The Radiant Joy of Negativity: Introduction to Open Secret Graz
This Open Secret screening took place in the context of the Ultrablack Non-ference of Mille Plateaux II in April 2025 at Klub Kunst Kräftner. Palais Sinclaire’s introduction was recorded and edited by Polymnia Tsinti.
Palais Sinclaire
I will make, now, a fairly brief introduction to the screening tonight, because it’s happening in the context of this Mille Plateaux Non-ference, so I thought it might be useful to kind of explain first what is Open Secret and how it ended up being included in this program that brought us to Graz this week.
So I can say, hello. My name is Claire, and I'm one of the directors of an independent publishing house called Becoming Press. And I would say that if projects can have a life of their own, that notion should include a capacity for friendship—as what is life without friends? Or should I say comrades?
So in that sense, Becoming Press is friends with Mille Plateaux and we have collaborated a lot together, such as with the publication of Achim Szepanski’s work on Baudrillard. But Becoming Press has another BFFE called Open Secret, which is a kind of touring audiovisual project curated by Dana Dawud. We organised an edition of Open Secret before in Lisbon as part of the book launch of Unconscious/Television back in January 2025.
So this is my second time introducing this event, but I promise I will not speak for one hour this time. And I will not mention Lacan, except for just now. One of the reasons that Open Secret is brilliant is because it can be plugged into anything, like an event stored on a USB stick—which in a way it literally is.
When we arranged Open Secret Lisbon and Graz, we were simply sent a playlist of films to be deployed. So this USB stick has been plugged in all over the world now, whether that's Lisbon, Tehran, Hong Kong, China, London. And it reminds me of an anecdote from my past when I used to DJ a lot back in Cyprus. There was this kind of iconic figure in the rave scene that used to say, I have a magic USB stick. That same literal USB stick is plugged in over there and it's full of magic ones again.
But besides just being friends, I think there is a conceptual connection between Becoming Press and Open Secret, which I believe is also relevant as a connection between the three with Mille Plateaux. And I think that topic could be Negativity. This came up last time I introduced Open Secret, and I will give a brief overview of this as context and as an introduction to the practice and maybe even the aesthetics of Open Secret.
So a while ago now, we were introduced to the concept of CoreCore, by one of the most passionate progenitors of the movement, who has become a very dear friend of Becoming Press. You might know them as The Ontological Turnt. When speaking with him, CoreCore is a play on the concept of core, which dominated aesthetics for a certain period. You would be familiar with words like Cottagecore or Fairycore or whatever. So then the question is: what happens if you reflexively turn the core back on itself and you have the core of the core?
One thing led to another, and this character, in collaboration with the brilliantly named project On My Computer, organised a conference on CoreCore, which brought together some super cool people including Dana Dawud, Louis Morelle, Redacted Cut, and so on. That conference led to the publication of a book on CoreCore, published by Becoming Press. There are a couple of copies here you can have a look at.
Between the book and the conference on the topic of CoreCore, one of the most interesting things that came up was the topic of Negativity. I will not read the essay again today, but there is an essay in the book by Persis Bekkering, where she argues that CoreCore revolves around the deployment of Negativity.
The last time I introduced Open Secret, I had the privilege of sitting on stage with one of our authors, Lucas Ferraço Nassif, and they said something that I think is quite brilliant in terms of thinking about this idea of CoreCore. First, for now, I will say that CoreCore as a technique seems to stem from the pitting of images against each other—or as Louis Morelle said, “images concatenated against each other.” It can sometimes feel a bit like flicking through the television channels with a remote control, with sequences of sometimes unrelated material bombarding you.
There is a kind of subversion here of the logic of the algorithm. And there is a sense of assigning primacy to the position of the editor. But what came up in the last talk was that between these clips, in the gaps between these images that are being pitted against each other, certain things jump out.
So Lucas's work on the Unconscious, which he has a book here that you can also look at today, turns to Japanese animation to elaborate on the Unconscious. He looks at anime specifically because it is often, according to Thomas Lamarre, a multi-planar composition, which means that there are different layers, some of which are sometimes static. And he argues that there is something that jumps out from the gaps between the layers.
