PULP is published on the sovereign land of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, as well as Indigenous members of our creative community. We respect the knowledge and customs that traditional Elders and Aboriginal people have passed down from generation to generation. We acknowledge the historical and continued violence and dispossession against First Nations peoples. Australia’s many institutions, including the University itself, are founded on this very same violence and dispossession. As editors, we will always stand in solidarity with First Nations efforts towards decolonisation and that solidarity will be reflected in the substance and practice of this magazine.
Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was and always will be Aboriginal land.
Senior Editor
Sasha Blackman
Editors
Rosy Chim
Portia Love
Jayden Nguyen
Jess Watson
Sophie Wishart
Ege Yurdakul
Design
Portia Love
Sophie Wishart
Ege Yurdakul
The views in this publication are not necessarily the views of USU. The information contained within this edition of PULP was correct at the time of printing. This publication is brought to you by the University of Sydney Union.
Issue 22, 2025
Welcome to all our new students — and welcome back to those returning from me. I’m Phan, your USU President for 2025–26, and I’m thrilled to be kicking off the semester with you through this PULP Issue 22. We are on the cusp of our favourite time of the year, a period filled with fresh energy and new perspectives. At the USU, and specifically at PULP, we’re excited to build on a strong platform for student voices, creativity, and culture.
PULP Issue 22 is the first edition from our new editorial team, PULP 4. Huge congratulations to Sasha, Portia, Ege, Jayden, Rosy, Jess, and Sophie on an impressive debut. This issue showcases their sharp editorial vision and strong commitment to championing student voice and expression.
We also welcome Kate Saap, our new Coordinator of Student Publications. On behalf of the USU, thank you to Alexandra Frost for her dedicated service and contribution to this role. Our gratitude also goes to the outgoing PULP editorial team — Hugo, Bipasha, China, Joan, Ashray, Kelly, and Estelle — whose contributions and creative leadership have helped shape PULP’s identity and impact.
If you’re new to PULP, the magazine is a key part of the USU’s Arts and Culture team, working alongside Verge Gallery and our Archivist to foster a dynamic, unified creative community on campus. I’m always inspired by the incredible creativity on display in every PULP edition as they never fail to captivate and surprise readers in one way or another. Whether you are a writer, artist, or simply someone who loves to explore new ideas and perspectives, there’s always a place for you in PULP. I also encourage you to visit Verge Gallery and experience the exciting exhibitions on display this semester.
Second semester launches the inaugural Creative Month a bold celebration of student creativity that will transform campus spaces into surprising and immersive artistic experiences. Through inclusive events, performances and installations, Creative Month invites you to see the university through a new lens; as a living canvas of imagination, collaboration, and possibility. It amplifies the creative spirit already thriving across campus, inviting students to see their environment in new and unexpected ways.
We hope this issue, and the many creative opportunities ahead, inspire you to connect, reflect, and engage with the diverse, artistic voices that make campus life so vibrant.
Warm regards,
Phan Vu
USU President
Senior Editor’s Note: Dreaming With Ethan Floyd
Ethan Floyd (they/them) is a Wiradjuri, Wailwan and Ngiyampaa person living on Gadigal land. They are also the Honorary Secretary of the USU’s student-led board. Sasha Blackman (she/her) is the Senior Editor of PULP, living on Gadigal land.
When we dream, the past and future become insignificant as our imaginations weave memory and fantasy together. Time melts away.
The fluidity of time has long been understood by First Nations peoples through the concept of The Dreaming and the non-linear ‘everywhen’. Dr Stephen Gilchrist describes ‘everywhen’ to be an Indigenous realisation of circular order “where past, present, and future are interconnected”, which guides the understanding of memory to be separated from a fixed and linear comprehension.
This is closely related to The Dreaming: the eternal period of time that encompasses creation and morality in relation to Country. The land holds ancient stories, and as we walk on Country, we become intertwined in the past and the landscape.
For PULP’s twenty-second issue, I had the privilege of asking Ethan about their connection to The Dreaming and Country, grounded in the notion of the ‘everywhen’. As we continue to live on colonised land, it was crucial that our issue on dreams began with this foundational body of knowledge.
Sasha: What does Country mean to you, Ethan?
Ethan: Country, in the same vein as The Dreaming, is something that is ephemeral. It doesn’t have a solidity to it and can change meaning between people and communities. I associate Country with land, but for so many people it could be a smell, or the feeling of being connected to something bigger. This is an experience that is really grounding, especially for people who didn’t have the chance to live or grow up in their culture.
Sasha: Continuing on with Country, could you describe The Dreaming for us?
Ethan: It has so many different meanings. I think I first learnt about it in school, as a creation time. The Dreaming is sort of taught to kids in the same framework as a biblical, Judeo-Christian narrative is taught. But it’s different because The Dreaming is a system of meaning, rather than a specific time. The term ‘Dreamtime’ was originally used, but this was far too simplistically viewed as a period of history rather than something that connects people, land, law, and the way societies should interact and treat each other.
Sasha: Thank you, Ethan. I think what’s so important for people to understand is that The Dreaming isn’t something that’s linear. It’s an ongoing notion that speaks to ways in which we relate to place and memory.
Ethan: Exactly; our memories are not necessarily just our own. They belong to place, it’s rare that a memory involves just one person. It doesn’t really belong to you even though you might have an interpretation.
