Futures and Fictions
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Ayesha Hameed is Joint Programme Leader in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her projects Black Atlantis and A Rough History (of the Destruction of Fingerprints) have been performed or exhibited at the ICA; the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2014); The Showroom, London (2015); the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities (2015); Edinburgh College of Art (2015); Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna (2015); Pavillion, Leeds (2015); and Homeworks Space Program, Beirut (2016). She has contributed essays to Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014); The Sarai Reader (Sarai, 2013); We Travel the Space Ways (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2017); and Unsound : Undead (Univocal, forthcoming 2017). She is also co-author, with Henriette Gunkel, of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg, forthcoming).
Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at MIT. He is the author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009) and, most recently, of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Anthropologist and The Wire.
Julian Henriques is Professor in the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also convenor of the MA Scriptwriting programme and Director of the Topology Research Unit. Previously, he was Head of Film and Television at CARIMAC at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. Julian researches street cultures, music and technologies including those of the reggae sound system. He has credits as a writer-director with the feature film Babymother (1998) and the improvised short drama We the Ragamuffin (1992); and as a producer with numerous BBC and Channel Four documentaries. He is also a sound artist (responsible for the sculpture Knots & Donuts at Tate Modern in 2011); a founding editor of the journal Ideology & Consciousness; joint author of Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (Routledge, 1984) and author of Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing (Continuum, 2011). His latest book, Sonic Media: Technology, Sociality and Ways of Making, is forthcoming with Duke University Press.
Ursula K. Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2015 she has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, PEN-Malamud and the National Book Foundation Medal. Her most recent publications are The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (2012) and Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (2015).
Robin Mackay is director of UK publisher and arts organisation Urbanomic and editor of their journal Collapse. He has written widely on philosophy and contemporary art, and has instigated collaborative projects with numerous contemporary artists. He has also translated a number of important works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, François Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography and Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye.
Louis Moreno is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Culture and Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also a member of the curatorial collective freethought, who were one of the artistic directors of the 2016 Bergen Assembly in Norway.
Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history. His current project Covers sees the artist embody images from popular culture in a series of attempts to transform music album sleeves by black singers from the 1970s and 1980s. In 2017 he will be exhibiting as part of Untitled: Art on the Conditions of our Time at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, UK and Tous, des sangsmêlés at MAC VAL, Museum of Contemporary Art in Val-de-Marne, France. He lives in Cambridge and works in Leeds and London, UK.
Simon O’Sullivan is Professor of Art Theory and Practice in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published two monographs, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Palgrave, 2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (Palgrave, 2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He also makes art, with David Burrows, under the name Plastique Fantastique and is currently working on a collaborative volume of writings, with Burrows, on Mythopoesis, Myth-Science, Mythotechnesis (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press).
Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD Programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research is a philosophical investigation of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She has written within the field of Media Philosophy and Computational Design. She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum, 2004) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press, 2013). She is currently researching the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.
Theo Reeves-Evisson is a writer, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Theoretical and Contextual Studies at Birmingham School of Art. His main interests cluster around the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in contemporary art. He has explored this theme through a PhD thesis, “After Transgression: Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigms of Contemporary Art”, and also through an ongoing project looking into the ethico-aesthetics of repair, which will result in a special issue of the journal Third Text in 2018. He has published articles and exhibition and book reviews in magazines such as Frieze and journals such as Parallax, and (together with Jon Shaw) is currently editing a book entitled Fiction as Method, forthcoming with Sternberg Press.
Daniel Kojo Schrade is an artist and Professor of Art at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, and studied in Germany and Spain. He received an MFA (Diploma) from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Germany. His paintings and installations have been presented internationally, including at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Oaxaca-Mexico; Alliance Française, Pointe-Noir-Rep.Congo; Haus der Kunst, Munich-Germany; the Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College; and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. He has taught painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich and the Kwame Nkrumah University, Kumasi. Kojo Schrade was a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College and has received many grants and awards. He has been invited to lecture about his work at Goldsmiths, University of London, Barnard College, Georgetown University and UCLA amongst other places. His work is represented in various permanent collections around the world.
Judy Thorne is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research explores the utopian imaginaries of people living through the economic and social crisis in Greece. She holds an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester, and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Nottingham. Judy is interested in everyday utopianism, popular modernism, the built environment as palimpsest, autonomist and feminist Marxisms, the anthropology of crisis and the conditions of possibility for relating to the future. She also enjoys irregularly updating her webcomic glowfallover and drawing and embroidering patterns and buildings.
Kemang Wa Lehulere was a co-founder of the Gugulective (2006), an artist-led collective based in Cape Town, and a founding member of the Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg. Solo exhibitions have taken place at the Art Institute of Chicago (2016); Gasworks, London (2015); Lombard Freid Projects, New York (2013); the Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg (2011); the Association of Visual Arts, Cape Town (2009); and at Stevenson, Cape Town. Notable group e
xhibitions include African Odysseys at Le Brass Cultural Centre of Forest, Belgium (2015); the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2014); and The Ungovernables, the second triennial exhibition of the New Museum in New York (2012). Wa Lehulere has won a number of prestigious awards, most recently the first International Tiberius Art Award Dresden in 2014; the Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Arts in 2015; and the Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” 2017.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We want to thank the contributors; the audience at the Futures and Fictions Public Program at Goldsmiths; Portia Malatjie and Oladapo Ajayi for transcribing the conversations; Lizzie Homersham, Edward George and Tavia Nyong’o for their invaluable input; and Frances Bodomo for our cover image.
Stefan Helmreich’s “Extraterrestrial Relativism” was first published in Anthropological Quarterly, 85.4: 1125-1139 in a special section entitled “Extreme: Humans at Home in the Cosmos”. Reprinted by permission of the editors, Debbora Battaglia, David Valentine and Valerie A. Olson.
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. Copyright © 1973 by Ursula K. Le Guin. First appeared in “New Dimension 3” in 1973, and then in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, published by HarperCollins in 1975. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
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