The Middle People

Rush Hour In the Studio

Mikey has collaborated with the Portugese artist António Olaio. Working as The Middle People they believe making contingent art as a real fiction becomes a process of reconciliation. At the heart of their exhibition Revenge of the Killjoys is a video made with documentary film editor Cameron Poole, Rush Hour in the Studio. Their digital assemblage is a crude stick in the spokes of chrono-normative ideas of image and meaning making. The video’s kaleidoscopic assemblage broadcasts the plasticity of identity and meaning in a region both outside and inside the institutional values of a user-experience world. This asks the question can we blur our differences and make meaning from the placebo belief of collaborative fiction, built with improvised joy?

Perfect,                               Screen-painting on linen, 2025

 

 

 

Revenege of the Killjoys installation view

 

 

Their exhibition at Farsight Collective Gallery sees a face off between their paintings. These are tapestries of plastic certainty, inviting the viewer to become devourer. Antonio pushes the virtuoso skills of representation to a point of disintergration and Mikey pulls the always disintegrating paint into representation where upon it reveals itself as image.

 

 

 

Visitors are welcomed by the large print-painting The impossibility of magic in the mind of a dead shark, which celebrates the absurdity of enlightenment (distantiated) thinking. Rather than pretending not to be a part of in order to create the truth of analytical thought, this art seeks to be entangled in an emerging lyric. It is, says Mikey, an arm around the shoulder of the Killjoy and this reconciliation could be the revenge of the exhibition.

 

Q&A event hosted by Richard Strange 8/2/25

 

Photograph: Christina Jansen 2025

 

 

Re’Lyrik

Taking their lead from Fred Moten re=lyrik aim to introduce the tactile sound of the lyric-voice into critical theory.

Re-Lyrik are research duo Prof Tony Sampson and a Dr Mikey Georgeson. They have created the fucked-cut-up “Inauguration of Innocence” for the Capacious Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. Marking the US presidential inauguration the assemblage invokes the capacity for possibility in this unfathomable future. The title cuts into Blake’s Auguries of Innocence which serves as a manifesto of immanence in the detournement of reversed Platonism.

 

Lyric voice – I spent 5 years researching how I feel most alive in the region of vibrant matter when all the time the memos screamed what’s the plan? A lot of friendly complex theory (Barad, Bennet, Malabou, Stengers, Debaise, Sampson, Bergson, Whitehead) led to the simple process of collaborating with matter in ritual.

Contingency – There is joyful complexity in dumb making-do that outstrips the pre-given ideas of a distantiated observer.

mAikey & the Blurryman is an installation I created based on an image (background below) that the hugging-face Ai generated from prompts regarding the folk figure Burryman and visual data.

In effect I was serving the servant and it is here that we find jouissance of crawling from the wreckage. Every second is only as long as the last one. Listening to the metronome hear this pink rupture of the grid in lyric gunk.

Read my thesis “Aesthetic Machines Entanglement and Affect” here.

 

 

a shift to understanding in improvised commitment.
only forward only joy

 

 

The Liminal middle (above) is a recent film made for the touring event Alchemy, curated by Matt Hulse. It includes a film about Isaac Newton made my son Ralf Georgeson for his school homework. Ralf is also drumming in the film. An expression of the feeling of the tapestry of emerging meaning that comes from an approach to life as a ceremony of making do and mending.

The Cloak of Longing is an experiment in bringing a ceremony of contingent commitment into life. In June 2023 Holly Crawford of the AC Institute to San Diego invited us to perform this reconciliatory ritual at their new Liberty Station venue. I am also grateful to the Museum of New Americans who helped make it possible. Only Forward Only Joy.

Meaning Inside The Event

We are the cosmos inside the singing and hearing of stories. The speculative that extra-embodied denizens of a perpetual Eco-synaptic, Bio-AesthetiK Ontology

Performative Painter in Temporal Substance

email: the vessel