Sasha: This also connects to Gilchrist’s understanding of the ‘everywhen’. How do you relate to this?
Ethan: I like how Gilchrist tries to explain the idea of ‘everywhen’ and in a way, the word has reminded me of a Roald Dahl word that encapsulates something important but the term itself is quite alien. ‘Everywhen’ effectively challenges what we think we know about time. Linear time is always about progress and forward motion, but this isn’t really how the world works. ‘Everywhen’ makes sense to me because so much of what we fight for and dream about achieving comes from unfinished work in the past. Not only is the past nonlinear, the future is as well. Whatever world we are living in and what has come before us is not separate to the world we will leave behind. This is ‘everywhen’ for me.
My conversation with Ethan was crucial in the conception of our twenty-second issue. Rooted in the theme ‘dreams’, our PULP team selected photography, creative prose, essays, mind maps, and more to connect memory, place and dreaming. By grounding this issue in Indigenous Australian concepts of Country, The Dreaming, and the ‘everywhen’, we hope to challenge Eurocentric notions of time, place, and memory, providing a framework to reflect on each piece through.
Thank you Ethan and enjoy the issue!
How To Dream With The Editors
PULP has created a series of instructions to help readers improve the quality of their night (or nap) time imaginings. This easy-to-use guide will help PULP citizens assemble a dream to explore the depths of their consciousness.
Disclaimer: PULP is not liable for any projections (astral, physical, psychological) which occur during the dreaming process.
1. Find a mattress, couch or bathtub (empty)
2. Lie down
3. Dial down all thoughts on everyone you’ve known, loved, or hated
4. Close your eyes
5. Attempt to ignore all restlessness. Remember you didn’t do one last wee before bed.
Head to the bathroom
6. Wash hands
7. Revisit step 1
8. Let your mind drift into the abyss. Not too far.
9. If you are struggling to source sufficient dream material, consider;
a. Your high school crush
b. When your cousin shattered your Sagittarius Beyblade with a fake heavy metal which led you to tears; he still brings it up
c. Primary school dodgeball, the beep test
d. Auditioning for school band
10. Upon waking, we advise you to write down your dreams for future entertainment or personal enlightenment
11. Consult a Freudian analysist to delve into the depths of your subconscious and somehow find a carnal connection to your parents
DO NOT:
- Consider restructuring your essay question
Note: Proper assemblage of dreams is crucial to the transformation of the social imaginary. Dreams are woven into the fabric of change and the vision of tomorrow which becomes a t angible reality. We hope you use your dreams to sustain and inspire.
Don’t let the bed bugs bite! Love, Jess, Ege, Sophie, Jayden, Portia and Rosy.
Eclectic Dreams of Anxious Girls: The Stories My Brain Writes Without Me - Alice Heffernan 5 누구의 기억 (Second Exposure) - Estelle Yoon 17
Curtains - Emma Lee 21
Chiara Prinsloo
Call me a luddite if you must, but these days I have been feeling borderline Kazscynskian towards anything that passes the Turing test. To me, it is becoming clear that humanity’s intellectual capabilities will soon be rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence.
After the industrial revolution, we lost the ability to be at one with nature; we lost our connection with our labour, and our bodies. As Silvia Federici notes, bodily alienation was a defining feature of capitalism. We reviled humanity’s ‘natural state’ to lengthen the working day, overwhelming the body’s natural limits. With a Cartesian split, the mind became the realm of temperance and prudence, while the body became the machine and the source of libidinal evil; brutish and distinct from the rational faculties of the mind.1 Despite our bodily alienation, the ideas we had and shared were still distinctly our own.
In our age of technological (dis)enlightenment, this is no longer the case. Half of the work produced by university students is the haphazard copy-and-pasting of spit from chatbots, alongside corporations’ usage of image generators for AI ‘art.’
In the final throes of late-stage Warholianism, it seems that people can no longer come up with ideas on their own without the safety wheels of ChatGPT.
In the days of Aristotle, humans were distinct from animals because of our minds.2 But AI systems process information, recognise patterns, and generate outputs in a way that reflects the human mind. Yes, this is an artificial mimicry and not consciousness per se, but does this distinction matter if we cannot tell the difference?
We still don’t really know how consciousness works. Biological essentialists in the USYD psychology department with positivist outlooks would probably say that, cognitively, we are no different to a machine. Except the machine is more effective. It hallucinates today, but one day the heuristic thinking of humans will be inevitably patched out.
But it is these heuristics — the disjointed jumping of ideas, chaotic and inefficient and unexpected — that that allows us to make art and makes us human. What will the world look like with the chaos patched out of it?
At a time when machines can conceptualise the idiosyncrasies of human life, eerily mimicking the idiosyncrasies of human thought, we must ask ourselves: what sets humankind apart?
At least for now, AI is not embodied, it does not know love, it does not know lust or hate or fear. It does not know the fear of death, nor does it know the warm embrace of a drunk cigarette (or three). It does not know the feeling of dirt. Taking the question posed by the title of Philip K Dick’s novel Can Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), we should ask ourselves not if androids are dreaming of the electric, but if humans can still dream of the humble mammalian sheep.
Think of what the humble sheep symbolises: earth and dirt and wool and mud and grass and hunger. Warmth and blood, purity, the body; vulnerability. Something warm-blooded. Something real.
