Kettlebell History Goes Back Much Further Than Russia (2016) Nick English.
In 1981, The Official Kettlebell Commission was formed [USSR], which advocated (but didn’t enforce) mandatory kettlebell training for all workers.
Felkar more or less agrees that Pavel’s marketing was extremely influential in spreading kettlebells as a fitness tool. She likens him to Eugen Sandow: he wasn’t the first guy to excel at bodybuilding, but he was a marketing genius who lay a lot of the groundwork for today’s world.
A civil servant missing most of his brain challenges our most basic theories of consciousness (2016) Olivia Goldhill.
Darwin Grosse’s Art + Music + Technology feels like an interesting podcast series. Listened to the chat with Michael Hetrick. Fun and nerdy.
Guerrilla Public Service Redux (~ 2017) a happy story of artist Richard Ankrom’s infra-art activities from 2001. A positive narrative. The same strategies of using uniforms to disguise guerrilla actions are still actively used.
Deep Decay – Into Diachronic Polychromatic Material Fictions (2017) Andy Weir. A difficult but informative text. Deep time Marxism feels like a fresh and fun approach/addition to the discussion. I should continue making melancholic downbeat electro (I’m dreaming of a drum machine).
As philosopher Ben Woodard has pointed out, the radical futurity invoked by the eco-crisis remains largely wedded to an anthropocentric horizon—understood in terms of “our children” and future generations. The deep geological repository, however, embodies not only a call to future generations, captured as a narrative of protection in the film [Into Eternity (2010)], but also a more radical confrontation with the death of human thought, and so its contingency alongside nuclear timescales.
If the more radical futurity of the eco crisis, alluded to by Woodard, can be understood as the further and scientific removal of the human from the centre of the universe, then the deep geological repository registers and deepens this germ of trauma.
The deep geological repository, as site of activity and its operational conditions, presents a specific kind of problem, one that necessitates what Jussi Parikka has called for in a media archaeology that he aligns with art practice, “the investigation of the mineral and substrate materialities as well as the materialities of production, management of global labour processes, and various other materialities that are always entangled”.
Art can be an experimental platform for building multiple “diachronic material fictions” that think the deep geological repository as futurology, excavating its political stake. From one perspective, this is important as artists are stakeholders in an ongoing industry consultation process, demanding critical reflection on what this could mean beyond the instrumentalisation of making seductively stunning images. From another perspective, our understanding of the “contemporary” of contemporary art is subject to traumatic reconfiguration, amplified alongside inhuman scale, refracted through multiple interface methods. Finally, developing the ideas of thinkers such as Parikka, who proposes “concrete and long-term investment in geological times of media as crucial for processes of subjectivation”, we can consider what it means to think production and circulation of these fictions as constitutive of radical, processes of subjectification, opened and cut across by deep time.