Colour Out of Space: Altered States and Cosmic Legacies

Delivered by Susan Finlay and Matt Williams

The launch of  Doodles in the Dark: An Artist’s Guide to Lucid Dreaming. Followed by a conversation between Dave Green and John Higgs.

3pm: Zoo Hotel Delirium by Stephen Barber, read by Matt Williams

3.20pm: Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power and the Will to Live, written and read by Amber Husain

3.40pm: Bonding written and read by Mariel Franklin

Jamie Sutcliffe discusses Weeb Theory, with illustrations by Zoë Taylor. 

Live music performance

Susan Finlay reads from The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, followed by a conversation with Richard Stanley.

Colour Out of Space (2019) 
Directed by Richard Stanley

Stephen Barber is a research professor and Research Centre Director at the Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, with a PhD awarded by the University of London. He has held fellowships and research positions at institutions across the world, including the California Institute of the Arts, the Berlin University of the Arts, the University of Tokyo, and most recently the Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University. His work has been supported by grants from bodies including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the British Academy, and the Japan Foundation, among many others.

Since the early 1990s, Barber has authored thirty-five single-authored books, spanning both fiction and non-fiction, covering subjects from Antonin Artaud and Jean Genet to urban photography, butoh dance, and European cities. His books have been acclaimed by The Times as “brilliant, profound and provocative,” and the Times Literary Supplement described him as having “quietly, independently forged one of the most singular and enriching bodies of work in contemporary writing.” His writing has been translated into numerous languages including Japanese, Chinese, French, and Russian, and four new books are forthcoming in 2026.

Dave Green is a London based artist who creates simple line drawings in his lucid dreams which he re-creates upon waking up. Lately he has been experimenting with giving his pen and paper to other people in his dreams to see what they create. His art has been featured in BBC Science Focus and DreamTime magazine. He has lectured about his work at Tate Modern and is the subject of a documentary by The World Science Festival called ‘The Dreaming Pen’.

John Higgs is a Brighton-based writer who specialises in uncovering hidden narratives in history and culture. His books span subjects from Timothy Leary and the KLF to William Blake and the future of the twenty-first century, and his work is currently being translated into seven languages. MOJO described reading him as being “shot with a diamond,” while Frank Cottrell Boyce noted his ability to take any subject and “poke at it until it yields up its secrets.” A prolific public speaker, he has appeared at the Tate Britain, the British Library, the Brighton Festival, and the Port Eliot Literary Festival, among many others. 

His books have drawn praise from an impressive range of voices: Alan Moore called Stranger Than We Can Imagine “breathtakingly lucid… a work of massive insight,” Terry Gilliam said William Blake Vs The World was “absolutely wonderful,” and The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds was named one of the top ten music books of 2013 by The Guardian, The Independent, and MOJO. Before writing full-time, Higgs directed over a hundred episodes of animated pre-school television, created the long-running BBC Radio 4 quiz series X Marks the Spot, and worked as a producer on videogames for Xbox, PlayStation 2, and Nintendo GameCube. 

Amber Husain is a writer based in South London. She is the author of Meat Love (Mack, 2023) and Replace Me (Peninsula Press, 2021). Her essays on politics, literature and art have been published in Granta,  the LRB,  ArtReview,  Bookforum,  Vittles,  The Nation,  Baffler, T he Believer,  LA Review of Books  and  New York Times Magazine, amongst many others. She has a PhD from UCL on the history of art and psychosomatics. Her third non-fiction book, Tell Me How You Eat, was published by Hutchinson Heinemann (UK) and Atria Books (US) in 2026. 

Kenichi Iwasa is a London based improviser and multidisciplinary artist from Japan. Also known for his legendary event Krautrock Karaoke night, he has collaborated with visual artists and musicians such as Beatrice Dillon, Maxwell Sterling and Linder Sterling.
 

He currently performs with Naima Karlsson under the name Exotic Sin and released LP on Blank Forms. Most recent live and recording collaborations have been with Neneh Cherry, David Ornette, Cherry, Tyson, Denardo Coleman, Rebecca Salvador, Alexis Taylor, Visio, Heith, Finley Clark, Lutto Lento, and Blood Music 

Susan Finlay is the author of the novels The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, The Jacques Lacan Foundation, My Other Spruce & Maple Self, Objektophila, and Arriviste, and the anti-memoir, The Lives of the Artists. Her books have been White Review Books of the Year, Anti-Capitalist Books of the Year, and many independent bookstore and art galleries’ Recommended Reads. They also appear within the photographic backdrops of lifestyle magazine features and in several episodes of Fashion Neurosis. 

