sigmund Freud. Sold out.

A one-week residency and intensive workshop by Prof Golding on her research into radical matter, culminating as Keynote for Uncertainty. Invited by the Programa de Artes Plasticas Universidad El Bosque and the Universidad los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.

The image of thought, indeed thought ‘itself’ has endured a long and somewhat tedious history, with debates circling around the role of representation, reason and rationality.3 Those debates have often infected the very terrain of the photograph (and, for that matter, image) and have done so to such a degree that often image is either presented as the metaphysical god-fairy of the photograph, with the latter acting as documentation for, or representation of, the former; or, as more recently the case, where skill inherent in the world of imaging is left to one side or ignored altogether. This chapter will offer a completely different approach. It begins by staging a minor narrative of our contemporary world in the form of ‘Alexa’. It then double-strands that narrative with, on the one hand, an interlacing of Newtonian physics, modern political thought and the importance of ‘exit[ing]’ for the material-conceptual development and inhabiting of what it means to be human – and indeed, what society might become, in the best sense of community, possibility, invention, democracy. On the other hand, it draws upon an interlacing of post-Newtonian physics, big data, artificial intelligence and the importance of ‘encounter[ing]’ in order to develop a wholly different picture of what it means or could mean to be human, and with it, what it means or could mean (ethically, politically, democratically, substantially) to be alive in this wildly shifting world of bots, conceptually activated vectors, multidimensional time warps. The chapter ends with a provocation: that these double-strands have something in common. It is the quiet, but no less peculiar, use of an old logical tool called the counterfactual, an alt-objective x from which the entirety of the philosophical, aesthetic, ethical and/or political scaffolding unfolds.In the former case, that is, in the pre-information age of industrial capitalism ‘case’, one could name (and did name) this counterfactual ‘the state of nature.’ In a postmodern age of complexity, derivatives, big data, distributed and artificial intelligence, that is, the post-Newtonian, neo-liberalist ‘case’, that counterfactual could be named, and is named: the photograph.

Reviews Panel: Allan Graubard, Amy Ione, Anna B. Creagh, Annick Bureaud, Anthony Enns, Aparna Sharma, Boris Jardine, Brian Reffin Smith, Catalin Brylla, Cecilia Wong, Chris Cobb, Claudia Westermann, Claudy Opdenkamp, Craig Harris, Craig J. Hilton, Dene Grigar, Eduardo Miranda, Elizabeth McCardell, Elizabeth Straughan, Ellen Pearlman, Enzo Ferrara, Eugene Thacker, Florence Martellini, Flutor Troshani, Fred Andersson, Frieder Nake, George Gessert, George K. Shortess, Giovanna Costantini, Hannah Drayson, Hannah Rogers, Harriet Hawkins, Ian Verstegen, Jack Ox, Jacques Mandelbrojt, Jan Baetens, Jennifer Ferng, John F. Barber, John Vines, Jonathan Zilberg, Jung A. Huh, Jussi Parikka, K. Blassnigg, Kathleen Quillian, Lara Schrijver, Martha Blassnigg, Martha Patricia Nino, Martyn Woodward, Maureen A. Nappi, Michael Mosher, Michael Punt, Mike Leggett, Nameera Ahmed, Ornella Corazza, Paul Hertz, Rene van Peer, Richard Kade, Rob Harle, Robert A. Mitchell, Roger Malina, Roy Behrens, Sonya Rapoport, Stefaan Van Ryssen, Stephen Petersen, Valérie Lamontagne, Robert A. Vonlanthen, Wilfred Arnold, Will Luers, Yvan Tina and Yvonne Spielmann Art and the Senses

Melancholic and sickly, this is a tirade -- a manifesto -- on the political eventness the event called 'en passant', the subtle move of pawn capturing king. Of course the question remains: who is pawn, and with it, who is king (but, then if you're asking that question, it's only the king and his/her army who might be caught unawares who has the power and who does not. Pawns always know their place, it would seem. The question becomes, can one emerge out of the binaric divide (friend/enemy, pawn/king) or is this pathway only open to those artists and mid-class chess moves who defy the odds (and thus create new ones). Not just a 21st century issue.

