Robin Mackay, Slade Contemporary Art Lecture Series 2012-13

Provenance

Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Should we go lower? Let's continue. I bet everyone makes that joke. Oh, that's good, yeah. Is that okay? Yeah. Okay, thanks very much, David. Thanks for inviting me, and thanks everyone for being here. I'm slightly disappointed now that I don't get any fancy dress, but maybe next time. So the main thing I'd like…

• 00:10:56

  He was a photographer in the early 20th century. He was a photographer in the early 20th century. These are photographs, which are virtually indistinguishable from the virtual models, in fact. These are photographs of the sites. These photographs are then employed in a painstaking virtual reconstruction. The mastery…

• 00:22:58

  The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. Its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there that had not had any expression…

• 00:34:42

  The impenetrability in principle of the superficially reconstructed building and the durational nature of its virtual environment, reemphasize this inexhaustibility. But this proxy experience is complicated by the physical form of a work that constitutes both its technical support and an installation into which it's…

• 00:46:51

  And of the depiction of which, Scheler says, perhaps only half jokingly, it's my illustration of what a beautiful world it would be if there were no people in it. They are the ruins of something whose cryptic promise seduced the human race into assisting in its emergence, but which conspicuously failed to engender…

• 00:59:02

  So there is no permanent image. It's being created all the time by this virtual model inside the computer. So I think that in itself is another subject, but it's a very different kind of image. As to... Do you mean if we were to make another model of this and it had been painted up and looked nice, would it be... It…

• 01:12:20

  And after all, it's not such an unreasonable proposition if you think about it. That humans are not the center of the universe. And also, as I said, I think there's a kind of timeliness to it in the fact that, yeah, we're contemplating the planet without us. We're contemplating that real possibility right now. There's…

• 01:27:00

  There's a question of kind of whether there's some suspicious weakness in the human perceptual apparatus that... that lays it open to being lured by this kind of repetitive modular aesthetic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly the way I'm thinking about it, really. Yeah. I think I do have…