Audrey Schmidt visits Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic at the gleaming corporate offices of Urbanomic.
https://www.min2.report/audrey-schmidt/amy-ireland-maya-b-kronic
♪ DJ Rashad “Let It Go”♪ ♪ Let it go, baby ♪ ♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ Let it ♪
♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ Let it go baby ♪ ♪ Baby ♪ ♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ Baby ♪ ♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ Let it go ♪ (keys clicking) (car door shuts) (keys jiggling) (footsteps pattering) (key turning) (keys clattering) – This is our huge
gleaming corporate office. And all of our like, overspill, think they call that. (papers rustle) Just got these in, Omnicide II, as well as some more Fang Noums, Pleromatica. (books thudding) I’m not gonna open those boxes but… 11th edition. (paper rustling) (Maya speaks indistinctly) – It’s like a map of the Ccru pandemonium,
mapped onto the mouth. I made. I was trying to work out how the names, the canonical names of the demons, related to an oral system of geotrauma. – [Amy] We’ve got like a
really great secret unpublished numogram. – [Maya] Yeah, you don’t show that. – [Amy] Made by Manuel Sepulveda. It might be a future project. We’ve been working on
doing screen prints of it. – Dan Mitchell is an amazing artist. Like whenever the tedium of the present and actuality really gets to me. I think he’s one of the
artists who I just look at his work and I’m like, “Yeah,
that’s the real virtuality. That’s what’s actually going on.” He made this magazine, which
I think it’s still continuing called, “Hard Mag,” but this
is the my treasured copy of the Plymouth Edition which
is all about seagulls. (paper rustling) So. That’s the reality. Giant gulls go on pornocide spree as Plymouth collapses into drunken ruin. (Amy and Maya laughing) Gull-unit. We got attacked by ’em
quite a lot in lockdown ’cause there was no chips around like there was no fast food
discarded on the street. So they’d just like swoop
down and take stuff from you. So you couldn’t go out
in the street with food. This is like some of my
sketches for Chronosis. So I would just like, make some sketches. I always wanted to be a comic artist. Like my ambition was
either to do airbrush, SF art, to make video games, to be a graffiti artist or to do comics. So like all the things that I wanted to do when I was a kid and doing Chronosis, I finally managed to do at least one of them. (paper rustling) There’s some demon sketches. (paper rustling) These are some other
pandemonium Ccru comics. (paper rustling) Unpublished. Hey look, that’s me, getting
beheaded when I was like, six or seven years old. – [Amy] Oh, that’s so cute. – So these two boxes here. This is basically how I
got Amy to move halfway across the world to come and live with me. (Amy laughing) – That’s not true. Came for more than that. – That’s what you say Oh, yeah. So that’s the programme
to Virtual Futures ’96 ’95 and ’96 is the conferences at Warwick. This is the one where like
the Ccru type people took over and I did this logo on
Corel paint or something. (paper rustling) Ian Hamilton Grant. Steve Metcalf who really exists. Kodwo. I remember when Kodwo gave this talk. A few people who came to the
conference like got kicked out by security for smoking and so the security like
upped their presence and I remember Kodwo was like
talking about Wu-Tang clan. So he did this talk where
he would like put records on and talk about them and he was like, “You can hear them inhale and exhale.” Sadie. At the end. Linda Dement, Pat Cadigan, Matt Fuller, Shu Lea Cheang. (printer whirring) Yeah. That was the year before
when it was like more like a actual conference. (paper rustling) This is like the original… There’s some Ccru, original Ccru stickers. When I first started making
this zine Collapse at Warwick, I just made loads of Collapse stickers and I’d just stick them up everywhere. I didn’t really know what I was doing but I just like made it and I think it’s just like
whenever I’m in a university, I just get so bored that
I wanna do something else. So. Yeah, I made three issues of this. So this is the original Collapse and we used to use, we
stole a photocopying card from the philosophy department and used that to print it. With a piece by Mark Fisher there. (tape screeching) (paper rustling) This was a talk that he did
at one of the Virtual Futures. Megadérive. – [Amy] This is Maya
giving a talk at Warwick, called Libidinal Ballistics. – [Maya] So cringe. – [Amy] Early ’90s. That’s cute and. – [Audrey] Adorable. – [Amy] This is Maya wearing
their silver cyber shirt reading The Critique of
Pure Reason in Zippy’s which is the Warwick bar. – Don’t dwell on this