Contemporary Philosophy and Aesthetics is the first of two core courses for practice-led art research in Radical Matter in Art Philosophy and the Wild Sciences (MA level). It delves into one of the main methodological approaches for modern and contemporary art / philosophy: namely, dialectics (be it historical, idealist, speculative or real).<br>Untimely Meditations, the second of the two core courses examines the broad approach of 'rhizomatic' or 'entangled' approaches. It will be uploaded separately. <br>All lectures are podcast and uploaded to YouTube or can be found at www.cfar-bcu.co.uk.

Professor Johnny Golding, Ph.D. holds the Chair as Professor of Philosophy in the Visual Arts and Communication Technologies (University of Greenwich, Old Royal Naval College, London). She is the Programme Director for the post-graduate MA/Ph.d. in Media Arts, a ...

The fourth in a series of four speaking/workshop events. An all day discussion with artists working at Spike Island, exploring my work on Friendship, encounter and relationships between art, aesthetics and contemporary materialism. This was an event linked to the concepts developed in the book chapter Friendship.

Nietzsche’s iconic Ecce Homo: (How one becomes what one is) maps out the answer by taking the reader on a kind of magical mystery tour ruminating between the paradox. With chapter headings such as ‘Why I am so Wise’ or ‘Why I Write such Good Books’ or ‘Why I am Destiny’, one begins to breathe in the method, the madness, the sheer intelligence of it all. Whatever else may be being said in that text and his others, one thing is certain: a sustained, crucial, well-directed attack on metaphysics – as idealism, dialectical logic, universalism, identity politics, morality and a whole host of other paradigmatic strictures – is necessarily, urgently, launched. Scroll forward more than 100 years since, and, coupled with the profound advances in socio-cultural norms from civil rights to feminism to gender equality, and beyond, as well as the profound advances in physics, from quantum to Higgs Boson; in mathematics from recursive algorithm to fractal imaginaries; in technology and new media (i...

This is the third meditation on the question of time, movement, metaphysics and art. It was enacted/installed/ read as part of a think-tank held at the Pacific Institute for Technology and Culture, Univ of Victoria where Professor Golding was invited June 2009. An earlier version was presented at the European Project for Poetics and Hermeneutics: Memory and Interpretation (The Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Skopkje). Published later in R. Garnett: Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis (Bookworks:2010). CF GALA reference.

The Assassination of Time re-thinks the relation of singularity and dimension to the question of the Chronos/TIme. In so doing, it offers a different trajectory to the restaging of method and epistemology to metaphysics as a leap out of Hegelian dialectics and the Heideggarian dwelling via Nietzsche's madman prophetic verses and Einstein's infamous equation. The piece originally was delivered at the Digital Arts Week in Zurich as Invited speaker; it was then reworked and staged with musical composition by S. Kennedy in Berlin, New York, Wisconsin and LA and recorded as an album release (Feb 6, 2010).

From publisher's description: "On The Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation" is a provocative and bold rethinking of photography in light of the digital transformation and its impact on art, culture and society. Addressing the centrality of the digital image to our contemporary life, the fourteen new essays in this collection challenge the traditional categories of photographic theory – that of representation, evidence, documentation and the archive – and offer a fresh approach to its impact on aesthetics, contemporary philosophy and the political. Drawing on the networked human condition of embodiment, social media and bio-politics, 'On the Verge of Photography' offers an invaluable resource for students of visual culture, researches in the field of digital imaging and artists working with new media. Rubinstein, Golding and Fisher co-edited this volume.

This was a two year collaborative research project funded by the Austrian Research Science Foundation [FWF-PEEK]. Data Loam was designed as a multi-faceted arts-based approach to one of the more intractable and urgent problems facing our contemporary digital environment today: the massive proliferation of data, and with it, a particularly nuanced set of complexities confronting our national libraries, universities, research labs as well non-academic cultural institutions and industry-oriented environments. The urgency of the problem circled around three areas: archiving (what to archive and how), accessibility (how to ensure that knowledges systems would remain, intrinsically, ‘open’ in the face of ever-increasing data) and experimental (enabling creativity, intelligence, curiosity, diversity and risk to remain as fundamental to our way of life). In so doing, Data Loam rejected the entrenched paradigm of indexicality as the only method capable of articulating the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘whe...

