For my whole career as a writer, I have been watching Adam Curtis films on the BBC and seeing them grow more abstract and unconventional, less about making an argument or recounting a history, and more about conjuring a feeling for a particular time and a place, and the excitements that it had to offer and the changes that were happening then. In 2015, Bitter Lake ended with the wish, “What is needed is a new story, and one that we can believe in.” In 2021, Can’t Get You Out of My Head concluded, more desperately, “We have to imagine a new future.” More recently, he has been looking for a new “language,” because, he says, we have not come up with a new story for society – of what we should want, or how we should live – but might still find new modes of expression to describe the present. (I asked if there’s anyone he seen that’s come close, and he replied, “No.”) Over the past couple decades, Curtis has influenced how I have come to think about the world, but also how I think about image-making and cultural production, and the failure of artists, filmmakers, musicians, novelists, journalists etc. to come up with new languages for the overwhelming and often thrilling feeling of being alive today, and the expanding complexity of selfhood, both of which have changed dramatically during this period.

Curtis’s most recent series, Shifty, evokes the feeling of the last 50 years in the UK through a jumpy, gleefully mischievous collage of archive footage and pop music, broadcast without any narrative voiceover, with only the odd burst of context and interpretation delivered as bold text overlay. It is, like much of life today, a bombardment of short video clips, flashing images, sans-serif captions and familiar songs from the past, combining – at least for me, having grown up in England during the time – into a devastatingly nostalgic, heartbreakingly melancholic ambience; again, like much of life today. His next project, possibly, might be a stage show that goes back to the New York City of the Eighties to search out the origins of the contemporary construction of the self and the performance of the real. Over two conversations in old wood-panelled rooms, we spoke of the problem of creativity, transcendent romantic love, the desire to escape the self, and how that might be done.

You may now read the whole interview from VICE’s THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE here:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/leaving-the-21st-century-adam-curtis-talks-to-dean-kissick/

Earlier this year I wrote a story called “The Deconstructionists” for Heavy Traffic Six. It is a story about fashion. You may now read it here:
https://www.heavytrafficmagazine.com/the-deconstructionists

This summer, I went to Shanghai for a month to act in a film that Irena Haiduk was making at the Rockbund Art Museum. More on that in a year or two. While I was there, I also kept a diary for VICE magazine’s Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue, which you can read below. VICE is back and now edited by the very brilliant Kevin Kharas. VICE has outlasted VIRTUE:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dean-kissick-vice-magazine-shanghai/

These very contemporary images, and I wrote an essay about them, “The Vulgar Image,” for the Vulgarity Issue of Spike Art Magazine. You can read it here:

https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/vulgarity-the-vulgar-image