description
John Erik Jordan, Kerstin Stakemeier and Jeremy Wade invite you to participate in a free reading group in five parts at the Hebbel am Ufer called Moi Machine Moi, beginning March 20, 2015, 5pm. The reading group, hosted by Stakemeier, will occur in tandem and in service to the creation of a new performance by Wade and young American sci-fi writer John Erik Jordan titled Drawnonward. Together, they will extend the research process of the piece to the public.
We will be looking into becoming our own science fictions. The relationship between humans and automatons, robots, cyborgs, networks and algorithms has been at the core of sci-fi since its beginnings in the late 19th century, when it emanated from the capitalist reconfigurations of life through machinery, and more precisely from the human alienation that entailed. In the 1950s French philosopher Gilbert Simondon entitled this twisted relation our “psychophysiological alienation”. Like Simondon, like Donna Haraway, like Sadie Plant, like N. Katherine Hayles, like Alexander Galloway, like Jasbir K. Puar, like Lydia H.Liu, we want to put machines first, and see ourselves through their circuits. It will be from our alienation that we commence. We will create sub-circuits, and seek out those who have created them before us: the orgon accumulators, occultures, prosthetics, dildos, darknets, etc. Technical objects that produce queer, instead of straight times. With the texts of these and other authors, with films and sounds, we want to unearth the psychophysiological sci-fi's from our machines.
We will read early contestations of machinery, like classic machinists Haldern, Russell and Merton and more contemporary ones we have mentioned, seeking out individuation from within the technical objects we created: hoping for snippets of speculation bypassing value, for bodies thriving for sex beyond gender, and for machines creating their own use. The reading group will discuss historical and present day possibility machines to unearth their inherent science fiction. Let's read into the machines and out of the machines. Let's reconfigure them together, building one that is Drawnonward!
We will be looking into becoming our own science fictions. The relationship between humans and automatons, robots, cyborgs, networks and algorithms has been at the core of sci-fi since its beginnings in the late 19th century, when it emanated from the capitalist reconfigurations of life through machinery, and more precisely from the human alienation that entailed. In the 1950s French philosopher Gilbert Simondon entitled this twisted relation our “psychophysiological alienation”. Like Simondon, like Donna Haraway, like Sadie Plant, like N. Katherine Hayles, like Alexander Galloway, like Jasbir K. Puar, like Lydia H.Liu, we want to put machines first, and see ourselves through their circuits. It will be from our alienation that we commence. We will create sub-circuits, and seek out those who have created them before us: the orgon accumulators, occultures, prosthetics, dildos, darknets, etc. Technical objects that produce queer, instead of straight times. With the texts of these and other authors, with films and sounds, we want to unearth the psychophysiological sci-fi's from our machines.
We will read early contestations of machinery, like classic machinists Haldern, Russell and Merton and more contemporary ones we have mentioned, seeking out individuation from within the technical objects we created: hoping for snippets of speculation bypassing value, for bodies thriving for sex beyond gender, and for machines creating their own use. The reading group will discuss historical and present day possibility machines to unearth their inherent science fiction. Let's read into the machines and out of the machines. Let's reconfigure them together, building one that is Drawnonward!