objects and landscapes -- 23/03/2026

A few years ago my partner Agnes and I read a text by the game developer Stephen Gillmurphy called “personal aesthetics”, in it he describes the ending of his game “magic wand”. The whole game you pursue the titular “magic wand” and once you get:

“it makes a weird noise and then the world is changed, in a way it’s hard to read as good or bad. Certainly more cluttered - the plains outside are now covered in debris, gigantic heads and hands, pictures of the demiurge. there doesn’t seem like much to choose from between these places, so maybe the only thing you’ve gained is to have seen them both, the old and new, and have the old slide a little further into memory, the secret alchemical medium that can absorb all contradictions.”¹

Through this, we began discussing the idea of a landscape of desire², a framework to refocus and counter the act of constant pursuit heightened by capitalism. The landscape of desire was a way of us mapping our wants in relation to their abstractions. Formatting desire as something multifaceted, seeing it as something that is never just singular, but instead sits in a wider context.

a photo i took back in march 2025 on a gorgeous day down in Surrey

Take eating out. The desire to eat out, even when related around a particular dish or cuisine, is never just a desire for that particular food. Maybe you could be really craving ginger scallion tripe, but you never just stop at one dish. Going out for a meal is not just about the food, it’s the fantasy. You are cooked for, served food, you may have a drink, there may be others around, you are hosted, its a web of different needs and wants being met through the pursuit of a singular object.

you always add more dishes. please let me know if you have any notes on our order

Recently, I saw the Adam Curtis documentary “The Century of the Self”, which describes the relationship between psychoanalysis and mass-comsumptive capitalism. He attributes the link between luxury goods and objects of desire to the work of Edward Bernays, using psychoanalysis to market objects as cultural signifiers. While I question the simplicity of his framing, something in this documentaries framing of objects as points of desire, helped me formulate a kind of adversary for our ideas around the landscape of desire. Thus I began thinking about the object of desire.

In a series of lectures / workshops I’ve been giving recently, looking at my practice, technology and social art, I’ve felt weirdly protective over the prospect of pruning a particularly dense section talking about authentic desire³. I’d first formulated the bones of this while talking on a panel for my friend Wassim at Newspeak house in 2025. I was trying to get at what felt libratory and revolutionary in the illegibility of transness, tying the act of remaking one’s gender, how that renders you illegible to certain bureaucratic systems, to its roots in breaking down social archetypes. I wanted to make the point that capitalism is very good at repackaging revolutionary acts in a way that allows it to profit from these revolutions, but struggles fundamentally with certain aspects of trans identity. There is an incompatible tension and in that tension it must jettison core parts of these identities, otherwise it could threaten the system as a whole. To truly consume and repackage transness through the lens of capital, the whole system would have to shift into accommodating new forms of bureaucratic processes that would alter capitalism⁴ away from its core motives. To truly integrate trans people into contemporary society, we would have to remake so much of modern bureaucratic processes, contemporary psychology, understandings of personhood, infrastructure (such as bathrooms, bathhouses, gyms), marketing trends and more. Transness represents a schism from this social order, its a break and movement away from social pressures and placements, to pursue a more authentic relation to the self and thereby desire. This isn’t to say capitalism can’t find a way, I’m almost certain it can, or that it has tried and somewhat succeeded, but instead that it struggles to digest all of it. It can’t and looking for why it can’t feels politically important.

So in formulating this argument towards authentic desire, I looked at the sale of celebrities as emulatory status symbols. Forms of celebrity have been around for far longer than the smallest instincts of capitalism, but I wanted to draw the relationships around celebrities, products and desire, specifically focusing on what we seek from these relationships. What is it we truely want when we say, for example, that we want to emulate and be like writer, cartoonist and artist Tove Jansson⁵. What am I after from this relationship? Surely I don’t want her well documented issues with her father, the difficulties of pursuing queer love in 1950’s Finland or her struggles to prove herself as more than just a cartoonist. No, if I look deeper, I want to emlate her wit and intelligence, how accessible and earnest she is in communicating complex themes, always relating them to personal moments and everyday life. I want an imagined version of her relationship to living, how she travelled and loved. I want to live through the photographs of her and her partner Tooti, swimming in the sea and off travelling the world. I don’t want her life, I want my own to emulate something of the landscape of hers. A long term loving and consistent partnership, travel and excitement, an imagined confidence in my own ideas and capacity to communicate it through the world of the everyday. Through this analysis, I can draw a more authentic relationship to what it is that I truly want from the world, and open it up to contain something more.