So Lucas brought attention at the last Open Secret in Lisbon to the name CoreCore. And I quote: “CoreCore is two words, but it is the same word, and there is a mirror stage between the Cores, because who is going to confirm what the Core is? There was a kind of black hole of self-referentiality, or schizophrenia, if you're reading from Guattari, where the Core collapses and you have essentially a nothingness.”
CoreCore, in a way, does what Dada does with the word Da being the signifier of “there” in German. Where is the there between the there and the there? Who is going to confirm where there is?
Now I wouldn't say the Open Secret is exclusively CoreCore, though the curator and collaborators often recognise that the formation of this social group happened concurrently with the conference proceedings and the book on CoreCore. So there is perhaps a connection between the aesthetics of Open Secret and CoreCore, but it is not limited to that.
Perhaps it would be more helpful to think about Open Secret in the sense that now instead of talking about CoreCore, we're often talking about Internet Cinema, and it takes this as its kind of blank signifier. And I can elaborate on that by saying that there is this really iconic quote from the curator, Dana: Guys, there is no Internet Cinema. And I would agree with that. Internet Cinema doesn't exist, and yet we are sitting in it today. It's another nothingness like CoreCore.
So I see this negativity or reflexivity as the bridge between Open Secret and Mille Plateaux. And of course, when I'm talking about Negativity, I mean it in the philosophical sense—the kind of Negativity that we are talking about when thinking about Semiotics and Signs. In actuality, one of the things I love about Open Secret is that it's very life-affirming, it's positive in that sense, as the friendship between the collaborators, the fun they have whilst doing something that is arguably quite avant-garde.
So we are here today, essentially subtracting a Negative from another Negative. We are taking up some schedule in the Non-ference with Open Secret. So we're subtracting one negative (Open Secret) from another (Mille Plateaux), and in mathematics this generally produces a Positive.
So Dana Dawud, the curator of Open Secret, described this project as exhibiting portals into artistic practices, portals into different semiotic realms, whether that be in New York, in Zurich, or in Palestine, or wherever. So on behalf of Open Secret, Becoming Press and Mille Plateaux, I invite you to watch these films together with us today. I encourage you to think about the aesthetics and the deployment of the material, but I also encourage you to just sit back and enjoy, because as Louis Morelle said: “None of this demands any explanation. Analysis or criticism is an interaction that we choose to do—in this case for fun, if you can believe that—but it is not necessary, and there are multiple semiotic registers which Open Secret bursts into.”
And I wanted to double down on this point because of a conversation I had with Lars yesterday, that it's really okay to have fun sometimes. We need to. It is unproductive to wallow in powerlessness and misery; sometimes resistance means maintaining our mental health and proactively loving and being loved.
Because, you know, when speaking of having fun, and as I said, I borrow this from a conversation I had just yesterday... what does it mean to have fun? When I think back at the most fun times of my life, it can often be five days without sleep in the 45 degrees heat of Cyprus, struggling against exposure, carrying kilos and kilos of magazines from the print shop to my apartment.
Because fun doesn't just mean consumption or some kind of serotonin release to me. It rather means something more like life-affirming, something that makes you feel like it's all worth it. Something that inspires revolutionary hope or revolutionary ideas. There's nothing fun about heat exhaustion, but believe it or not, I met Lain in that same desert, in those same conditions of intensity and sleep deprivation. And when you have limited access to water, you must take refuge in the oasis of friendship and in community.
Becoming Press was also forged in that furnace, and I believe Mille Plateaux was a bright idea that emerged at the peak of an acid trip. Becoming Press, Open Secret, and Mille Plateaux are grounds for you to exit the semiotic realm of the mainstream, of the king, of the city and the centre, and enter the semiotic realm of the periphery, where Jaguars like Achim Szepanski roam—you never know if they're going to eat you alive or lead you to something sacred. And that is the risk that makes me feel alive. And that is what I consider fun in a way.
So whatever fun means, let's try to have some tonight, whether that means laughing or crying. So, thank you very much.