DOUGALD HINE

Category: Books

  • Walking On Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times

    Walking On Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times

    In 2017, we were invited by the publishers Chelsea Green to put together an anthology of work taken from the first ten issues of Dark Mountain. These early books are now out of print, so Walking On Lava is the best way to get a feel for the mix of voices that gathered around the Dark Mountain Project in its early years.

    The book opens with the original manifesto and the essays, stories, poetry, conversations and artworks that follow are organised around the eight principles with which the manifesto concludes.

    Walking On Lava is available to order direct from the Dark Mountain Project.

    Don’t read this book if you’re not willing to be shaken and unsettled. Unflinching and unafraid!

    Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
    • Hannah Lewis reading at the Walking On Lava launch
    • Steve Wheeler reading at the Walking On Lava launch.
  • The Crossing of Two Lines

    The Crossing of Two Lines

    The Virgin of Guadalupe appears before a camera crew on a Mexican hillside. A wooden shrine is hammered to a watchtower on a deserted Soviet army base. A stonemason fixes a cross to the roof of a roadside chapel in his family’s village. Since 2008, the work of Stockholm-based artist duo Performing Pictures has taken an unexpected turn towards themes of Catholic devotion. The results are still sometimes shown in galleries, but their primary function is within the religious lives of the communities with whom they are made.

    Sometimes we use the term religious art or sacred art, but I really prefer venerative art. Because, as I see it, the upper middle class, the good-taste people, they do venerate like hell!

    Robert Brečević

    The book I made with Robert and Geska Brečević (aka Performing Pictures) is a document of this work, but also an enquiry into where it came from and the reactions it was causing among their artistic peers.

    We are used to art that employs the symbols of religion in ways seemingly intended to unsettle or provoke many of those to whom these symbols matter; yet to the consumers of contemporary art, those who actually visit galleries, it is more uncomfortable to be confronted with work in which such symbols are used without the frame of provocation.

    Alongside the hundreds of photographs documenting the making of this work, my contribution is one essay, four conversations with Robert and Geska, and a set of twelve poems.

  • Despatches from the Invisible Revolution

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution

    A wave of networked disruption swept across the world in 2011, taking with it the idea that today’s social technologies are only about throwing sheep at each other, or hiding away in Second Life. The new social forms which ride the network now make their entrance on the stage of history; yet the grain of networked reality remains puzzlingly elusive. Much of the activity which makes up the network seems too loose and haphazard to be significant, by the standards of the world in which we grew up.

    This book began in December 2011, as a conversation over lunch, and soon became an invitation spreading along the network of thinkers and makers and hackers and activists with which Keith Kahn Harris and I had been entangled in the course of that year. Within three months, it was in print.

    The invitation was simple and open to interpretation: write a response to the events of 2011, no more than 3,000 words, not an essay written at leisure but a despatch from in the middle of where you find yourself.

    This was the year when it seemed to be ‘kicking off everywhere’ and the pieces that came back reflect experiences of the Indignados movement, the Arab Spring, Occupy and the UK riots, but also events on a smaller scale. Bridget McKenzie wrote about her daughter’s refusal to go to secondary school and how the experience forced her to rethink assumptions she had held through twenty years of working with education.

    In the Industrial Revolution, you could point at a steam engine and ask: ‘What on earth is that?’ What defines the Invisible Revolution is that there’s nothing to point at, no totemic object that conveys the power and the strangeness of the forces changing our lives.

    Pamela McLean

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution was published with Pediapress. The book is available through their website, where you can also find links to the online versions of individual articles.

    Despatches from the Invisible Revolution book launch, Free Word Centre, London, 29 February 2012 (Photographs: Andy Broomfield)

  • Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto

    The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

    In 2007, I read a blogpost from an environmental journalist called Paul Kingsnorth, declaring his intention to quit the trade of journalism – and then, in the final paragraph, voicing an idea he had for a new publication. There was something in his words that spoke to me and we began exchanging emails, then meeting up in the corners of pubs, and two years later the fruits of our conversations took shape as a manifesto.

    This twenty-page pamphlet was the starting point for the Dark Mountain Project and much of the work that I’ve done since. You can read the full text on the Dark Mountain website, order it in paperback or read the essay I wrote to introduce the fifth anniversary edition, telling the story of how the manifesto came about and what happened as it made its way out into the world.

    Paul and I at the launch of the manifesto in July 2009. (Photograph: Andy Broomfield)

  • COMMONSense

    COMMONSense

    A celebration of ‘the commons’ made in collaboration with the artist Anne-Marie Culhane and members of the Access Space media lab in Sheffield.

    The original call for submissions

    Access Space in Sheffield is seeking contributions for a magazine to be published this autumn. The issue will reflect a theme which connects the activities of Access Space to the wider world.

    The theme of the issue is COMMONSense. Not so long ago, the only people who talked about “the commons” were historians; today, the language of the commons is central to debates around intellectual property, environmental protection, and resistance to globalisation. These international debates find their echoes here in South Yorkshire – in the activities of Access Space, recycling waste technology and promoting Open Source software, or in Grow Sheffield’s efforts to build local food networks and seed city centre wasteland. Can talk of “the commons” help us find common ground between these kinds of projects? Does using the same words mean we’ve found a common language – or can it disguise different meanings and intentions?

    We’re looking for pieces of COMMONSense: prose (stories, thoughts, book reviews, bibliographies…), poetry, songs, pieces of code, photographs, cartoons, drawings, graphics or anything else you can think of. These might approach the theme in relation to green issues, land ownership, social relations, the internet, the music industry, copyright, software, or anything else that makes sense to you.

    The format of the magazine means that each contribution will take up a single A5 page. With that in mind, we’re looking for the following:

    * written texts of up to 200 words
    * or poems of up to 20 lines
    * or black and white drawings, cartoons, photos or other graphics

    Images should be at least 300 dpi and in JPEG, PNG or TIFF format.
    Texts should be in TXT, ODT or DOC format.
    We ask that your contributions be made available to us under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/ ) The magazine will be freely accessable from the web.
    Although we cannot pay for contributions, there will be a limited print edition and each contributor will receive a free copy.

    The deadline for submissions is 26 September 2008 [EXTENDED TO 17 OCTOBER 2008]
    Please send your contribution by email to collaborativecultures@googlemail.com
    Attachments should be no more than 6 Mb.

    The magazine will be edited by Dougald Hine and the creative direction will be by artist Anne-Marie Culhane.

    It will be launched at Access Space during the Off The Shelf literary festival on 24 October 2008

    Contact us at collaborativecultures@googlemail.com

    www.access-space.org/ccs

    Commonsense