Classical metaphysics requires a concept of the ethical that belies or erases certain forms of truth-telling, often pulling the ethical in the direction of more sterilized forms of reason and rationality in order to invoke its universal applicability as a kind of ‘one-size-fits-all’ for any person, place, time, or thing. In so doing, not only does this tend to diminish or expunge the sensuous, carnal encounters of body and spirit, it pre-figures certain forms of courage, care and imagination so that the very core of what it means to make a community alive, responsive, and creative remains stuck in the old classical canons of thought and practice. In this way, the beliefs and ‘truths’ that tend to be reproduced serve only to strengthen the status quo’s status – somewhat of a problem if that status quo’s status is also mired in misogynist, homophobic, ethnic and/or racially divisive traditions. The 9th Technology of Otherness, building upon Foucault’s Courage of Truth, the last lectur...

Friendship is neither a gift bestowed with 'strings' attached; nor is it a 'lost object' of desire. If we re-think it in terms of a 'being-with-alone-together' - an odd connection can be drawn in terms of the seemingly sterile nether regions of 'machine learning', where 'zero' no longer denotes a 'nothing' and where '1' no longer denotes a 'positivity'. Instead, it requires taking seriously tools brought forward from the digital-computing world of machine learning, where the infinite terrain stretching in all directions (zero) is pock-marked by various segments (one's). This performance piece emerged after a sustained research into Friendship (published as a peer reviewed book chapter).

For the second of our Visual Cultures Lecture Series 2016/17, we are pleased to welcome Johnny Golding & Shumon Basar who will present their recent research and discuss The Post-Human & The Future of Technology. The conversation will be chaired by Tom McCarthy. The lecture is free and open to all - it will also be live broadcast by this is tomorrow.

Incisive and concentrated aphoristic journey challenging the listener/curator/ artist/curio to 'decide' when and how and where something should be placed - especially when that 'something' is not necessarily what the person invited to look may particularly wish to see. How does noe know what is being communicated by what; and when (if ever) does the 'political' enter the fray? Exposed to the early works of Enlightenment thinking, moving through Nietzsche's seering accusations of the 'The Madman' -- this is a 'philosophical installation' - interrupted by the brusque questions of Deleuze & Guattari, and the chorus of the two types of 'is' A re-staging of aesthetics, and with it, the age-old question: what does it mean to be human in an age of geneotpias and robotic intelligence.

Not for the first time in the history, theory and practice of art has the influence of science taken on the role of a strong though usually silent partner in the development of arts' material expressions, logics, representations, stylistics and/or practical-political pathways. But today something ground-breaking and certainly compelling in its raw intensity is occurring across and through the discipline, disrupting in its wake the very meaning of materiality, philosophy, aesthetics and indeed contemporary art practice itself. In direct opposition to Newtonian physics and its insistence on a conception of absolute space as inseparable from dialectical development, Diffraction, Entanglement and the 'Sensuous Unnatural’ Act(s) of Art seeks to explore the ephemeral skins of radical matter and its consequent requirement to re-stage aesthetics and contemporary art practices away from simplistic "scientistic 'rationality' v artistic 'irrationality'” binarisms, ...

Ana-materialism & the Pineal Eye provides a landmark interpretation of materialism, representation and the image using the Cartesian conceit of a pineal gland and its voracious sexually embedded appetites. Developing the argument via Georges Bataille’s re-invention of the pineal gland as an allseeing, all devouring, (pineal) eye, Johnny Golding borrows this move to envision a different analytic approach to digital forms of ‘matter’ and artificial forms of ‘life’. From her critical engagement with Bataille, Giles Deleuze and Judith Butler, Golding shows why the tools provided by these modern, contemporary and postmodern approaches to philosophy, image, the body, indeed representation cannot fully explore, let alone develop these new forms of reality/ies except by retreating into traditional binary divides between male and female, good and evil, mother/child and so forth. Anamaterialism and the Pineal Eye introduces a much needed understanding to oddly cathected sensualities, multiver...

This 'Radical Matter Lab' was a pilot pedagogical experiment to help MA students begin to understand the relation between contemporary philosophy, fine art and the 'wild sciences' (AI, robotics, meta-mathematics). Several labs took place at the RCA 2017-2018, with over 57K viewing on YouTube.

A detailed examination of Karen Barad's pathbreaking: Meeting the Universe Halfway and her Trans-Matter-Realities. Here the first forays into how a 'logic of sense' enables a practice-led approach to the intractable problem of corporeality at a time when the body seems the least likely to survive digital probity.