Indeed, having originally studied Visual Art at Camberwell and the Royal College of Art, London, many of the same longstanding preoccupations—be they trend-forecasting, psychoanalysis, and/or the glorious consumerism of Georges Bataille—inform Susan’s writing regardless of subject or genre. Her essays have been commissioned for artists’ books by Zoe Williams, MV Brown, Lucy McKenzie, and Reba Maybury, as have similarly themed fictional pieces for anthologies including Werkplaats Typografie’s Pure Fiction, Pilot Press’ Untitled (eye with comet), and Map Magazine’s Out-of-Office: Auto-Reply. Her cultural criticism has been published in magazines such as Tate Etc., Frieze, Spike, Art Review, A Rabbit’s Foot, and Motor Dance Journal. Her poems and short stories in POETRY, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Stinging Fly, and The Toe Rag.

More recently, Susan completed an AHRC funded PhD at the University of Manchester. This focussed on the use of Institutional Critique as an educational methodology and was the result of over a decade sneaking into the womenswear departments of UK FE and HE arts organisations (i.e. doing something besides the teaching she was officially paid for). Although this led to the realisation that she dislikes traditional academic structures regardless of whether her relationship to them is as a lecturer or student, some of the tropes she observed within these organisations informed the exhibition Inland Far, co-curated with Mimei Thompson at the Herbert Read Gallery in Canterbury.

Other collaborative projects include the literary programmes Screen Time and Recreation for a.p., the former publication space at Callie’s, and REAL EKPHRASIS with Erin Honeycutt for ChertLuedde, both Berlin; the performance The Annual General Meeting for Artefacts Projects, Birmingham, UK; the multi-format artists and writers’ organ, Jour Mal Jour Nal; and the art-music collective Holiday Instruments. Previously, Susan was an associate editor at JOAN; founded the Coelacanth Press with Phoebe Blatton, where she co-edited four editions of the biannual journal; and founded the independent publisher MOIST, with her father, Paul Finlay, which she co-ran until Summer 2025. The final book that she commissioned and edited was Nell Osbourne’s Ghost Driver, ​which won the 2026 Queen Mary Small Press Prize. 

Besides the above, Susan continues to produce—but rarely exhibit—visual art (an archive of which can be accessed here).  She has undertaken artist residences in China, Greece, Lithuania, North America, and the UK, and now resides, for the most part, in Germany. 

Mariel Franklin lives and works in London. Her debut novel, Bonding, was published in the UK in 2024 and the USA in 2025. After studying English Literature and then Fine Art, she found herself managing data for the tech industry. For several years, she led a double life, spending her days working in the Square Mile and her nights immersed in the rarefied, hedonistic world of contemporary art. It was during this time that she began writing about her observations of the manners and expectations shaping each field – particularly around ideals of freedom, individuality and sex – expectations filled with paradoxes that are quickly coming to a head. 

Jamie Sutcliffe is a writer, curator, and co-director of Strange Attractor Press. He is the editor of the books Documents of Contemporary Art: Magic, published by The Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press (2021),  Weeb Theory  (2023) published by Banner Repeater, and the author of Let Me Work! an experiment in comics criticism forthcoming from Breakdown Press. His essays, reviews, and interviews have been published internationally by Art Monthly,  Art Review,  e-flux,  Frieze,  The White Review,  Rhizome,  The Quietus, and Bricks From The Kiln amongst others.He is Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts, London. 

Zoë Taylor’s comic Joyride launched with Breakdown Press in 2017 and was exhibited by Lagon Revue in the major survey “Le Chemin De Terre” at the Pompidou Centre in 2024. Her sequences have also appeared in international comics anthologies. Mirror Vault Secret Door was published by Foot Books in 2024. She is currently developing drawings for Let Me Work! a co-authored research project exploring the legacies of anime and manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, forthcoming from Breakdown Press. 

Richard Stanley is a South African-born filmmaker whose passion for cinema began at age four with a 16mm print of King Kong and a childhood love of Ray Harryhausen. After winning the IAC International Student Film Trophy in 1989, beating entries from UCLA and USC — he helped establish the Cape Town Film and Video School, the first of its kind on the continent. Drafted into the Angolan Bush War in the mid-eighties, he fled to London, where he found work directing music videos for bands including The Fields of the Nephilim, Public Image Limited, and S-Express, building a reputation as a distinctive visual artist. 

His first feature, Hardware (1990), was followed by Dust Devil (1992) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), all of which became cult favourites, though he was famously removed from the Moreau set after just four days, an episode later chronicled in the acclaimed 2014 documentary Lost Soul. After more than two decades away from feature filmmaking, Stanley returned in 2019 with The Colour Out of Space, starring Nicolas Cage, which opened to rave reviews and went on to become, according to Netflix’s global data, the most popular standalone sci-fi horror feature of the Covid era.