DB10 - Unhinged, obscene, and disruptive -

Tim talks about the most famous person he met by hating on him at length in beeps! Melletios thinks Tims skirt looks like a tablecloth with ambition and that he stole it from Despina's (Melleltios's mum) dowry box . We look at Manet’s Olympia through Astrid Lorange’s lecture on trans panic and from the census and its shifting definition of family, we follow Lorenzo Veracini’s idea of settler colonialism as a world turned inside out rather than upside down: displacement instead of revolution, the quarter acre block, Jefferson’s land speculation, and how more categories isolate people just enough to stop them revolting.

Then Tim sets up Heather Berg’s porn work and porn anti work, from wages against housework to reality TV, Uber and OnlyFans, and we ask why a cock in a gallery gets dismissed instead of looked at. Justice Potter Stewart knew it when he saw it. Then Tim pays Melletios a compliment he didn’t ask for, and Melletios learns he is, apparently, a very game man.

Further Reading

Heather Berg, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, 2021

Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 2010

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor, 2012

Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework, 1975

Robert Menzies, The Forgotten People, 1942

In this episode we talk about anarchy. Through the scholarship of Bima Satria Putra, David Wengrow, and Stevphen Shukaitis, we explore the longer histories of anarchy in South East Asia. Long histories of refusal, separation and difference emerge across the archipelago in response to various forms of centralised authority. History shows anarchy always wins. Instead of anarchy coming at the end of “civilisation,” it can be thought of as the start of experimentation in different communal organisation. We discuss how this refusal is always also a refusal of centralised gender and sexuality. We descend into the problematics of classification and dive into the violence at the centre of white nationalism as productive of difference where there is none. Then Melletios gets angry on a bus, and Tim finds a gun hilarious.

Further Reading

Bima Satria Putra, Anarchy in Alifuru, 2025

Bima Satria Putra, David Wengrow, and Stevphen Shukaitis, Fire Tribes and Stateless Worlds: A Conversation, e-flux, 2026

Dagmar Herzog, The New Fascist Body, 2025

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, 2021

Shukaitis, S. and Figiel, J., The Wages of Dreamwork Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labor. Minor Compositions, 2024

Hakim BeyT.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone , 1991

In this episode Melletios and Tim discuss charity collectors,hot lecturers, wheelchairs using bike lanes and a design for a perfect cow killer. We (finally) get to Paul Preciado’s Pharmacopornography. We discuss the history of biopower via Kodak, fallout shelters and Miss Atomic Bomb. All of this for Tim to arrive at his “trauma” of being kicked out of a mall by mall cops. This shit is killing us, so listen along if you want it to kill you too. x

"Gustave" typically refers to either the infamous man-eating Nile crocodile in Burundi or the French civil engineer behind the Eiffel Tower. from wikipedia just sayin

Links to smarter people:

Paul Preciado, Testo Junkie

Beatriz Colomina,  X-Screens: Röntgen Architecture

J. Logan Smilges Crip Negativity

In this episode our painting is selected for the Salon des Refusés, and Melletios goes to the opening. He embarrasses himself but somehow makes friends with Craig Foster. Meanwhile Tim tries to start, but Melletios needs to know what brand of salt Tim puts in his hair. Eventually Tim discusses Effigy Attack and the laws around paintings being treated as actual humans (for the purposes of being hanged during the French revolution). If a painting can come alive so it can be harmed, how can we think of contemporary painting and AI as the ghost of deep traumas in excess of photography? How can we think of the new laws around AI generated porn as the tip of the iceberg? Where each AI image holds the traces of the image based work and extractive mining that are required for the spectacle to appear. Can “alive” paintings reveal that  ‘truth emerges through art as revelation rather than representation’ (Bogna Konior, 2026).

Links:

• Blak Douglas Artist Website
• Karla Dickens at AGNSW Website
• Laurel Nakadate Artist Website
• Wangechi Mutu at MoMA
• Up in the Sky by Tracey Moffatt 1997
• War in the Age of Infinite Evidence: On AI-Generated War Photography, Bogna Konior, 2026
• Seeing Against Seeing by Alexey Yurenev 2023-2025

DJ Delicious Mellicious takes a call from his mum and explains to her what a podcast is. We discuss why clapping alone is weird, but it’s even weirder when people clap alone, together. Melletios just wants to be clapped to sleep. Tim just wants to make music with a pasta machine. Both just want to be an anti-fascist spectacle. We discuss the history of the spectacleas moving from being to having to appearing. Appearance is always a fantasy we can’t have. And the hottest fantasy around is Heated Rivalries, a show about ice hockey, homoerotica and gentle (fascist) love. We delve into the history of sport asthe way we learn nationalism, and now homonationalism. We unpack the “naturalisation” of violence and sex, ableism and ageism, competition and desire that sport feeds us. It is a fantasy that is cruelly presented to an audience whose lived experience is one of disappointment and anxiety. But the anti-spectacle is here to help. It offers a pathway out of this tragic fantasy. Come and be bored with us.

