Tag Archives: McKenzie Wark

LEGACY RUSSELL AND MCKENZIE WARK IN CONVERSATION

In a dystopic global landscape that makes space for none of us, offers no sanctuary, the sheer act of living—surviving—in the face of a gendered and racialized hegemony becomes uniquely political. We choose to stay alive, against all odds, because our lives matter. We choose to support one another in living, as the act of staying alive is a form of world-building. These worlds are ours to create, claim, pioneer. We travel off-road, away from the demand to be merely “a single being.” We scramble toward containing multitudes against the current of a culture-coding that encourages the singularity of binary.

Glitching is a gerund, an action ongoing. It is activism that unfolds with a boundless extravagance.1 Nonetheless, undercurrent to this journey is an irrefutable tension: the glitched body is, according to UX (user experience) designer, coder, and founder of collective @Afrofutures_UK Florence Okoye, “simultaneously observed, watched, tagged and controlled whilst also invisible to the ideative, creative, and productive structures of the techno-industrial complex.”2

We are seen and unseen, visible and invisible. At once error and correction to the “machinic enslavement” of the straight mind, the glitch reveals and conceals symbiotically.3 Therefore, the political action of glitch feminism is the call to collectivize in network, amplifying our explorations of gender as a means of deconstructing it, “restructuring the possibilities for action.”4 — Legacy RussellGlitch Feminism*

Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, and McKenzie Wark, author of Reverse Cowgirl, “meet online to discuss the divide between the digital and real and whether this divide has in fact already collapsed, virtual as the ‘new normal,’ and whether it is still possible to find utopian space in the virtual.”

To r.s.v.p. to this Verso Live event, see link below. On October 15, the School of Visual Arts will host a Glitch Feminism launch, and Russell will join Zoe Leonard in conversation.

LEGACY RUSSELL and MCKENZIE WARK IN CONVERSATION

VIRTUAL—THE NEW NORMAL

Thursday, October 1.

10:30 am on the West Coast; 1:30 pm East Coast; 6:30 pm London; 7:30 pm Paris.

*Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (London: Verso, 2020), text and footnotes courtesy and © the author and the publisher.

1.The glitched body is a body that defies the hierarchies and strata of logic, it is proudly nonsensical and therefore perfectly non-sense. I think here of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Fifty-eight Indices on the Body,” Indice 27, wherein he muses: “Bodies produce sense beyond sense. They’re an extravagance of sense.” In Jean-Luc NancyCorpus, translated by Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 153.
2. Florence Okoye, “Decolonising Bots: Revelation and Revolution through the Glitch,” Het Nieuwe Instituut (October 27, 2017), https://botclub.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/decolonising-bots-revelation-and-revolution-through-glitch.
3. Maurizio LazzaratoSigns and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, translated by Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 18, 26.
4. Ibid.

From top: Legacy Russell, photograph by Daniel Dorsa, image courtesy and © the author and the photographer; McKenzie Wark, photograph courtesy and © the author, the photographer, and Verso; Victoria Sin, performance at Glitch @ Night, organized by Legacy Russell as part of Post-Cyber Feminist International, 2017, ICA London, photograph by Mark Blower, courtesy and © the photographer and ICA London; McKenzie Wark, Reverse Cowgirl (2020), cover image courtesy and © the author and Semiotext(e); Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism (2020), cover image courtesy and © the author and Verso.

LA ART BOOK FAIR 2020 ONLINE

Support your independent press. The LA ART BOOK FAIR 2020 has moved online, with links to all scheduled exhibitors and publishers.

From top: AA Bronson, After General Idea, courtesy and © the artist and Three Star Books, Paris; Jill Johnston, The Disintegration of a Critic, edited by Fiona McGovern, Megan Francis Sullivan, and Axel Wieder, courtesy and © Sternberg Press; Daido Moriyama, Visions of Japan, courtesy and © the artist and Komiyama, Tokyo; Linder, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero IV, 2012, courtesy and © Linder Sterling, Modern Art, London, Dépendance, Brussels, Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm and Paris, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo (Linder, Linderism, Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2020); McKenzie Wark, Reverse Cowgirl (2020), courtesy and © the author and Semiotext(e); Matthew Brannon, Avery Singer, 2015, courtesy and © the artist, JRP Ringier, and Art Catalogues.

FOR PAUL VIRILIO

The Brooklyn Rail—with the participation of McKenzie Wark, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, David Levi Strauss, and DJ Spooky—will hold a tribute this weekend to the late Paul Virilio.

“The failure of the visual arts leaves open the possibility of the ‘optical correction’ of the world. By whom? By machines and businessmen, who happen to know how to work together quite well.” — Virilio, The Accident of Art, 2005

A special film by Sylvère Lotringer will be screened at the event.

A TRIBUTE TO THE WORK OF PAUL VIRILIO

Saturday, October 27, from 7 pm to 9 pm.

Brooklyn Rail, 253 36th Street, #C304, Brooklyn.

See The Genetic Bomb by Virilio and Lotringer.

Top: Paul Virilio, image from Bunker Archeology.

The Accident of Art image credit: Semiotext(e).

Below: Paul Virilio.

I’M VERY INTO YOU, STAGED

I’M VERY INTO YOU—the mid-nineties email correspondence between Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, published in 2015 by Semiotext(e)—has been adapted and directed for the stage by Sara Lyons, and will be performed as part of Los Angeles Performance Practice’s LAX Festival.

Lyons gathers a local cast of feminist, queer and non-binary underground artists—including Gina Young, Paul Outlaw, Jennifer Jonassen, Provvidenza Catalano, Yves Agustin Armando, Jer Adrianne Lelliott, Robin Podolsky, and Elspeth Weingarten—who embody Acker and Wark from points across a wide gender spectrum. Their feverish digital exchange is interspersed with the ensemble’s own stories of gender slippage and online intimacy, examining how our connections have evolved over the last two decades—through the internet and through expanding queer expression.*

I’M VERY INTO YOU*

Saturday, October 13, and Sunday, October 21, at 6 pm.
Sunday, October 14, and Tuesday, October 16, at 8 pm.
Thursday, October 18, at 10 pm.

Think Tank Gallery, 939 Maple Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

I’m Very Into You in performance. Photographs by Rolando Sepulveda II/OUTsider.

Book cover image courtesy Semiotext(e).