Oscar Nimmo
b. 1993

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No Place
14 August—6 September 2026

I was going to use an excerpt from an H.P. Lovecraft story as the show text, but then I found out he was a horrible racist so I decided not to. In hindsight, this probably should have been clear from the work itself. It’s all very obsessed with the ‘other’ and how spooky that can be, not to mention his track record with naming pets… Anyway, the excerpt I had in mind comes from the introduction to his most famous cosmic tale, The Call of Cthulhu (1926). It describes the inevitable progression of science and knowledge towards ‘terrifying vistas of reality’ hitherto unseen by humans. According to Lovecraft, upon experiencing this unmasked reality, we humans will either go insane and crash out, or recede from this ‘light’ back to the comforts of a new pre-technological era. Very scary indeed.

Written in the period between two world wars, it’s understandable how someone might arrive at that conclusion. But I don’t know, this ‘piecing together of dissociated knowledge’ as described by Lovecraft, doesn’t sound all that bad to me. Someone told me recently that you can cook a whole chicken inside a rice cooker. If that’s not proof that leaning into alterity isn’t the evil it’s cracked up to be, I’m not sure what is.

This is not to say that the new should be pursued with mindless enthusiasm. Clinging onto a utopian ideal of newness is the exact kind of foolhardy approach that Lovecraft is weary of. There is indeed no place for utopia (as made clear in the original use of the word), by definition it is an impossible aspiration. Much like my attempt to mimic the perfectly digital gradients that appear on my computer screen, it is frustratingly unattainable. But if there is a chance to get a quick glimpse at it, it won’t be by turning away.

I haven’t tried cooking chicken in a rice cooker yet, but I suspect it will be both strange and very tasty.