Further reading/looking/listening:

Jasbir K. Puar Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times

Melletios’ various artworks (clapping, unanthem)

Kaylene Whiskey Artworks

Ordinary Unhappiness on Heated Rivalries

Parker Bright’s protest/art/performances

Dagmar Herzog, The New Fascist Body

Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism:Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis

In this episode we discuss (eventually) Roland Barthes’ 1973“The Pleasure of the Text”. We dive into the cut between pleasure and bliss, administration and abolition, comprehension and noise. We travel vertically through time, trying to escape the horizontality of property, debt and prisons. How can we find the vertical when we are forced to wait? How can we reclaim agency from the narrative fantasies we are told to desire? Can we find a nihilistic truth at fantasy’s ultimate end point (hint, a special guest returns that no one asked for). Oh and Melletios somehow makes Tim paint again.

Elia Suleiman, The Time That Remains , 2009 (Full Movie)

Faith Wilding, Waiting, 1972

Sabrina Carpenter, House Tour, 2025

In this episode we talk about making art in the end times. Whathappens when the end doesn’t come? Melletios runs around naked, Tim takes drugs to dull the pain, and Malevich is stuck painting squares, forever. We discuss eschatology and the death drive as opposing forces in art making that tries to deal with the death of art (and everything else). We throw in dead supervisors, Heaven’s Gate cult, Lars Von Tres’ Melancholia and a sad triangle. Can art reclaim a power at the end that isn’t sublimated to fascist aesthetics, or the cold post-conceptualism of “smoothing the pillow” of capitalism? Oh and zombiesreturn, because, well, they are zombies.

Recorded in a gallery full of ghosts, tradie dust, and caffeine. Art school nostalgia, fascist cubes, horny helium metaphors, the politics of skill versus expression. Teenage HSC trauma & Morandi's fascism. Claude Cahun's anti-fascist love story & the erotic tragedy of the Australian adult. Shame, cringe, pedagogy, the death of sincerity in a world obsessed with skill. Seriousness as rebellion. Expression as failure. Failure the only thing still alive.

follow us on Instagram DB10

Recorded inside an echoing Tin Sheds Gallery at Sydney University while tradies lay floorboards in the next room and reality starts to warp.

Teenage dancers take down the monarchy.

A Rolex gets scratched into a manifesto.

Hornsleth buys a village with livestock.

The line between satire and sincerity dissolves.

Silence becomes violent. Cringe becomes sacred.

Art school gets roasted.

Silence is political.

John Cage was 15 once.

This is a lecture .

There’s a theory for everything.

It’s a soft revolution with scaffolding still up.

DB10 Instagram

Straightness collapses in on itself, the gallery becomes a scene of violence, and PornHub statistics replace national identity? This episode dives into queer public sex, Mona Hatoum’s electrified domesticity, the failures of heterosexuality as both ideology and kink, and the lingering scent of burnt patriarchy in art spaces that still smell like bleach. A lecture, a glitch, a beat you won’t be the same after.

Db10 insta

0:00 DB10 begins in chaos: failing audio, artist manifestos, and being an artist by saying you are one

1:29 Coercive networking, follower-capture, and saying “I do this now” as art

2:40 Spelling DB10 wrong, dumb fuckers, and uninvited comedy

3:36 Visual arts are dead: the Gregorian calendar and imagination as practice

5:01 Creation myths, AI entropy, and the horror of accurate reproduction

6:46 AI’s subtle sabotage, fuller lips, face swaps, and algorithmic seduction

8:46 Labour of glitching, Haraway, ontology, and AI’s colonised learning curves

10:01 Mona Hatoum’s Homebound: domestic space, electricity, and dinner table dread

12:15 Art galleries are hospitals: nostalgia, smells, Greek backyards, and cultural erasure

16:00 Structural vs personal trauma, sparking jets, and the colonial conduit

17:08 Is it the spark or the state? Domestic violence as state violence

18:42 Kids hate galleries: forced field trips and the dead museum problem

20:24 Columbia, student protest, collapsing the structure from within

21:23 Heterosexual failure, emotional bricolage, and the shelf-science of the nation

25:17 Fucking monuments: failure in public and the white male artist’s flaccid attempt

31:42 Garbled norms and straightness as elastic propaganda

36:14 Pornhub’s nationalism, cuckold bags, and identity by fantasy algorithm

41:30 Sexuality as transitive, cousin logic, and fucking your nationality