something in this image calls to me

Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s infamous framing of the Body Without Organs, we can better unpick these objects for what they are. The Body Without Organs⁶ suggests a container with no directly drawn connections, but that allows us to group things by their abstract relations. I find it a useful theory for grouping information by vibe, to then try understand why a set of things may all encompass a certain type of energy. Capitalism puts a heavy emphasis on the object as medium for self, hence the particular emphasis on selling lifestyles in the advertisement of say, a soft drink. This isn’t a particularly original analysis, but when we use the Body Without Organs as a tool to explore the relations that this object has (particularly in relation to ourselves), we can see past the advertising to look at the desire itself, as something multifaceted and nested in a landscape and from there ask why. You don’t want a soft drink, you want the feeling of a sunny day, in all the possibilities that it entails.

i hated this advert growing up but its an easy example for those who have seen it

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, sexiest philosopher of the mid 1900s, Paulo Freire sketches the outlines of a socialist society predicated on conflicts of desire. Here he draws attention to the ways that a freedom to desire, unbound by constraints of capitalism, is central to a free society. However conflicts are rife when authentic desire is present, these frictions and conflicts being at the centre of the collective and collaborative, with navigating them is a core concern of living. A pre-conceived idea of a socialist system leaves out the requirement of balancing and being open to the bubbling and frothing currents of collective desire. Its non-linearity, its lack of rationalism and its unpredictability mean that the future must forever be foggy and unclear and that giving it a set destination represents a form of control. Socialism is about fostering productive conflicts that allow for growth and learning, whereas fascism tries to strangle the future into the imaginary ideal of progress.

I like to think of this framing of the future as a landscape of desire, one where through the desire for something singular, we can encounter hidden and latent desires in its path. Desires that are unpredictable and complex, even in conflict with one another, and thereby bring about a world that has room for the uncertain or fuzzier connections. A world that, more importantly, holds space for others’ landscapes of desire. Rather than situating these things within objects, competitively sought after and undernourishing in their acquisition, we can look at the wider whole that they represent, making it easier to place them among others. To come back to my earlier analogy, if everyone is arguing over what restaurant to go to, it’s easy to lose the fact that what everybody truly wants is to go to a restaurant.

23.03.2026 - objects and landscapes

kat

why a laptop orchestra? -- 18/03/2026

I worry that discussions of technology, particularly laptops or personal phones, have distilled to lean closer and closer to an analysis of online infrastructure, than anything direct relevant to the machines that enable interfacing with it. Yes there is a lot of talk around Data Centre’s and the broader concerns around large scale technological infrastructure but the smaller elements seem to have gotten a little lost, past a general feeling of phones bad, because social media bad, because internet bad. This isn’t wholely the case, Dani Ploeger’s look at the infrastructure of E-Waste¹, Xiaowei Wang’s coverage of Shenzhai technology² and other hardware focused narratives have emerged, but it seems to me that these occur often abstracted from one another³. The laptop is either physical or spiritual (ie. A method to access other worlds) but less often both. What would it mean for your digital companion, friend and enabler, to also have physical components and for those components to have morally deplorable origin points in the supply chain.

Groups such as SLOrk or PLOrk popularised the concept through questions of what the laptop can enable for performance, curating performances of works using sensors⁴ (famously old golf game controllers) as their interface with custom sound making software. As pointed out to me by a student recently, this can be seen as de-centring the laptop. Making it into a gimmick, which is quickly forgotten by the audience, in favour of the visual of just another electronic DIY instrument. That is to say, it’s not directly in conversation with what it means to make sounds with a laptop.

For a long while, I didn’t understand the draw of DJ’s, particularly those using a laptop as their method of performance. Standing gently bobbing, illuminated by their screen light, working as a glorified iTunes playlist, nothing seemed less inspiring of adoration. But I’ve calmed on this, mostly through the ways in which club music tends to restructure spaces, making the DJ a facilitator and the audience the performance. This critique is useful though in how it applies to a performance centring the laptop, how do you make a computer performance interesting? Visuals are one method. Shelly Knotts’⁵ performances circa-2017 exemplified the best of live coding for me. Displaying her terminal, there is a playfulness with which she goes about assembling her tracks, in full view of her audience, occasionally commenting with little humour-us asides, giving the performance a warm and personal texture. Putting emphasis on performance as a dialogue between audience and performer.

