Eventhttps://doi.org/10.25620/e210923-1
Workshop
23 Sep 2021

Making Contact with Deeper Times

The current moment is one perhaps especially transitional, a time that is causing re-modulations of life so as to become attuned to temporalities that exist beyond the human. There exist many nonhuman entities in the world whose existences make manifest these deeper times. Perhaps some of these beings may not be of this planet at all. This workshop will stage close encounters with some of these possibly alien, deeper time-beings that dwell among us as a way to think through questions of extraterrestrial and queer resilience. Working both indoors and outdoors gathering specimens, participants will examine collected samples with a portable microscope and think together about how to communicate with the samples collected — or their far-away relatives —through the epistolary form, letters. Participants’ collective letters may then exist as a form of delay-tolerant desire for contact with the alien whose time one cannot experience. By doing so, those in the workshop will have hopefully experienced the intertwining of deeper queer temporalities, a swerve away from the linearity and determinism of western, capitalist time.

Adriana Knouf, PhD (US) works as an artist, writer, and xenologist. She engages with topics such as wet media, space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, drone flight, queer and trans futurities, machine learning, the voice, and papermaking. She is the Founding Facilitator of the tranxxenolab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements among entities trans and xeno. Adriana regularly presents her artistic research around the world and beyond, including a work that has flown aboard the International Space Station.

Pre-circulated reading for discussion: The Introduction to Thomas Nail’s Theory of the Earth:
https://nebula.tranxxenolab.net/s/EscqJgLeXnHcLSW

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Adriana Knouf

Organized by

Alison Sperling

In English

First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/making-contact-with-deeper-times/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Symposium

Writing Letters to Extraterrestrials

To be extra-terrestrial, or extra-earth, might imply excess or spillover from the earthly, being expelled from Terra, or the desire to leave the Earth altogether. It might invoke fears or excitement of greeting an alien other to Earth, or perhaps instead reveal fantasies of being able to leave a damaged Earth behind and become oneself extra-terrestrial. Alongside these fantasies that imagining the ET might harbor, it also reckons with loss and grief; the theme inherently interrogates the possibility of extinction, climate change, toxic ecologies, and the Anthropocene. It reconsiders questions of identity and belonging, what it might mean to be more-than terra or to have certain qualities considered as ’alien‘ in terms of nation or citizenship, as well as ’extra’ or un-usable, not-valued (by whom or by what?), or in the recent popular sense, ‘extra’ as excess, the dramatic over-the-top. Many of these provocations of the extra-terrestrial will draw on feminist and queer legacies of science fiction in philosophy, the sciences, literature, film, TV, and the arts. Each artist and theorist in the event imagines speculative practices towards radically different and just futures free of capitalist, racist, fascist, ableist, carceral, homophobic, transphobic, and other forms of connected structural oppressions.

WRITING LETTERS TO EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS is a three-day series of hybrid online and in-person events at the ICI Berlin and the Technische Universität Berlin that focuses attention on the promises, dangers, and ambiguities of communicating with extraterrestrials and being ourselves ’extraterrestrial‘. The interrogation of the epistolary mode and other traditionally non-academic modes of writing in the name of expression, or coming to know the world outside-of-oneself (if such a distinction can be drawn), hopes to gain access into experiences of otherness and ways of navigating radical difference both real and imagined. Invited participants include performance, film, visual and sound artists, writers, theorists, activists, and scientists to be in conversation in a multi-disciplinary and multi-format event.Speaker Bios (pdf)

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Edna Bonhomme
COVEN BERLIN
diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie
Ashon T. Crawley
Irina Gheorghe
Juliana Huxtable
Adriana Knouf
Mary Maggic
Margaret Rhee
Simon(e) van Saarloos
Emilija Škarnulytė
Jenna Sutela
Regina Kanyu Wang

Organized by

Alison Sperling
An ICI Event organized in cooperation with TU Berlin ZIFG and IPODI Initiative, CoFutures/Science Fictionality at the University of Oslo, and the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw.

Part of the Symposium

Containing also

Cite as: ‘Making Contact with Deeper Times’, workshop presented at the symposium Writing Letters to Extraterrestrials, ICI Berlin, 23 September 2021 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e210923-1>