Program
12 Apr 2017 19:00 - 22:00
Thanatopolis II: An Evening With AutopsiA

***New CD presentation – Music and Films. Lecture by Alexei Monroe – Book by Divus*** Aesthetic coldness and distance, pseudo-bombastic music, elitist hermeticism. The characteristics and elements of Autopsia’s fascinating and troubling works might appear out of time and place in the 21st Century. Are they any more than reminders of distant, foreign nightmares that we can safely forget?
In
fact, the troubling, ghostly forms in Autopsia’s work bear witness to
the constant potential for catastrophe and collapse. Such reminders are
ever more needed and ever less welcome within our actually-existing,
privatised, technological utopias. If the “20th Century
is Dead”, is the 21st Century [Living] Death? What does Autopsia, the
most cryptic of industrial art projects, with its origins in London, its
formative years in ex-Yugoslavia and more than two decades of work in
Prague, contribute to 21st culture?
Thanatopolis is the first
book in English to analyse the work of the secretive entity known as
Autopsia. Why does such deliberately uncommunicative work matter at this
time? The West is shaken by post-factual politics and the link between
technical artefacts and technical knowledge is breaking. Knowledge is
suspect and blind automation is innocent. Are Autopsia’s frozen visual
techno-archetypes now more potent that they were? Perhaps now they are
not some quaint, admonitory commentary on Yugoslavia’s terminal
hyper-modernism, but also on our own, designed-in, always-already
obsolescent culture and its simultaneous attempts to induce and to
defeat death. Thanatopolis.
Alexei Monroe is a writer and
cultural theorist specialising in industrial culture, the art and
culture of former Yugoslavia and electronic music. Author of
Interrogation Machine Laibach and NSK (MIT Press, 2005), editor, State
of Emergence (Ploettner Verlag, 2011), co-editor, Test Dept Total State
Machine (PC Press 2015). Programme Director, First NSK Citizens’
Congress, Organising Committee Member, 2nd NSK State Folk Art Biennale.
divus.org.uk | shop@divus.org.uk
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Venue:
I K L E C T I K, Old Paradise Yard' 20 Carlisle Lane, SE1 7LG London
Date
12 Apr 2017 19:00 - 22:00
Organizer:
Czech Center is a coorganizer of the event