Author: Howard Slater

19992024ArticlesDatacide 6Film ReviewsOnline Exclusive

“Long Live Death!” – On Pasolini’s Salò (2024)

This text on Pasolini’s Salò first appeared something like 25 years ago in Datacide No.6. It was part of a sequence of texts on cinema which began with a piece on Alan Pakula’s Parallax View and ended in a text on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Here Howard Slater returns to and revives his psycho-social analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

Read More
2023Datacide 19

The Electronic Disturbance Zone – Part 1

Following on from a talk/listening session given at the launch for Datacide 18 at Ridley Road Social Club in February 2020, Howard Slater expanded on the theme of the Electronic Disturbance Zone in the following work in progress.

General Outline: 0. Preamble (Sonic Theory, Pierre Schaeffer, EDZ at Dead by Dawn, techno and ambient) 1. Environment Recordings (Luc Ferrari, Murray Schafer) 2. Entity music (Walter Marchetti) 3. Drone (Eliane Radigue, Roland Kayn) 4. Aural collage (John Cage, Luc Ferrari, Industrial) 5. Studio Based Electronics (Stockhausen, Bernard Parmegiani ) 6. Live Electronic Improvisation (David Tudor, Morphogenesis etc) 7. Hybrids/ Heterogeneity (decategorisation)

Part 2 of this text will appear in the next issue of Datacide and will cover Drone through to Studio Based Electronics.

Read More
2017ArticlesDatacide 17

Unparaphraseable Life – Notes on Third Cinema

Picking up again on Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘post media’, Howard Slater here explores the liberating aspects of the Third Cinema of such directors as Djibril Diop Mambéty and Med Hondo. Drawing on the writings of Teshome Gabriel this text reveals Third Cinema as being an ever-valid challenge to mainstream Western notions of the cinema as a conditioning monoform.

Read More
2016ArticlesDatacide 15

Sincere Genesis – On Félix Guattari & Groups

For a left that rejects the party-form and in times in which the ‘soviet’ model of workers councils became less viable, the question of organization has proved problematic. Guattari, a life-long member of militant groups from the 60s onwards, never failed to address this issue of how we can ‘belong together’. This short text offers the rudiments of Guattari’s response as informed by his work as a maverick psychoanalyst and his ideas of a micro-politics that upsets long-held views of what it is to be an ‘individual.’

Read More