'To Tremble the Zero: Art in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction' is a philosophic, political and sensuous journey playing with (and against) Benjamin's 'Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. In an age inundated by the 'post-': postmodernity, posthuman, post art, ...

Incisive and concentrated aphoristic journey from Hegelian dialectics through the Heideggerian turn, via Nietzsche's 'The Madman' and Godel's uncertainty principles, restaging the political and with it, aesthetics, after Einstein's infamous intervention. Further interrupted by Deleuze & Guattari, the question is thus raised: when is something installed as 'fascistic'? and when can it be otherwise? As Golding states, 'it's a delicate game we are playing, after all'.

Radical Matter will offer a practice-led study in flow, energy, fluxus, artificial intelligence and dimension. It will take this flow, energy, fluxus, intelligence and dimension and run with it – in order to sniff out the sexual, the corrosive, the imaginary and the curious. It will do this in part by investigating the radical moves, initiated by Nietzsche (The Gay Science) and expanded upon by Heidegger (via his logics of ‘techne’). We will also take a look into Foucault’s use of parrhesia in his ‘The Courage of Truth’ (pleasure and the ethical-political), Golding’s encounter (erotic poetics/ politics) and Lyotard’s tensor band (libidinal economy). Running through this radical matter: Einstein’s notion of special relativity/ curved-time, Deleuze (logic of the senses), Deleuze & Guattari (the rhizome and the refrain), Haraway’s tentacular thinking, Barad’s response-ability via quantum entanglements and Guattari (complexity theory). Assuming we’re still standing, after all this, we’l...

This exhibition was the main artistic event of the project featuring more than 20 international artists, with over 500 in attendance at the opening night. It was the culmination of several events linked to the PEEK [Austrian Research Science Council] award entitled Data Loam, PI Martin Reinhart [University of the Applied Arts, Vienna] and Johnny Golding [Co-I, RCA]. The »Data Loam« exhibition was 'one of the best received shows in AIL history.' [see URL confirmations below]

At a point when Drone-Truth and its partners in crime, Post-truth, the Petrol-sphere, the Anthropocene, and the trust-no-one Bit-coin methodologies of money and of life, stalk the globe as if intractable expressions of well-being, ethics and righteousness, Golding offers a radical challenge. It requires a step away from object oriented philosophy, speculative realism, metaphysics and neo-liberalist frameworks. It requires a ‘step- toward’ what Golding names the zero zones. At its most strange, this is nothing more or less than a re- engagement / encounter with some rather exquisite new friends (and in some cases, some rather tarnished old friends): quantum mechanics, contemporary art, alchemy, feminism, erotic praxis, non-locality, tentacular thinking, enlightenment and the queering of sense. But most of all, it is nothing more nor less than a profound engagement with curiosity. Her challenge to ‘step-toward’ the zero zones of time suggest, at its most courageous: radical empathy in...

This published (3rd) meditation on 'Radical Matter' was developed over a two year period. Its first incarnation was given as Keynote at Modus Operandi: Uncertainty, International Conference at the invitation of Maria Angelica Madero, Directora Programa Artes Plasticas,
Facultad de Artes Universidad El Bosque and Carolina Ceron Castilla, Departmento de Artes, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Artes y Humanidades, Bogota, Colombia, 18-21 October 2016. It was introduced by the musical score/composition: Red Right Hand by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and delivered with the film Paris is Burning, Dir. Jennie Livingstone, (NY: 1991) in the foreground. A second version was subsequently trialed at the Lessons in Physics Conference, mac Gallery, Birmingham, 18 Nov 2016. This time in complete blackness with no musical or visual accompaniment, and an emphasis, in the main on Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’. Its debut at the Oxford University Philosophy Society and Ruskin S...

Johnny Golding is Professor of Philosophy & Fine Art, School of Arts & Humanities at the Royal College of Art. Golding’s research situates post-Newtonian analytics, contemporary poetics and the logics of sense as ‘radical matter’, an inhabited, art-led onto-epistemological encounter with the wild sciences (artificial and distributed intelligence, non-locality, imaginary numbers, undecidability). Recent essays and poetic installations include: Entanglement: Just Gaming, Zoomiverse, 4hour 30 min philosophic-artistic enquiry into artificial intelligence, warfare, fantasy, magic, curated by G Rae and A Nazo (London, 2020); ‘The Photograph of Thought,’ in D Rubinstein, Fragmentation of the Image in the Digital Age (2019); ‘Anatomy Lesson (an Open Letter, in friendship, to Sigmund Freud)’, presented at the Feud Museum and, slightly revised, at Nothing Less! 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage, the Austrian Cultural Forum (2019)EmbassyEntanglement: The Opera: Artificial Intelligence, Hive Time, ...