Riddled through the passages of Psalms, sheep were once biblical and pastoral, innocent and pure. Now think of the electric sheep. If you’re anything like me, the most encounters you have with animals these days is in the form of Instagram reels of horses and sheep frolicking in a field with Bladee in the background. A synthetic simulation of the real. Hollow but functional. Manufactured contentment, an ultimate collapse of meaning.
As Isiah 53:6 condemns us: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”.
We rarely encounter animals these days; we are deprived of the farm. When was the last time you saw a mammal up close? Not a cat or a dog, but something big and bovine. There is something awe-inspiring about being up close to a cow, or even a sheep, creatures so big and strong that they could literally kill you if they wanted to. Driving past cows is like coming face to face with the sublime.
Whether the artificial writer, artist, or white-collar worker is a pale imitation of the real thing or even a worthy creator themselves does not really matter. Humans may very well soon be rendered obsolete either way, by a creature of our own making, much like God and man. Soon we will yearn for a bygone era when we didn’t have these debates, where we could just create freely and wallow in dirt that still had worms in it.
If AI can mimic our mind, the thing that sets humanity apart is the body. We must affirm the biological, the physical, the muddy and the messy.
In true luddite fashion I fear we are slouching towards a digital dystopia. In a thousand years androids will probably dream of electric sheep in bits and ones and zeroes.
But right now, while human-generated intelligence still has a foothold, we must act. Can we still dream about the real; or are we too entangled in the synthetic to notice the difference? We must affirm the body; we must exalt our natural state.
Otherwise, we will be sidelined by a digital monster of our own making; dreaming of the past and of mammalian sheep.
1.Federici, Silvia.‘The Great Caliban: The struggle against the rebel body,’ C apitalism Nature Socialism,15no.2,(2004):7–16.
Eclectic Dreams of Anxious Girls: The Stories My Brain Writes Without Me
Alice Heffernan
I am used to feeling out of control in my own mind. I have what we in the industry call moderate OCD and comorbid anxiety, and I’ve been taking Fluoxetine for about a year.
Nothing is more boring than other people’s dreams. Except when they’re mine. Since starting Fluoxetine, my dreams have been crazy. Before I started medication, I asked everyone I knew who had taken SSRIs about their experiences with side-effects. Nobody mentioned dreams.
Some Examples of my Recent Prozac Dreams:
I am graduating, except it is a combination of the High School Musical (2006) graduation and the Tony Awards. My childhood bully is there. So is my therapist. My boyfriend was valedictorian, and he sang a song a la Ariana DeBose instead of giving a speech (he is a theatre kid but not...that kind).
I am at a music festival, which is also the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and also the Wednesday markets on Eastern Avenue. The cranky manager at my retail job is having his wedding here. My manager hates me (as he does in real life). I called in sick to attend the festival and spend the dream desperately balancing wedding snooping with running away from my manager and trying to make it to various writers’ talks.
Jacob Wysoki (of Pitch Perfect (2012) and Dropout TV (2022)) is in my house. He is trying to murder me. It’s also raining inside. I stab him with an umbrella and he continues to chase me, impaled by the umbrella (this one was genuinely very scary and doubly upsetting because I find him so funny).
This is what my dreams are. They’re not always nightmares, but they are always bizarre. It isn’t the dreams themselves that scare me, but the not knowing why. Why is it that there are mounds of (public, tested, funded) research on the impacts of antidepressants on erectile dysfunction, but in researching an article on SSRI side effects, all I found were two YouTube videos, three psychological papers and ten AI-authored summaries of those papers? My GP detailed in gruesome specifics what would happen if I stopped taking my meds cold turkey, but when I asked her about the dreams, she just shrugged, “I’ve heard that from other patients, it’s quite common. If they’re distressing you, we can try another medication.”
OCD is just what it says on the tin. Obsessive. So, ‘just don’t worry about your weird dreams’ isn’t really on the cards. In pop culture, OCD is the kid in the medical drama who can’t stop washing his hands. Has to make all his own food. Carries hand sanitiser everywhere.
Like almost everything else in medical dramas, that’s bullshit. It is a much more interior experience. Most people with contamination OCD worry about infection more than anything else — although this is not the kind of OCD I have, I struggle with health worries. Ironically, they are almost always about my mental health.
Imagine the sounds of the world constantly deafen you. You hear the footsteps of your neighbours, the breathing of your partner, and the wind whistling through the gap under your front door. Being on the train is insufferable. Shopping centres are terrifying. These noises are pervasive and overwhelming.
Taking Fluoxetine is like wearing headphones. The constant spiral of intrusive thoughts that I experience doesn’t disappear, but it is muffled. I can get things done without a barrage of sounds distracting, distressing, dissolving me.
So, you wear headphones all the time. They make life much better. You’re happier, more productive, and a better friend and partner.
Except, every night, your headphones play a rotating playlist of insane combinations of music. The catalogue is endless.
From songs you made up in the shower, to football chants, to what you danced to at your year ten formal. Pitbull, the Glee (2009) cast, Grimes, a derivative rock band from Paraguay called Prozac Dreams.
This music isn’t distressing — and it is much better than being able to hear your brother snoring in the next room. But why is this happening, and why did nobody warn me about it?