My answer, or more experiment with what makes interesting laptop performance draws on this. With a lot of my practice being in social art, a form of art making that centre’s human dynamics and relationships at its core, making performance participatory is a no-brainer, however this does pose challenges. How do you make interesting work that is accessible to everyone in its performance. Something that encourages and rewards curiosity, while doesn’t prove boring or one note for those that have more experience with either sound or coding? Also what are the politics of accessible art in relation to these questions? What purpose can they serve in an industry in which flashy custom software and technology is the desired focal point?

Here I want to draw on the study of anthropology, particularly on the etymology and philosophy of community building. When people think of community, they often default to identitarian definitions of community. An in-grouping, made around common ground within a group, eg. the trans community, the queer community, coding community, etc. It’s often an easy in-road to community building, find a common point and rally around it. However, this definition emphasises community as a ‘safe space’ for the people in it, one free from overt conflict or frictions. Those who know me particularly well will know that, while I see this form of communities purpose, I am skeptical of such arrangements. Likely from growing up within an identitarian grouping, my father having been in the military, everyone had something in common and that was fascism (while discussing this with my partner, she makes the important point that this is indeed the etymological definition of fascism, the bringing together of sticks). But beyond that I find these spaces somewhat boring, the lack of conflict feels unproductive and unsocialist to me. Adapting Paulo Friere’s thoughts on socialism⁶, true socialism exists within conflict, otherwise authentic desire is repressed. So I wanted to build the laptop orchestra around the broadest possible grouping of community, you don’t need to have any experience with coding or music to particulate, you could (and hopefully will) just stumble upon a rehearsal in the wild and take part. The only commonality is a vague interest in the events occuring. To paraphrase anthropologist Tim Ingold⁷ I hope to create “an unbounded collectivity formed of difference, where everybody can participate precisely because they have experience to share, because its not they are not the same as the other persons”. A community of productive conflicts, brought out within performance.⁸

For this type of accessibility, the laptop is kind of perfect⁹, its a fairly ubiquitous tool that a lot of people have access to, more so than a traditional instrument, and also channels some of the things I’m interested in when it comes to sound. I got my start making generative soundscape works using custom software - often working with dancers. I wasn’t particularly interested in traditional composition and even less so in mainstream music production techniques, but what did interest me was sounds relationship to time and determinacy, what does it mean to make music that never repeats itself? Or what does it mean for music to have no clear beginning or ending? So my work now is a kind of extension of those questions but moving away from digital forms and instead wanting to reflect generative forms of sound making but within collective structures, making indeterminacy out the conflicts of creativity and desire within a group setting. This is where I draw a direct relationship to the Scratch Orchestra¹⁰, in its attempt to make accessible and generative compositions for groups.

It’s also easier than ever to be forever listening, in fact it’s encouraged, Liz Pelly draws attention to this in her book Mood Machine examining the way Spotify funnels you into endless playlists to accompany almost any activity. A lot of this draws from the “Lo-Fi Beats To Study To” trend of the mid 2010’s, ambient muzak that has no real beginning or ending but also very little texture. It’s often divorced from a relationship with time, something I would arguably say is key to sound as a medium. It is forever in some form of conversation with time. Fine art and photography, while having some relation to time, are forever an expression of the past, whereas sound is strictly in its present. Therefore playing with that present, the tension of an anticipated or unexpected ending, drawing the boundary line of when a work begins, become interesting dialogues with the medium itself. However, this gets muddled in society ruled by the forever expanding playlist, that simply finds more to play to you once you have already listened to everything it contained. I’m rambling but I guess the point I wish to make is that there is a difference between asking questions around time and obfuscating a relationship to time, I am more interested in the former than the latter.

A lot peoples imagery around computers lingers on the image of a solo user, interacting with their computer in isolation (be that social isolation or physical isolation). This is common as they are devices built for a one user, with limited capacity in traditional use for multiple interactions simultaneously from different participants. At a push LAN parties break this portrait, but even then, they still often focus on each participant having their own individual device for participation. Pulling out of this image to settle on the social relationships surrounding it feels important.

