ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

'Tina Stefanou: You Can't See Speed' - Digital Publication Launch

·1 hr 13 min·4 clips

Tara ties the horse bit, Muybridge, and management to surveillance and control.

The evening starts with weather. Elise Goldfinch welcomes the audience to an ACCA publication gathering, talks plainly about the cold and rain outside, and acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as custodians of the land. The room already has that damp, arrived-together feeling. Instead of settling into formal biographies, she introduces the people around her and sets up readings from the digital publication before the conversation opens out. Lloyd Mist gets the first practical job. As designer, he is asked to guide the audience through the publication, so the website does not feel like a thing sitting somewhere else. It becomes part of the room, something to enter, handle, and listen through. The tone stays public, careful, and a little ceremonial without getting stiff. The named contributors include Azza Zayn, Tara Heffernan, Tessa Lurd, Tina, and Lloyd, and the event moves through their texts and responses. Then a reading changes the temperature. One contribution, Art Offroad on Defying Oculocentric Safetyism, pushes back against outsourced expertise, polished safety, and the habit of treating visual control as the only kind of knowledge that counts. The artwork centers Matthew Kasser, described as a dirt bike enthusiast trained in high-performance contexts who lost his eyesight over a decade ago and later began riding and repairing dirt bikes. His practice runs on trust, but not in a vague inspirational way. A friend guides him by headset during expeditions. Repair happens through touch, bodily awareness, and close familiarity with the machine. The reading lets those details do the work. Kasser's riding and maintenance become a way to think about danger, intuition, technical intimacy, and kinds of experience that sight cannot tidy up. Christopher Lash comes into the argument through The Culture of Narcissism. The reading links fear, conformity, and trouble reading one's own appetites to a social mood of managed risk. Blindness is handled with some care here. The speaker says it is not just an identity marker or novelty, but also a metaphor for intuitive knowledge and resistant experience inside Tina's project. The ending comes back to use. Someone asks about listening to the playlist, and the answer is nicely modest: the tracks play one after another on the website, without YouTube or Spotify. Thanks close the evening. The writers, contributors, Matthew in the audience, and everyone who showed up are gathered back into the same wet room where the night began.

As heard by us

A launch-night art talk that makes sensory knowledge feel lived in.

ACCA Podcast uses a publication launch to frame a calm, careful discussion around Tina Stefanou's collaboration with Matthew Kasser. It moves through readings, acknowledgements, and the questions that sit underneath the project: sensing, risk, and technical know-how.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for an art launch that moves from a land acknowledgement into dirt-bike philosophy.

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