What we do know is that SSRIs suppress REM (Rapid Eye Movement), delaying the phase of deep sleep where dreaming happens. Sometimes, this results in “rebound REM”, described as a burst of brain activity after an extended period of deep sleep. In this case, the REM phase occurs just before we wake, which could explain why someone on SSRIs remembers their dreams every day.
Many people with OCD don’t want to — or can’t — take medication due to obsessive thoughts about their brain being changed. Further research into the impact of SSRIs on dreams and sleep is therefore essential, as well as how medication impacts OCD differently than it does anxiety or depression. The most important tools we have to treat mental illness are information and empathy, and all healthcare providers should realise this in practice. The under-researched and side-effect heavy experience of SSRIs is not appealing to a brain that loves control. I’m happy relinquishing some of that control, but I wouldn’t mind one good, long, dreamless sleep.
Happy Home Kira
Kwongh
I pass by a telly shop. The news is on, and I stop next to the owner to watch. He has a flimsy sort of fold-up stool he must have bought decades ago. He’s sitting on it again, in the same spot as yesterday, eating barbeque duck combo rice out of a Styrofoam box. He keeps his eyes down, glassy and non-committal, but turns up the volume to the daily blare of TVB’s news intro. I recently found out that it is remixed audio of a telegram message. A modern touch; I’ve come to love its sound. The new journalist is presenting again. I’ve begun to acknowledge we won’t be seeing the one from last month anymore. The segment documents the shopping strip a few streets down, where my mother likes to get her hair done — only the shops are all closed as protestors march against a new warden.
I dream my teeth are falling out. One by one, I spit them into my hands. Smooth, warm, almost alive. I try to put them back in my mouth, but a new skin has grown where my cupids bow once was, conjoining the middle of my top lip to the bottom, leaving two little mouth holes on each side. I manage to fit one tooth through the new orifice and plant it into my stringy, fleshy gum.
The week following, I begin to chew gum regularly, every morning on the walk to university. Every so often, another student in my course has a farewell party, a common event among friends and family. Many move to Europe. Though they’re not hostages here, like the old or penniless, the very idea of ‘home’ is held for a high ransom.
I have my teeth dream again, this time the fleshy mess of teeth have the faces of friends that have left, staring back at me from white bone frames. Gently cradling them all in my hands, I don’t try to punch my teeth back into their sockets.
Puncture punch jam jab stab attack
Ran ransom rich cover your eyes the tear as will sting
Careful not to farewell identit . Lonely without your human ri hts
I’m leaving Kowloon today. I’m not sure where I’ll go, but I have my film camera with me. I take photos of all my favourite things. I start with the sound of the news, the old man’s stool, the gate at the sterling mall entrance of Mei Foo MTR where I tap on every day, the taximan who knows my dad, aggressive Ip-man herbal medicine posters, the corner shop that just sells bathroom taps, the friendly kitten at the Mee & Gee, the traffic lights where I last saw an expat.
I pass my mum’s old hair salon and stop to take a photo. The shop is unrecognisable now, the steel roller door is plastered with the new government mandate, along-side it is tagged with protest speech that won’t last the night. Tomorrow it will be scrubbed clean. I bring my camera to my face, resting it on the crux of my cheek, but this insults the policeman standing within view shot. He shoves the camera at my face. My body topples at his overexertion of force, and I kiss the pavement. There’s a rock stuck in my throat. No, not a rock, a tooth.
Top left: Greg Girard, Woman at a tram stop, Central, Hong Kong, 1985. Bottom right: Fan Ho, ‘Black and White’, Hong Kong, 1964.
Urvi Agrawal & Olivia Russell
Poetry And Consciousness in the Present
Jayden Nguyen
A Note on Theory
Scholars of the Global North sometimes shelter themselves in neo-colonial positions when confronted with revolutionary praxis.
Oxford Professor Jane Hiddleston, in her book Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory (2010), asserts that notable post-structuralist philosophers rarely intended their political critiques to materialise into action. Their texts, then, deserve to be read through an intellectual (artificial) separation of philosophy from politics:
“[Post-structuralists’] goals at the outset were always philosophical rather than political and, indeed, there must be a space for philosophy independent of any practical political outcome. If Foucault argued that power was constructed and supported by the production and dissemination of knowledge, then these thinkers question the knowledge offered by their own writing practice and seek to invent not a programme of political resistance, but a way of theorising that refuses to appropriate the other”. 1
Here, materialists are confronted with idealism. Hiddleston’s interpretation of Foucault separates his discourse analysis from the dialectical method consistent with critical theorists. Though in his debate against Noam Chomsky, Foucault explicitly links his critiques with political struggle:
“It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions [...] and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.” 2
We are left to question the veracity of Hiddleston’s proposition, as she indicates that Foucault’s critique simply aspires for a post-racial taxonomy. As people from the Global North, we must not obfuscate political resistance as a passive act in this way.
In Saul Williams’ words, the responsibility of people from the Global North is to “crumble that empire from the inside”.3
Poetic Critiques of Israel’s ‘Frictionless Occupation’
Palestinian author Marwan Makhoul had a poem, ‘On Politics and Poetry’, become viral on various social media outlets. It reads:
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political,
I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent.4
As Israeli technological developments aspire towards a “frictionless occupation”,5 non-violence is postulated alongside the (im)possibility of “poetry that isn’t political”. In Antony Loewenstein’s words, as “the Global South has been controlled and pacified with (principally) Israeli and US weapons,” then a poetics of peacetime necessitates an end to the financial capitalist world system affording such violence.6
More broadly, evolving poetic forms reciprocate the absurdity of algorithmic patterns inherent in software, through market volatilities or news broadcasts which capture (and profit from) continuing colonial violence in Palestine and the Global South.