There is a million answers to why a laptop orchestra particularly, but these are just some of them.

18.03.2026 - why a laptop orchestra

kat

hunger -- 23/02/2026

Hunger asks audiences to relationally understand robotics through the lens of desire and desperation. At its centre is dog, an AI-powered humanoid robot without ocular sensors, that uses a localised mesh network and olfaction to conceptualise physical space and boundaries. Initially, dog will twitch and gesture, as it processes its environment, slowly building a relationship to both the space and also its audience.

Dog will then begin patrolling the crowds, weaving through the tiered seating of the audience, over bags and boots, alternating between crawling and standing upright, inspecting its audience and demonstrating a robotic capacity to see beyond the visual, navigating through smells and physical touch. Upon selecting a participant, they will be ushered to the central platform. Actors that refuse this call may be forced through pacification, inviting audiences to witness the struggles of robotics through forced participation.

Once on the stage, actors are encouraged to cook for dog, thus helping it understand intimate forms of human communication through taste and scent. If the meal is satisfactory, dog is then programmed to replicate the meal through olfaction alone, recreating the exact smell of the dish. Actors then must serve the dish to other participants, bringing dog into rituals of collective caretaking and learning.

The piece evokes lost human traditions of care, through the mediums of data and exchange, replicating and entangling participants in networks of responsibility and compliance through compassion.

23.02.2026 - hunger

kat

family mart -- 27/01/2026

my dad told me he was dying. not in any way thats urgent.
more a shorter life expectancy than planned.

i’ve been feeling numb since.

i write this while i’m eating noodles, so my metaphors are food based and the feeling looks like the broth. slightly cloudy but mostly transparent. the occasional flash of “my father will die soon”, followed by nothing.

my instagram keeps recommending me this video of jake gyllenhaal, talking about his wife dying in an accident. he confides that he never truely loved her. it then cuts to him demolishing a kitchen. i didn’t really understand it the first few times it played but now i understand it. it’s about the broth.

a few days ago at a family mart, the clerk stopped me before i left. she ran to the aisle and grabbed a pack of plasters and took my hand. applying it to my cracked knuckles she gives me a little smile and says “better”

i keep thinking about this moment.

when i came back a few days later, she called me over and took my hand again to check on it. she beamed back at me “better”.

the interaction has made me afraid to go near the shop again. like in some way she cares too much. i worry i’ll cry if i see her.

27.01.2026 - family mart

kat

speaking to the soldiers -- 10/01/2026

When I was 18, I got a job on a military base (the prior Military Hospital at Headley Court), working between the kitchens, cafe and bar area. I grew up around this type of infrastructure and so found it easy talking to people and sharing experiences. There is a barrier of jargon between forces personnel and “civvies” as they call them. It can be hard to understand the cultural references, talking points and hierarchies of those structures without having been embedded in it.

Part of this embedding took place throughout my childhood, growing up inside of and around the infrastructure of military bases, both in the UK and outside of it. But this also came about through my own reckoning with my place inside of it. At 14, I was sent to a military boarding school as part of the Continuity of Education allowance. A structure that provides large subsidies to forces personnel sending their children to one of these schools, ostensibly to allow for a more stable upbringing. In reality, it seems more of a somewhat self serving exercise in carrying on the British tradition of the “military family”. Where service is passed from generation to generation and provides candidates already indoctrinated and primed with an understanding of its social intricacies.

While at this school I had a crisis of faith, feeling pushed to take seriously the implications of a proposed military career that had been pushed on me from an early age. I became fascinated with the Iraq War and its ripple effects. Part of that helped me understand that I couldn’t bring myself to find peace with a life that involved killing (or adjacency to it). It terrified me (and still does). Through that, I became interested in alternative structures and social models, leading to an early identification with anarchism, but thats irrelevant to this story. Beyond the fear, I honestly don’t know what helped me make that choice. It worries me that I don’t know, but I am grateful to my past self for making that choice.

Recently, I’ve been considering my placement along this political borderline. Raised in the military’s strange form of socialist-fascism (with its co-operative stores, general community centred structure and politics of mutual aid) and my current identity as a anarcho-socialist with strong left leaning beliefs. I still know some people adjacent to the military. I still love some people despite that adjacency. But I’m struggling with that love and how to express care and love, while feeling a deep requirement to beg for them to understand the harm their adjacency enables.

