The Passenger - Talk by McKenzie Wark

Our devices—the phone in your hand, the laptop on your lap—make us passengers of our own lives. We're not the driver. The driver seems asleep at the wheel. We watch videos of the crash of history, in slow motion, as it happens. The revolution was not televised, but the collapse surfaces through the portals of our devices. What then are the possibilities for the collective creation of another media for another life? 

Maybe part of it is to address firstly the relationship of two procedures of communication: let's call them ficting and facting. These are not actually separate procedures. The attempt to stabilize a fact passes through fictions; the attempt to imagine a fiction is always entangled in facts. Once we have a concept of ficting and facting procedures, we can start to think about how to build communicative circuits in which the vector of communication is the means to constitute autonomous, autopoetic, self-correcting ensembles of human and non-human agents. We could start working on that now in the early stages of the crash of social-technical infrastructures. To get ahead of the impact, since we know it's coming.

Info

Dates: Friday, November 20, from 7pm to 8:30pm. 
Location: Nave Una (in Nave 17) at Matadero Madrid. 
Main language: English with simultaneous translation to Spanish. 
Available spots: Until capacity is reached. 
Price: Free, no registration needed.

About Mckenzie Wark

McKenzie Wark is widely known for a series of books of twenty-first century critical theory, as well as for works in an autofictional style. Her books translated into Spanish include Vaquera Invertida, Raving and Amor y Dinero, Sexo y Muerte (all from Caja Negra); Intelectos Colectivos and Sensoria (both from La Caja Books); and Historia de vida (mutatis mutandis).