In his poem ‘one more’, 7 Lebanese-Palestinian author Hasib Hourani reiterates how financial capitalism and neo-colonialism are inextricable:
hp provides maintains controls
١* the identification system in israel2
٢* the control mechanism at checkpoints3
٣* administration for their navy’s IT infrastructure4
٤* digital storage systems for their illegal settlements5
2 Who Profits, Technologies of Control: The Case of Hewlett Packard Stratified Identities: the new ID cards system” (Tel Aviv: Who Profits, 2011) 16–17
3 Who Profits, Technologies of Control “OK Computer: the Basel biometric checkpoint system” 9–11
4 Who Profits, Technologies of Control “Smart Occupation: HP’s contracts with the Israeli army” 20–22
5 Who Proftis, Techonologies Of Control “No boundaries: HP activities with the Israeli settlements” 25
Contrastingly Edward Said in his book The Question of Palestine (1979) emphasises the epistemological contention between Israeli and Palestinian presences; that “Palestine [sic] too is also an interpretation, one with much less continuity and prestige than Israel”. 8 Hourani’s poem signifies a contextual shift in literary representations of Palestinian resistance; embedded in the internationalist and materialist logic of anti-colonial struggle.9
Australian Mardi Gras and Settler-Colonialism
Wiradjuri poet and artist Jazz Money’s poem ‘mardi gras rainbow dreaming’ continues the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist critiques of Makhoul and Hourani’s texts in the context of Australia:
the BWS is now a BWyaasssssS as in yass queen as in yasssss gay pride as in yass we co-opted this lingo from black queer communities on the other side of the world as in BeerWineSpirits is now a place to drink down some black queer liberation on land stolen that locks up blak queer bodies if maybe they’ve had a bit too much BeerWineSpirits but won’t lock up the others who snarl as you walk down the street hand in hand with ya misso on ya way to have a drink
The corporatisation of Mardi Gras is emblematic of a broader intersectional critique of capitalism throughout its history. Here, Money synthesises the continuities of capitalist accumulation; white nationalism attached to Australian settler society, and heteronormativity beyond reproductive labour. Read alongside Hourani’s poem, it reiterates that corporations do not only attempt to erase and prevent manifestations of political resistance. In fact, the ultimate aspiration is to render democracy within private workplaces, and capitalism, impossible.11 Corporations’ presence in everyone’s lives is immediate, whether through the sale of one’s labour to the market; the compensation of labour through a wage-relation; or the investments of wages through superannuation into private financial markets, which allow continuing capitalist pervasion.
Here, we are confronted with anti-colonial poetics that communicate the urgency of anti-capitalist resistance. Again, we possess the responsibility not to obscure political resistance as a passive act. Poetry is inextricably concerned with politics, whether or not it is instructive of revolution.
Endnotes
1. Hiddleston, Jane. Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory. Liverpool University Press, 2010: 10.
2. Chomsky, Noam & Foucault, Michel. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate On Human Nature. The New Press: New York, 2006: 41.
3. Williams, Saul. “’I have no business with genocidaires’: Saul Williams on Gaza, US empire and the power of art,” interview by Mohamed Hashem, Real Talk, Middle East Eye, 9 June, 2025, Video, 0:17–0:27, https://www.middleeasteye.net/ video/saul-williams-gaza-us-empire-and-powerart
5. Loewenstein, Antony. “The Palestine Laboratory – EP 1.” Al Jazeera, 30 January, 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/program/featured-documentaries/2025/1/30/the-palestine-laboratory-ep-1
6. Loewenstein, Antony. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports The Technology Of Occupation Around The World, Verso, 2023: 30.
7. Hourani, Hasib. Rock Flight. Giramondo Press, 2024: 17.
8. Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine. Routledge, 1979: 10.
11. Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Vintage Press, 2023.
In dreams, memories rarely return in their original form—they dissolve, blur, skip frames, and reassemble. 누구의 기억 (Second Exposure) is a photographic series comprising of flood-damaged family images that have been rephotographed and encased in glass. As a diasporic artist, I occupy a space between cultures, and the glass functions as both a boundary and a conduit — mediating between past and present, presence and absence. Each image exists in a state of partial legibility, echoing the ambiguity of dreams and the instability of memory. The process of encasing the photographs in glass both preserves and distorts them, prompting reflection on what it means to remember across distance, time, and generational loss. Like the moment just after waking — uncertain whether what was seen was real or imagined — these works attempt to hold onto what resists preservation. This series becomes a quiet archive of emotional residue. It reflects on how memory does not survive as a fixed or objective record, but as a fragile, shifting imprint—one that is shaped as much by what is absent as by what remains.
Curtains
Emma Lee
Curtains anonymise us. Lace, jacquard, velvet. Stage curtains uphold a world of fantasy. For the performer, the curtain is the only thing that protects them from being stripped bare by the audience before stepping onstage. Curtains can create the illusion of space. One does not know what lies beyond until you lean back and find nothing.