I felt inspired recently by the work of the Avant-garde artists of the 1960s-70s in their attempts at trying to reach and converse with soldiers carrying out colonial wars. Their attempts to use empathy to explain how they were also suffering through the horror they were being shipped off to carry out. Their convictions in trying to speak to those in our society so desperate that they turn to power and killing to make a living. How do you tell them that there is another way. That there must be another path forward. That the community they seek can exist outside of these boundaries.

While I worked the bar at Headley Court, I spoke often to soldiers who were awaiting discharge, both from the hospital and the military in general. Their safety net had burst. Most of them hadn’t even seen active conflict, simply had an accident while carrying out their day-to-day and were now facing their entire life structures crumbling around them. They felt abandoned and scared. They had come to the military as a place to escape poverty, provide a stable income and find a sense of belonging and community. Now all of that had gone, many seemed to realise how unrealistic that promise was in the first place. I couldn’t help but feel their grief with them.

I particularly remember two guys who were there almost everyday. They’d met through the hospital but had a care for one another that was touching. One man’s foot had been crushed while working in a supplies warehouse and through that, could no longer serve in the military. If I remember right, he had never once seen active conflict. I don’t know how the other man had sustained his injuries but they were more sever. He had a persistent tremor that had led to him needing crutches to walk, but also meant he could barely hold a drink without it spilling and struggled to speak. Both men were sweet and while one needed more help physically, the other clearly found a deep emotional comfort in their friendship. Coping with the anger and grief of his life collapsing due to an accident of his own making.

I don’t think a socialist revolution without a place for these people is truly socialist. We can’t simply convince or force people to conform to a model that we think will make the world a better place. To paraphrase Paulo Freire, socialism cannot (when carried out authentically) embody the dynamics of oppressor - oppressed that pressure freedom. So what of these peoples freedom. How do we work with and reach people in these systems, to collectively dismantle them? The horrors of the Iraq War linger in UK politics and despite anti-war efforts of the past 100 years (and longer!), there has been little shift in dismantling the military industrial complex. However, this does not mean there has been no victories in this fight. We don’t often get to hear of them but they are there. I had the lucky opportunity last summer to hear of the organising happening within BAE systems factories. Headway is being made, but slowly.

So how do we translate this to an actionable resistance against war. As observed by David Graeber and David Wengrow “Revolutions are rarely won in open combat. When revolutionaries win, it’s usually because the bulk of those sent to crush them refuse to shoot, or just go home”. The potential of this quote wells within me a deep desire for it to be true. I don’t believe in there being forgiveness for all acts, let alone the atrocities committed by soldiers working on behalf of their government. But part of me deeply wants there to be. Maybe selfishly, as part of my own entanglements. But also as an end to a cycle within which someone feels trapped by the horrors they commit. A hope that they can find a place outside of the shame and self hatred that conjures. Maybe socialism can try offer a place for this. Somewhere to find a sense of community away from the trauma bonding of a system that pushes you towards murder as a way of earning economic and social stability.

Often we can be quick to call for an abandonment of such people to the fates they have chosen. We all have a choice after all. But I think many haven’t truly held the weight of that decision. Felt the social pressures of being told that there is an easier route. On a day when I am less angry, I can feel some compassion and sadness for those that chose the other side. I don’t think they are truly happy with their choice either. At least, the statistics regarding mental health issues and suicide for those coming out of the armed forces don’t paint a picture of happiness and fulfilment. Doing some research around this, I came across the Veterans For Peace organisation. I want to direct people there for those looking to see good work being done in the space of de-militarisation.

In writing this, I’m not looking for or proposing a simple solution to this. It’s easy for me to advocate a position of extending compassion to those working as agents of fascist regimes (let’s be honest, that is what we are currently existing within) and be done with it. Their actions often don’t directly impact the quality of my life. It’s not my home they are bombing. But I also see a way forward in still trying to extend empathy and trying to reach those who fell into a darker path in life. If we want to end war, we have to imagine a place for those who took that path and must then come back from it. We have to help them come back from it. We have to care, even if it’s hard.

10.01.2026 - speaking to the soldiers

kat