The Experimental Essay

Is it possible to write a collective review of Insurgent Empire across the lines of colour and colonialism in our group? Perhaps, but this is not our agenda here. What we offer instead is a suite of vignettes that reflect on how we, a group of readers interested in understanding place and race, came together to think about the ideas in Insurgent Empire.

Inspired by the award-winning short film, How to Make Saltfish (2021), by Paul Bell and Stephen Pigram, the Posthumanities research group at Flinders University in Adelaide got to work writing this essay, collectively, more-than-humanly.

It’s all very precise; a kind of manual for essay writing from the unconscious. There are no visions in the dream; the words come in blackness with just the merest slivers of red and electric blue swimming somewhere at the edges.

Can’t Get You Out of My Head combines a novelistic structure with an essayistic style to create an oblique mode of visual storytelling, uniquely suited to the pause-and-repeat mode of web viewing.

Ghosts, which takes the form of a video essay-poem, takes the binary bomb gender reveal as a point of departure.

If the photograph, as Susan Sontag claims, is a note-taking form, then these images are notes on suburbia. Suburbia not just as a place but as a way of thinking and living, a lens through which we can see the world and understand our place within it; suburbia as a possibility.

Someone posted a recording from one of these events, and once again I was horrified; this time by the sound of my voice. It sounded so foreign to me. So Anglo-Australian. I had dropped my guard somewhere along the way and my Broken English had given way to an Art School Anglo-Aussie English with hints of Westie.

It might strike today’s readers as curious that for a period in the twenty-first century some people could work on their computers in any location they happened to choose, using a global computer network called ‘the internet’.

Dawn of a day too dark to call tomorrow is an imploration for the importance of affect and emotional immediacy in the wake of the collapse of the information age.