Pea Arts About

Claire Murphy-Morgan of Monkfish Productions talks through their arts initiative ‘A Little Bit of Good in the World’, and Kelly Coates from Projects4Change talks about youth provision through art and current collaborations with Monkfish. This co-production was made with funding from Arts Council England. www.monkfishproductions.org www.projects4change.org Music: commonGround by airtone (c) copyright 2018 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/58703 Recorded with Zoom Edited by Paula Blair with Kdenlive

Preview of a special collaborative episode of Audiovisual Cultures with Monkfish Productions and Projects4Change, funded by Arts Council England.

24 July 2020 *plot details and difficult subject matter ahead* The social, cultural and emotional effects of imprisonment and the release of political prisoners were topics I researched extensively for my PhD thesis on visual culture and social change in post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Since beginning that research in 2008, I have understood imprisonment as a mechanism for social control veiled as a system for the punishment of crime and the rehabilitation of criminals into society. I came to see firsthand that the latter, if reached, was achieved by prisoners themselves and facilitated by educators and often arts-based charitable organisations. While the deaths of prisoners do happen, whether due to external violence or self-harm, capital punishment ended in the UK in 1964 (although it was not fully abolished until 1969, and 1973 in NI). When current films such as Clemency (dir. Chinonye Chukwu, 2019) emerge, it is a shock to be reminded that states in the country that claims to lea

And so another ill-fated piece of technology in my life has succumbed to in-built obseletism. I was on borrowed time with Violet as she'd had a total systems failure in late July last year. My partner's wonderfully techy dad replaced the hard drive and installed Linux Mint. I was loving it. I never want a Windows machine ever again (although I'm using one stuck on Windows 8 to type this, and I'm grateful for it).  Violet was still exhibiting signs of mechanical difficulties, and for a long time I was loath to open her up to explore because I simply don't know enough to do this competently. She would run fine again when I gave her a rest to cool down, so on we limped. Then came a failure in her internet connectivity during a podcast recording. I thought it was overheating, but I just couldn't get her back. I hoped a disassemble and thorough clean would help, but I've never got her going again. It could well be something I'm missing in reconnecting ever

10 July 2020 The past few weeks have seen many reaching breaking point with systems that enable and foster abusive behaviours. On my Twitter feed this blew up firstly in resistance to systemic racial abuse, and secondly, in calling out misogyny and sexual violence in Irish comedy. The latter and the intersections between the two quickly spread across all spheres, and given my interests in arts and culture and former life as a film academic, it settled firmly in people who've been abused while employed at arts organisations (including one close to me), and people in film scholarship.  As a survivor of abuse in romantic relationships and in workplace settings, the stories of others hit hard. It is not every day that I can read or listen to detailed accounts, and I often don't want to because it feels like an invasion of privacy that victims must speak out so candidly because those in a position to help them ignored and negated their experiences. I also prefer not to blindly

3 July 2020 In these oddest of odd times, now seems as good a moment as any to probe the conspiracy theory angle on my Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable research. For a while now I’ve been teasing out the notion that although the story central to the exhibition was not true, that doesn’t mean it was also improbable, implausible, or even impossible. Indeed, the deeper and wider my investigation goes, the more evidence I uncover that points at the very least to the story’s plausibility, a believability that alone convinced many of its lies ( eikós ). I’m heading further towards reading the Apistos/Amotan story as one built upon unrealised possibilities rather than out-and-out fabrications. This part of my journey is being mapped somewhat by reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy (Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, 1975), which I came to via a tenuous link to an obscure reference (if it’s a reference at all) in The Diver , as outlined in part 21 . As