too much with the camera. ‘Cause it’s embarrassing. This is the mark sheet
for my MA dissertation, marked by Nick, which
he signs it as Can Sah and that’s that symbol that was in That’s in Fanged Noumena. That’s copied off there. Yeah. This is the first Collapse with the cassette tape of Meltdown, which is one of Nick’s texts that we had. The Apple voice read over some techno. (printer whirring) You see my amazing… Photoshop airbrush work on the cover there like something. (paper rustling) (paper rustling) Oh, yeah, there’s a Disney
article in here as well. With David Cole. – [Audrey] Whomst by? – [Maya] By David Cole. He’s an Australian. – [Amy] Yeah, he was British. He lives in Australia. (paper rustling) – [Maya] This is fading a bit now. (paper rustling) Here, Fanzine of the Month in i-D. Not bad, it’s written by Kodwo. “It’s a great read for
renegade selectors everywhere.” (Amy laughs) He says. This is Mark’s, I recognise Mark’s paper. He had like this really
thin paper in his printer. Mark was one of the first
people I ever knew had a fax machine. For some reason, he
always had a fax machine in his house and he was the first person I knew who had a mobile phone as well. Early adopter. That’s another one of Mark’s. (paper rustling) That’s an article out of I think that was the
Sunday Times when they came and interviewed everyone at Warwick. This picture of Sadie with some
fibre optic cable on a roof. – This is so good though – This is another really good example from Machinic Reading. This is qwertopology. So it’s like you read the
chapters, chapter names. So these are the chapter names
from A Thousand Plateaus. You read them as vectors
across the keyboard. So one or several wolves goes like one or several. So it goes like around
the keyboard like that. So each any sentence or
word like creates a shape. So Nick presented this and
it was in this place called the Airport Lounge, which
is like a kind of corner bar in the Warwick Student Union. And I remember it was snowing,
there was like snow swirling around the corner windows and I just remember like
this kind of silence that followed Nick handing these out and presenting this new way
of reading A Thousand Plateaus and everyone likes doing
sidelong glances at each other. But I mean, it’s a good experiment. I don’t think qwertopology
took off that much. – Speed, Speed is a good one. Speeds. Intensities is pretty great too. That’s one of my essays. Kurtz-gradient: Bergson
and Ballard in the Jungle. This is basically like
what I’m still doing now. I still haven’t finished this project. (paper rustling) Yeah, this is one of my favourite
things that I’ve written. If infantilism was all
the past had to offer then psychoanalysis would be time travel and the future would be well balanced. Nick’s comment on this is, “Kurtz reference possibly remains oblique to those unfamiliar
with the Dogon complex.” Correct. Fair enough. Yep. – [Amy] One of the things
that I love the most about Nick Land is his
girlish bubble handwriting. Like, look at this b, so good. – “My Secret Diary”. It’s my script. This one. So, Virtual Futures ’95. This is the first time I did a talk with music and I like
put together this mix where all of the kind of cuts in the text were
synchronised with the tape so it’s got like instructions
about where to start. – It says at the end, the end it says, “We subscribe to the
Gilles de Rais formula, disproportionate squandering of resources for V Zoom play Megadeth.” Not even sure what that means. (tapes screeching) (Maya laughing) I don’t know what any know this means. I was gonna show you my first edition of Thus Spoke Zarathustra – [Amy] Oh, yeah. In the Nietzsche section. – It’s been a long time. There it is. Four volumes. I bought this when I was a teenager because Nietzsche was like the
first philosopher I got into and so, I couldn’t read German. I still can’t read German but it’s cool because it’s got like little
samples of his handwriting. (paper rustling) Letters to Peter Gast. All the signatures. – [Amy] It’s really spiky,
his handwriting, isn’t it? It’s kind of handwriting goals. – Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen I was very pretentious
at that stage of my life. But Nietzsche has been constant. Maybe I’m still pretentious. (Amy laughing) – You’re not pretentious anymore but you still like Nietzsche. I like Nietzsche too. Check this out. Oh, this is a game we made. (thudding) I think this is answers
and this is questions. It’s like a riff off on
cards against humanity that we made with the kids. Yeah. I didn’t believe in sad
mediaeval loot music. The best type of house in
the Sahara Desert is made of. A tennis ball with no sense
of decency or decorum. – [Audrey] What was the other
