Alex Bennett

Typically, shine and shininess pronounce: superficial novelty, glitzy celerity, scintillant contingency, artificial transparency and frosty exclusivity. But shine is inherently slippery. Shine is excess. 

This project is a series of essays, with four proposed, on the subject of shine. Between them, a collection of inter-texts allows for darkness and materiality to emerge in the form of textual shadows. Throughout the project, shine is concatenated to a subliminal queer motivation to see, through shine and light, its capacity to enhance queer futurity.

Subjects have been chosen to destabilise the tacit significations of shine. These include: the materiality of plasticity, the work of Ed Atkins, a sequence of liquid experiments, the literature of Duncan Smith, the narcissistic surface, and the culture of tafheet racing.

As an optical reservoir, shine can twinkle between occlusion and revelation, provoking or revoking insight. In Shine, fascination and seduction become productive diversions; qualities become form; surplus assumes scale. Shine embodies the friction in what occurs when distraction is utilised, when excess becomes content.