On January 16, 2025, visionary filmmaker David Lynch died. Lynch was known for his surreal oeuvre which blended dreams and nightmares. In his films, characters seem to speak and act from a nother world. A world of trapped brutalised suburbias and a cauterized middle class. Lynch’s death gave me a feeling of churning dread. Suddenly his spirit haunted every small domestic object; dense eraser heads, hot black coffee and the curtains that hung limp and dusty around my living room.
Six days after his death, I found him again, in the ‘Magritte’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). René Magritte was a surrealist artist who, like Lynch, brought the everyday into unfamiliar spaces, blurring the lines of reality. Between surrealist scenes of floating bodies in unending deserts, layered bowler hats and apples. There Lynch was; in red curtains.
Passing through a scrim of tulle scallops, entering the ‘Magritte’ exhibition was like walking into another world.
As I pushed through the exhibition’s crowds into the belly of the show, the walls darkened. Concrete floor was replaced by soft black carpet. There, staring out at me, was Magritte’s Les Mémoires d’un Saint (The Memoirs of a Saint) (1960). In the centre of an intangible space, a ring of rich red curtains stood upright, drawn at the middle to reveal the sky.
Twin Peaks: The Return. Season 3. Aired 2017. Dir. David Lynch.
Les Mémoires d’un Saint reminded me of arguably the most recognisable image of David Lynch: the dreamscape ‘The Black Lodge’ from his 1990 series Twin Peaks. A room entirely wrapped in bright red curtains, with dizzying black and white chevron floors. What is hidden behind the curtains is unknown: an image representative of the tantalising mysteries of Lynch’s work. The similarities between Lynch’s ‘Black Lodge’ and Magritte’s painting are undeniable. However, the pieces prompt two different impressions. The curtains in Lynch’s film encompass the landscape, making it feel as if the world exists inside this space.
In contrast, Les Mémoires d’un Saint showcases the existence of a world beyond the curtains, pushing the viewer to question the limits of our material experience.
Seated in the cinema of the AGNSW on a quiet Wednesday afternoon, David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) played. We sat in communion in the theatre, captured by the red curtains that lined the walls. Set in a sooty factoryscape, the film explores dream sequences prompted by the gas of a leaking radiator that takes the protagonist, Henry, away from his industrial world. Inky blackscalloping envelops scenes of a deformed chanteuse who lures and enchants Henry. Although I was enchanted, the theatre grounded me in reality. I could step back into the Sydney sun and shed Lynch’s leering world. I could step beyond the theatre’s curtains.
I felt this same thrill at 6 years old, wrapped up in my grandmother’s curtains, breathing in thick dusty fabric, before staging a play. The thrill of falsehood, a safe lie, became accessible through the play. The curtain in Magritte and Lynch’s works acts as a protective barrier, the illusion of the dream that makes it safe to step into their transgressive worlds.
In January, around Lynch’s death, I made a set of curtains. It was a feverish Sydney summer. Sleeping fitfully, I became fixated on them. Creating curtains feels like a Sisyphean task, involving endless yards of floral fabric. Sewing by hand in your lap, the fabric pools and fills the world around you. Curtains disrupt; soften. Curtains create a stage on which we perform in our everyday lives. In the tragedy of Lynch’s death, I found a new thrill in the rediscovering of him. I found him in art, in the drapery around me. The nights I sewed those curtains, I would dream of them too. Red velvet, dense cartridge pleats that enfolded me. Perhaps in my dream, I should have pushed through them to find out what was on the other side.
René Magritte, Les mémoires d’un Saint (The Memoirs of a Saint), 1960.
Return To Sender
Alexandra Dent
Miss [REDACTED] 16/12/2024 21d [REDACTED] Rd [REDACTED], NSW, [REDACTED]
Dear [REDACTED]t
I want to apologise for the scene that I made at The Rose last Friday.
I am writing this letter at the recommendation of Dr Celine Bertuch (my Freudian psychoanalyst).
For the past week, I’ve had a recurring dream where I find you alone in the Quad General Lecture Theatre (K2.05). Only, when I sit beside you, the scenery changes – the wooden pews turn into the firm, purple leather seats of a V Set Intercity Train. You turn to speak, but when you do, your voice is Dr Bertuch’s (she finds this detail quite fascinating). You ask me if I miss you. The carriage smells musky and my mouth is dry and I want to tell you that I do miss you, but I can’t speak. I try to act out my re sponse, but I’m a bad mime. My limbs move slowly, as if wading through honey.
Regarding The Rose: I was thinking of the conversation we had – how exhausting it was. My words fell to the floor, soaked up by the sticky carpet. Your reactions: tepid; your responses: noncommittal. You are only half -listening, scanning the pub for someone more interesting to talk to.
You had a dinner party recently (for your birthday). I wasn’t invited, which I didn’t mind at first – until I saw that you invited Helena McLaughlin. This was strange to me; I know for a fact that you hardly know her. Did you invite her to spite me? Water off of a duck’s back, I told myself. Though as I tried to get to sleep that night (breathing in for four counts, holding for seven, exhaling for eight), I found that I couldn’t. I pictured you serving your signature dish
Only, when I sit beside you, the scenery changes – the wooden pews turn into
Intercity Train. You turn to speak, but when you do, your voice is Dr Bertuch’s (she finds this detail quite fascinating). You ask me if I miss you. The carriage smells musky and my mouth is dry and I want to tell you that I do miss you, but I can’t speak. I try to act out my response, but I’m a bad mime. My limbs move slowly, as if wading through honey.