game you were telling me about the other day? It was like. – That’s another game we
made up in a similar session. So it’s like exquisite corpse where you have to do like draw a body. Everyone draws one section of
it and you can only see just like the very edge of what the
person before you has drawn and when you unfold it,
it’s like a weird monster or something but you have to,
instead of drawing a body, the idea is to draw like
a diagram or a flow chart. So you kind of like draw a
section of like, I don’t know, maybe machinery parts or something. You can label it, the next person adds like something to it without
seeing what you’ve drawn. And usually, we have like
two groups of people and at the end when you open the diagram before really having a chance
to absorb what’s on the page, one person from each team has to pitch it to a venture capitalist
as like a new process or a new invention. – This is one of my favourite. One of my favourite ones. You got the Shinazuku farm building there, which is subtended to the surface but then subtended downwards
the lowest level of the buildings. You’ve got this structure
which reaches all the way down into the egregious nebula and is irradiated by stiff radiation. So, if you’re sending out from the department for building a better future, all of these different
resources, unprocessed energy, partially processed energy, et cetera. You know the score or the the
dangerous waste flux is going here because that’s obviously,
there’s no response to that. But then you’ve got the
human compatible responses which suggests that communication
should be continued. The anomalous responses
which we have to be cautious about obviously and the
residual dust deposits just kind of channelled over to the side. So that’s that one. I’ve got a good Polish. No. Got a nice Czech magazine
which is all about chimneys. It’s chimney porn. (paper rustling) This is Divus, which is a printer and an arts kind of organisation
in the Czech Republic. He printed some of the Collapses. (paper rustling) They’ve got names. – [Audrey] Like a porno magazine. – Chimney Porn. And this was like one of
my first inspirations. Chris Foss. I still think he’s a great artist. He did loads of science
fiction book covers. I used to always want an airbrush and I never had one. I guess they’re obsolete now but it’s an early accelerationist
tendency, I think. It’s kind of like producing this extremely, high resolution shiny surface. And then Chris Foss was
also the artist who did the illustrations for the Joy of Sex. So he’s got like two different careers. One of my greatest triumphs is that I managed to secure a
Chris Foss painting to go on the cover of Reza Negarestani’s
Abducting the Outside, which still hasn’t come out but
it’s gonna be very exciting. – This is a, I think this
is a second edition copy of Fanged Noumena, second edition 2012. When I was doing my PhD, first discovered Urbanomic, got a copy of this. I have read it quite a lot. This is like, I guess just
typical of how I interact with books. Like, I really enjoy
writing all over them. Kind of use it as a like
externalised memory prosthetic ’cause I can always
remember what I was thinking about a particular text if I like can visualise my marginalia. I thought there was a code in this and I spent a long time
trying to figure out like if there was some logic to which particular
letters were capitalised. Running it through like the keyboard, running it through alpha-numerics, trying to like understand. But I think it’s just aesthetic. – You know that piece? It was in a catalogue essay
for Jake and Dinos Chapman. their first big show at
the ICA in London in ’94. And Nick still had his Amstrad at the time so he like printed this
out from his Amstrad and I had to retype it. (Amy laughing) If I remember rightly on an IBM ’cause Nick didn’t believe in IBM and PCs. – So you retyped. – When we did this book,
all I had was a copy of the catalogue and I had to retype it again. So I’ve retyped this twice. The guy who makes these
perfumes, Frederic Malle. This is a really interesting enterprise. So he started making perfumes
with the name of the perfumer on which before that had never been done. What would happen usually was
like a fashion house would get a perfumer behind the scenes
to formulate the scent and then they’d give it a name and it would go out in the
name of the the company. And accordingly, he’s like
designed the packaging so that it’s kind of like
a bookshelf, Musc Ravageur This is like the most incredible, this is the only perfume that’s given me like an erotic headache
just from wearing it. It’s really incredible. I did a lot of translation
for them as well. I translated some of
these texts on the back and I did a lot of translation
