Trip Advisor review of a protest

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Is poetry disabled?

In poetry’s capacity to self-define, to reject conventionality, to be in a constant state of flux and to hold the contradictory together in its granularity, it subverts formal systems of designation time and again. Poetry then avoids simple diagnosis, at least pre-emptively.

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Know thyself

Non-fiction THE FIRST TIME I left Australia, I was six years old. My parents took my sister and I to Greece, the original home of...

A freer state of being

Non-fictionToday, we live in a time in which self-worth and value are often signified by a numerical figure – how many followers we have, how many likes we receive, what level of traction our posts incite. We live in a time in which this numerical figure equates to social capital, with digital ‘celebrities’ gaining varying levels of access to places and perks on the basis of their following. We live in a time in which the aesthetics and metrics of this burgeoning digital realm pervade and influence not only the way we live our lives but what we perceive to be reality. We understand ourselves and the world around us through the cultural codes, signs and symbols we consume. We depend upon and wield such cultural codes, signs and symbols to inhabit narratives in which we wish to belong, fashioning them like an armour that tells the world who we are. Appearances are everything.
But hyperreality is an unstable landscape. When our cultural codes, signs and symbols give way, so too do our carefully curated identities, which inevitably implode.

Resisting the ‘Content Mindset’

Non-fictionWhen we hear publishers, broadcasters or gallerists describing creative work as content, we know immediately that their approach is transactional. When we hear people describe their own work as content, they have already become complicit in their own exploitation. Social media profiles the world over feature bios identifying their owners as ‘content creators’: people who produce interchangeable matter to fill someone else’s space. Social media accounts are available free of charge on the basis that we will keep creating the work that feeds and evolves the algorithm, provides a culturally authentic context for ad placement and keeps us all scrolling – our number-one self-selected addictive behaviour.