Text page
k-punk Simon's interview with CCRU (1998)
An interview that makes the CCRU's theory-fictional method legible through scene language, provocation, and public self-explanation.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The interview matters because it captures the group in a relatively direct explanatory mode without abandoning the instability of names, styles, and positions that define the archive. Public explanation is itself part of the performance.
Question-and-answer form forces the CCRU orbit to translate itself for an external audience. The resulting simplifications, refusals, and tonal pivots reveal as much about scene construction as about doctrine.
This matters because interviews are one of the clearest points where the archive collides with public readability. The piece shows theory-fiction negotiating journalism, scene memory, and self-mythologizing in real time.
How to read this text
Read the questions for what they assume the CCRU is, then watch where the answers confirm, redirect, or intensify those assumptions.
Treat the interview as a public interface rather than a transparent confession. Its value lies in how explanation and performance intertwine.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
Blurring the borders between traditional scholarship, cyberpunk sci-fi and music journalism, the CRRU are striving to achieve a kind of nomadic thought that to use the Deleuze & Guattari term—“deterritorializes” itself every which way: theory melded with fiction, philosophy cross-contaminated by natural sciences (neurology, bacteriology, thermodynamics, metallurgy, chaos and complexity theory, connectionism), academic writing that aspires to the future-shock intensity of jungle and other forms of post-rave music.
Definition · paragraph 9
I mix up different linguistic registers and narrative strategies so that the text writhes in the hands of the reader. In that respect, there's a lot more to be learned from fiction than theory.” Here Fuller chimes in with Sadie Plant, whose forthcoming Writing On Drugs will include a fictional component, and who hopes her future books will become “pure fiction.” “The most enjoyable aspect of CCRU is that they are a gang—Ph.D. students with attitude!,” says Eshun.
History · paragraph 1
k-punk « THE VANISHING WORKING CLASS | Main | CONTINUOUS CONTACT » JANUARY 20, 2005 SIMON'S INTERVIEW WITH CCRU (1998) (Was talking about this last night with Matt Woebot; it's no longer up on Simon's site, so I think it's time it got another airing.
History · paragraph 4
Another Land-influenced theory-fiction collective, O[rphan] D[frift>] are CRRU's prime allies: they performed at the CCRU-organised Virtual Futures 96 conference at Warwick, and are set to stage an event in collaboration with CCRU/Switch at London's Beaconsfield Arts Centre, October of this year.
History · paragraph 1
RENEGADE ACADEMIA Simon Reynolds “CCRU retrochronically triggers itself from October 1995, where it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat. ...CCRU feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers +....
Appears in sections
Theory-Fiction and Cyberstyle Primary section
How theory-fiction, cyberpunk prose, and anti-academic style became part of the archive's method.