for their cosmetic, their bathroom range. I mean, it’s a really interesting industry because it’s moving constantly back towards nature and towards
like natural scents and then breaking them down, making them into like synthetic compounds, producing more intense or
different versions of them and then often it swings
back to being natural again. But these are kind of the best, some of the best perfumers in the world. And this one is Horizon. This is like an ’80s
one that smells kind of like airport, smells like a runway. It’s got a lot of this
kind of ozone scent in it. It smells like you’ve
been out on a hot day in some kind of traffic filled city. One of the things I’m most interested in is how people give names to colours. Because it seems like it’s the kind of, it’s a very specific
form of abstract thinking to try to attach language
to something like a colour or a scent. So I love these Essie ones ’cause they have these crazy names which aren’t all in the same register. Like mint candy apple is quite a direct but then Mademoiselle, this
is like an association with, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell exactly
what the association is. Keys to Happiness, that’s a really good colour. Resort Fling was one of my favourites, that’s kind of run out now. That’s another good pink, lovey-dovey. But some of these Chanel
ones have good names too. That’s OVNI, which is UFO in French. – We’ve got a small
collection of Mills & Boon because we decided we were gonna try and write some Mills & Boon fiction. We did start one called,
The Colours of Love. Our pseudonym was Mahogany Dewitt. But these are kind of amazing like they have a very strict formula and if you look at Mills & Boon’s website, it gives you very specific instructions for each different series. ‘Cause there’s different
like levels of titillation and like, if you kind of
get into this as a writer, it pays pretty well. So I mean– – Better than philosophy. – Definitely better than philosophy. The two kinds of book
publishing that like, you actually can make money in is erotica and children’s books. Everything else is pretty
much a [indistinct] – So that’s the areas
we’ll be moving into. – Yeah.
– In the future. – This is a series about a publisher and her androgynous boyfriend
and it’s just slice of life. Really cute. She gets really stressed ’cause she has to do lots of editing and then she hangs out with
her cute androgynous boyfriend in the mall. Just like real life. – Yeah, I like these ones where basically nothing much happens. This really. Kind of comforting, isn’t it? – Yeah, here’s some more Mills & Boon Temptation at His Door. Her one night proposal. What are you looking at here? – Well, what chapter is it in? Third eye. That third eye thing. I can’t remember which chapter. – [Amy] Third eye? – [Maya] Just look up. Have you got a pdf? – [Amy] Yeah. – [Maya] Is this what this. – [Amy] Am I looking up
literally the words third eye? – [Maya] Just look for the word eye because the two words are not together. – Oh. – Let me look at mine because
I’ve got that edition. Like, the question is how you deal with books in a way
that isn’t hermeneutic and interpretive which
always leads you back into the cycle of, the human meaning of symbols. How do you deal with a book as a machine? I was just reminded of this ’cause I’ve got Nick’s
copy of Drowned World here which I borrowed 20 something years ago, and I noticed it’s got
all these numbers in. So it is like these, one of
the things that we were trying to do was try to
understand ways of reading and ways of dealing with a book in which you suspend any disbelief as to what’s a valid way to read or what’s a valid way
of dealing with symbols. And you just basically experiment with different ways of processing text. This kind of, this particular edition and this book in general was just like a kind of object
of experimental study. Yeah, so I just wanted to show you like one of the interesting results that was arrived at in reading Faciality. If you take the last two
words of each paragraph, third eye will produce necessary
foundation through touch. We sense differential speeds to come. – That’s also a sentence that is in a piece collaborative piece
written by Anna Greenspan, Luciana Parisi, and Suzanne Livingston. This is the secret epic Ccru archive. One day, I will organise
and make available. – [Maya] Amy knows more
about the Ccru than anyone. – I got so much stuff here, but. – [Maya] More than the
people who were in it. – I definitely remember
more if you can say that. Amphibious Maidens, here we go. It was a collaborative text and they used that as like the hypograph. So you just saw the source. (upbeat music) ♪ Let it go ♪ ♪ Let it go let it go let it go ♪