Regarding The Rose: I was thinking of the conversation we had – how exhausting it was. My words fell to the floor, soaked up by the sticky carpet. Your reactions: tepid; your responses: noncommittal. You are only half -listening, scanning the pub for someone more interesting to talk to.
You had a dinner party recently (for your birthday). I wasn’t invited, which I didn’t mind at first – until I saw that you invited Helena McLaughlin. This was strange to me; I know for a fact that you hardly know her. Did you invite her to spite me? Water off of a duck’s back, I told myself. Though as I tried to get to sleep that night (breathing in for four counts, holding for seven, exhaling for eight), I found that I couldn’t. I pictured you serving your signature dish – fig and fennel spatchcock – followed by sweet, fragrant Moscato d'Asti paired with vanilla poached peaches for dessert. It was almost as though I’d been there, an invisible dinner guest. I wanted to cry.
I stood outside your Erskineville terrace yesterday. (It is almost unrecognisable at night!) Resting my head against the thin wall, I could feel the steady thrum of a double bass. I peered in through the window and there you were – a perfect tableau vivant. Wonderfully still under the dusky light of the lamp. Curls of steam were rising up from your tea and touching your nose. You were leafing through My Brilliant Friend, the copy I’d bought you for your birthday last year. Was this a sign? Perhaps some part of you could see that I was there. You looked so peaceful.
Back to The Rose: My words were coming out all wrong, but it didn’t matter because they never made it to your ears, and though I’ve never been one to resort to physical violence, it was the only way to reach you (you finally saw me!).
I’m tired of being the one to see and never the one who is seen. I hope you understand.
With love, Yours,
Kindest Warm Best Regards,
The dog wasn’t desexed, she jumped the fence
It’s a hydrangea, that one is agapanthus.
My shoes were broken, so my father walked me down
We took the train, through Europe, fruit picking in Greece
The cat wasn’t desexed, she ran away
Leather boots that never wore out
We drove a car through Europe, Spain
It’s a hydrangea, that one is an agapanthus.
Jess Watson
Smoking is one of the highest risk factors for dementia. The smell of cigarettes line the veins of the home where my Oma tells me cyclical stories from her past.
Oma asks where my Opa is and we tell her that he is in the garden. My mum’s voice breaks. My Oma’s face cracks into a smile.
Today, Oma called me by my mum’s name. In her eyes, I see a vision of myself, tracing my bloodline upstream until I reach my mother’s childhood years.
I am my mum. My mum is my aunt. In this room at St Andrews Old People’s Home, we exist only in a chrysalis of her past.
But the hydrangea remains a hydrangea. The agapanthus is still an agapanthus.
In the same year that Oma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, one of Australia’s most famous street artists, Rone, created his first immersive art exhibition ‘EMPTY’ in a deserted theatre in Fitzroy. Portraits of young women were painted directly onto the decaying building. Their flesh had been sold to developers before their birth and the building was demolished days after the exhibition closed. But for a week, people filled the liminal spaces of society, drawn to the ephemerality of the art. Of course, street art is also named graffiti, linguistically reframing the artform as delinquency and facilitating its erasure from public spaces.
born from its ephemerality, justifying a loss otherwise senseless.
A quote from Rone states:
“Something in a fragile state always seems more beautiful because you realise that they might not be there tomorrow.”1
Rone doesn’t argue that transient objects are more beautiful but rather that they seem more beautiful, linking transience and beauty in perception rather than quality. Rone relates this appreciation of fragility to the reason we visit our grandparents more than our aunties.
However, when deciding to switch off the life support for a grandmother than an auntie, we tend to have a lighter conscience. Our lives, in birth, in death, in sickness, quite literally lie in the hands of others, becoming dependent on our recognition as valuable. As Judith Butler writes, “to be a body to be exposed to social crafting and that is what makes the body a social ontology.”2
Life circles back to the idea of perception and its interpolation into reality. The grief we feel for someone is framed by the anticipated impermanence of their life, the predictability of their death.
For a long time, people thought Alzheimer’s, a disease which causes memory loss and severe cognitive decline, was a symptom of aging. For an old person, a mind’s wandering into abstraction was considered normal.
There is a certain tone in which people will speak to old people who are physically or mentally compromised. Hands on knees. A plaster smile. “How are we today?” follows. And that “we” is so damning, veiling an individual in the collective imagining of age, a space in which anything can happen. Grief is lessened because at least they were long-lived; at least.
At a funeral of a friend, I remember the imam saying, “everyone dies. Sometimes we die when we are seventy, sometimes when we are young”. At the time, I kept waiting for his speech to dissolve the viscous grief that my body was coated in. Later, when I was surrounded by good-willed people searching for patterns of meaning I would receive the:
at least life was so bright at least it gets better in time at least there are so many good memories at least.
Then, I understood the imam’s speech.
There is an age at which we cease to dream for the future of another because we consider the realistic potential of their aspiration to be less. Dreams, therefore, exist in a hierarchy. At twenty-one, my dreams are recognised as more achievable than they were at eight and more important than they will be at thirty when their value is eroded with age.
And when we lose our minds and dreams and reality become inseparable, socially, the meaning of a person is abstracted.