The image of thought, indeed thought ‘itself’ has endured a long and somewhat tedious history, with debates circling around the role of representation, reason and rationality. Those debates have often infected the very terrain of the photograph (and, for that matter, image) and have done so to such a degree that often image is either presented as the metaphysical god-fairy of the photograph, with the latter acting as documentation for, or representation of, the former; or, as more recently the case, where skill inherent in the world of imaging is left to one side or ignored altogether. This chapter will offer a completely different approach. It begins by staging a minor narrative of our contemporary world in the form of ‘Alexa’. It then double-strands that narrative with, on the one hand, an interlacing of Newtonian physics, modern political thought and the importance of ‘exit[ing]’ for the material-conceptual development and inhabiting of what it means to be human – and indeed, wha...

Attempting to share and account for what one cares for is fundamental both on a small and great scale. At a small scale, I use the word fundamental in the sense that in the absence of an ontological ground, to care and to try sharing / accounting for the focus of one’s care can provide that sense of meaningfulness metaphysics had given to many people. At a greater scale, to care and to try sharing / accounting for the focus of one’s care is fundamental because it operates as a cohesive force within a system, as gravity. When the focus of one’s care is effectively shared, relations become stronger than boundaries.

Melancholic and sickly, this is a tirade -- a manifesto -- on the political eventness the event called 'en passant', the subtle move of pawn capturing king. Of course the question remains: who is pawn, and with it, who is king (but, then if you're asking that question, it's only the king and his/her army who might be caught unawares who has the power and who does not. Pawns always know their place, it would seem. The question becomes, can one emerge out of the binaric divide (friend/enemy, pawn/king) or is this pathway only open to those artists and mid-class chess moves who defy the odds (and thus create new ones). Not just a 21st century issue.

Here Golding takes as her point of departure Foucault's well known 'Introduction to a Non-Fascist Living' in D&G Anti-Oedipus. Focusing on three of the main points in Foucault's piece (namely: (1) to get rid of 'Lack', 'Castration', 'Law of the Father' all of which have, for so long, hampered any real understanding of life in all its complexity; (2) to emphasize the nomadic, de-territorialising aspects of discursive formations, and (3) to remember that one 'does not have to be sad to be a militant, despite what one is facing is abominable'), Golding sets the scene to develop an ecstatic philosophy, one based on a kind of 'a-radicality' and 'multiple-singularity'.

... for if everything becomes 'slice' or 'relative' to the intensity of its minor attraction, how can one avoid bad faith, terror ... Contributors include: Jennifer Allen, Eric Alliez, Devrim Bayar, Dan Fox, Rainer Ganahl, Johnny Golding, Peter Osborne, Anne Pontégnie, Nina Power, Ralph ...

"In a meta-literal sense, the Pineal Eye is the mythical step-creature of that biological entity found in the brain; namely, the pineal gland.By the time Descartes got a hold of the gland, he refashioned it as a ‘synthesis’ of sorts – a double-helix synthesis which named the Pineal Gland as both site (as in terrain) and sight (as in vision-image) where the body and the mind’s ‘eye’ came together, and were enlivened, fashioned, quickened as it were, with a ‘soul’ or even ‘the’ soul. This was a place where memory, knowledge and the senses intermingled and became one; became one, that is to say, in the carnal, sexual-sensuous sense of the word; and, perhaps more to the point, became knowledge in all aspects of the intellectual and inventive, dipped in a wild, bio-degradable substance. This was not an innocent conceptual move. This paper explores that claim against the paradoxical backdrop of sexual imagination(s), multi-versal platforms and non-representational materialities otherwise called 'Ana-materialism'. "

The Colour of Time draws one’s focus away from the usual predicaments in metaphysical time (such as posing it either as ‘ahistorical’ or eternal) or as is found in more ethnographic permutations (as finite, visual, historical). By restaging time as a colour (say, strawberry, teal, blue-black), this Colour of Time attempts to move onto that more peculiar terrain of the