One of the outputs from the residency I completed at King’s College London back in July was the below gif poem.

The goal of the project was to combine my colleague’s deconstructive critique and my creative processes in order to explore  the aesthetic construction of New Right politics.

Together, we worked on a number of texts taken from the online forum ‘reddit’.

What we found was that creative process can recover the ways in which speech acts such as the one below use aesthetics as much as politics as part of their rhetorical strategy.

Just look at the use of punctuation in the gif poem below. So much intentionality, so much desire is packed into that full stop. What the creative approach to the text allows is not simply an analysis of its function but a re-contextualisation of it within the gaze of the poem space.  The redacted text disturbs the full-stop’s normal function of ending a sentence, instead placing it in the middle of available language. Doing so triggers a moment of shift and flicker. The poem is an artificial intervention in the original text and yet it exposes its inner workings. Doing so raises further questions about the relationship between language and ideas: a key preoccupation of original text itself.

Like a prism, the poem splits and doubles language, asking more questions than it offers answers. In doing so, however, implicating the reader within the drama of aesthetics, it opens up new ways of engaging with the tropes and motifs of New Right thought.

The poem will be on display at The Exchange Gallery, London until November 2019.