ICA Panel

Posted on Jun 28, 2015 in Talks | 0 comments

I was recently invited to give a talk as part of a panel on "Changing Prospects" for the LUNÄ talks organised by the Belgian artist Marjolijn Dijkman. The week-long talks were part of the ongoing fig-2 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and revived the tradition of the Lunar Society of Birmingham of inviting speakers to speak to an audience around a dining table in a loosely structured participatory discussion (in fact, Marjolijn brought her own replica of the original 18th-century dining table with her, all the way from Belgium for the event). Our session concentrated on the notion of change in relation to the locus of collective imagination of the future, exploring different approaches to motivating and triggering seismic shifts relating to the world around us. 

My talk was titled "Utopian Collective Futures" and considered the modern genre of the literary utopia – from late 19th-century utopian futures and new images of collectivity, to the "critical utopias" that engaged with feminism, the New Left and ecological discourses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and 21st-century utopian futures, which imaginenew strategies of protest, new novelistic structures & utopian temporalities.

I was joined on this panel by Mark Fisher (Goldsmiths), author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), the writer, lecturer and broadcaster Ken Hollings (Middlesex, Central St Martin's), author of Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science and the American Century 1947-1959 (Strange Attractor Press, 2008) and The Bright Labyrinth: Sex Death and Design in the Digital Regime (Strange Attractor Press, 2014), and the writer Mary Margaret Rinebold. 

Click here or on the image below to view the PowerPoint slides which accompanied this talk.

Featured image by seriykotik1970 under a CC BY-NC license.