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The second day of A Special Form of Darkness will see afternoon sessions with philosopher Ray Brassier and an evening of performances from radical female performance artists - expect motorcycles, blood and screaming.

Saturday 25

The View From Nowhere – part 1

Ray Brassier & Thomas Metzinger

Saturday 25 Feb/ 2.30pm/ Day or Festival Pass

What if what we consider as our self is just a process: an evolutionarily solution whose efficiency causes us to think we experience reality, naively mistaking experiences as ours; if where we think there’s a ‘self’, really there is no one? Could this ‘no one’ could be constructed elsewhere, or manipulated? Can we trust what we feel? Philosophers Ray Brassier and Thomas Metzinger (he'll now be able to attend the festival in person) discuss how cognitive neuroscience is unlocking the physical basis of personal experience.

The View From Nowhere – part 2

Ray Brassier & Alexi Kukuljevic

Saturday 25 Feb/ 4.15pm/ Day or Festival Pass

We’ve privatised stress, pseudo-markets are apparently the only way to care for the sick or educate the young, we’re all self-surveilling bureaucrats who need to inject ‘creativity’ into our work …is there no alternative to the language of business? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures? And if they are, what capacity do we really have to act in a world? Two leading, radical philosopher/ cultural critics discuss how neoliberal capitalism has locked down social experience. Mark Fisher can no longer make it.

A further performance by Iain Campbell F-W

Rehearsal after Reflect Soft Matte Discourse

Malin Arnell, Clara López & Imri Sandström

Saturday 25 Feb/7.30pm/ Day or Festival Pass

Being a kind of re-enactment of the re-enacting of a super influential landmark of performance art (Gina Pane’s Discours mou et mat: an allegorical performance of alienation, abjection and the figure of the mother). What is to be gained from this repetition, this concern with her body, their body, our body? Is performance a means to think with the body?

Become What You Are

Dawn Kasper

Saturday 25 Feb/9.00pm/ Day or Festival Pass

Having something to do with "The evidently paradoxical task of 'becoming what you (already) are’” to quote Nietzsche; a series characters and the re-enactments of death scenes; slapstick comedy, monologue, props, make-up and a kind of live sculpture from an artist we’ve had described to us as the performance artist every performance artist in New York wishes they were (even if they don't know it).



Junko

Saturday 25 Feb/10.30pm/ Day or Festival Pass

Junko is one of the founding members of the defining Japanese Noise band Hijokaidan (who’s early take on Noise involved no small amount of disgust and bodily fluids), and owner of the most intense voice in music. Her solo vocal performances are incredibly musical and harrowing confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming.