At a point when Drone-Truth and its partners in crime, Post-truth, the Petrol-sphere, the Anthropocene, and the trust-no-one Bit-coin methodologies of money and of life, stalk the globe as if intractable expressions of well-being, ethics and righteousness, Golding offers a radical challenge. It requires a step away from object oriented philosophy, speculative realism, metaphysics and neo-liberalist frameworks. It requires a ‘step- toward’ what Golding names the zero zones. At its most strange, this is nothing more or less than a re- engagement / encounter with some rather exquisite new friends (and in some cases, some rather tarnished old friends): quantum mechanics, contemporary art, alchemy, feminism, erotic praxis, non-locality, tentacular thinking, enlightenment and the queering of sense. But most of all, it is nothing more nor less than a profound engagement with curiosity. Her challenge to ‘step-toward’ the zero zones of time suggest, at its most courageous: radical empathy in the strongest, communal sense of the terms friendship, truth, love.
A paper was presented during conference ‘Sliced-up ghettos of thought’? Science, art and society - 20 years from now as part of a lecture series sponsored by the LAHP, November 2017 - March 2018.
[PLEASE NOTE: This paper has just been accepted to be included in the book by D. Rubinstein (Ed), The Fragmentation of Image, Routledge (under contract) to be published 2019)