Before he moved to the retirement home, my Opa was concerned that he was the victim of theft. His neighbours had stolen the addresses out of his address book.
In the Bell Jar (1963), Sylvia Plath writes, “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream”.3 I laughed at the absurdity of Opa’s fear.
Genetics is linked to Alzheimer’s. It’s possible that at the very point of life when my hands have filled with memories, I will find the walls of my mind too eroded to keep them in.
My Opa walks out onto the front steps, tells me my painting is beautiful
It’s an agapantha, that one is a hydrangea
Got lost in the Sydney tunnels. Again
My Opa walks out onto the front steps, tells me my art is crap
Navigated through M4 using using adavanced google map reading It’s an agapantha, that one is a hydrangea.
1 A Multi-Disciplinary Artist Who Isn’t Easily Categorised, The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia, August 10, 2023. https://taustralia.com.au/t-australia-faces-rone/
2 Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009, p.7
3 Plath, S. 2005. Originally published 1963. The Bell Jar. London, England: Faber & Faber, p.259
Ghost Hunter
Arwen Beaumont-Lee
An old couple entered the cinema, carrying a Victorian porcelain doll with a painted half-smile; outstretched arms, fingers pointing up to the sky. They placed her beneath the projection, with flashing lights on either side of her white mary janes.
They were paranormal investigators, speaking before the screening of Pulse (2001), a Japanese ghost movie which neither had seen. The husband was a medium, and the wife was a clairvoyant empath. They frequented haunted sites, trying to detect ghosts with cameras, voice recorders, and infrared sensors. The doll was named Clare; she was possessed by the spirit of a girl who had died young and violently. She communicated with them via blinking battery lights. As the couple sat down, they left Clare to glow softly beneath the screen.
Pulse is about ghosts breaking into the physical world through the internet. The dead fade into black stains on the walls and reappear as glitches, haunting the living with endless loops of images on computer monitors.
After the movie, the couple lingered. The man spoke about seeing his dead brother on the couch after returning home from his funeral. He thought he was going crazy.
His brother said, “we have a lot of work to do”. Ghosts had followed him ever since.
I asked, “do you see ghosts in your dreams?”
“All the time”, he said.
He offered me Clare and I held her like a real baby. He smiled a big, toothless grin, and kept saying,
“We do it all for love”.
If you try hard enough, you can think a ghost into being. Imagine a figure by the window in dusty light. See a woman sitting on her front porch as you drive by. A whole life drifts before you in a passing glance.
You know her. You can see into her. When the car moves past the house, you can understand that she was not a seated woman, but a straw hat laying discarded atop a paint can. Know that she was real anyway. A silver fish will slip from your hands the moment you try to grab a hold of its tail.
Imagination blisters reality. With no references or associations, your reality expands to fill the day. This is freedom. Your consciousness dilates with practice. When you don’t know what to do, look for signs. Signs are miracles, appearing when you least expect
them. Death liberates suppressed material. It gets us closer to the things we haven’t discovered about ourselves yet.
When we die, the first we’ll say is, “I’ve been here before”.
Chris Kraus says the living can absorb the dead at any time, and therefore, our species has an infinite capacity for memory. Time is mixed with blood. These ideas draw on those of Philip K Dick under the influence of amphetamines in Valis (1981), where he claimed that the Gnostic empire never ended. He said that at death, the spirit transforms itself into a code that travels back into the world as information.2
You are made of time. It is the force that tells you who you are.Time is supposed to pass, but ghosts lack the ability to reconcile with this condition. Their present and futures are simultaneous. Ghosts fall from their experience of an objective world to the depths of infinite space–time, where they do not feel a sense of moving forward.
Like the ghost lemurs of Madagascar, their way of thinking is not oriented toward time, sequence and causality.3 If there is no time sequence except for what we conceive of, to make us at peace with the world, then it is possible to cross from one nameless state to another. Perhaps a gateway must be created between here and there.
The ghosts from Pulse use the internet as a conduit to make contact with the living, trapping them in a digital limbo. They can’t escape that liminal space, so they try to bring the living with them. Ghost hunting, like a belief in aliens, is a way of looking outside the self. It is an attempt to escape the imprisonment of the body; the alienation of being human.
“We do it all for love,” he said.
Communing with ghosts is a display of radical empathy, a oneness with everything. “By an extreme effort of concentration, you might be able to escape your flesh, to rise above and discover the true meaning of divine love,” says Kraus.4 Empathy is a loop. In this state, there is no separation between who you are and what you see.
I’m in my bedroom, smoking a cigarette out the window. I can see a ghost across the alley with long black hair. I don’t trust my eyes at first, thinking it must be a distortion made by raindrops on the window, a peripheral daydream. But the feeling, unlike anything I’ve felt before, makes it real. I start to record what I see in my notebook. I expect the vision to fade away as I replace it with words, but when I look away and back again, she’s still there. I know it’s all in my mind, but I’m looking at it with open eyes. When I let go of my fear, angels appear. A flower morphs into hands cupping dirt.
A woman lies on her back, head in the water of a flowing stream.
1. Kraus, Chris. Aliens and Anorexia, MIT Press, 2000.
2. Dick, Philip K. Valis, Bantam Books, 1981.
3. Burroughs, William. Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, Omni Publications International Ltd., 1987.
4. Kraus, Chris. Aliens and Anorexia, MIT Press, 2000.
