Apologies for taking a while to schedule this next session after our last, I’ve been scheming something special for you which will span two sessions. The first will take place July 6 at 6pm BST, and will feature a book, a film, and a YouTube channel. The second will take place in September, and for which I have collaborated with Collective Ending members Ted Le Swer and Fenella Brereton to organise a hybrid event for you. Ted is a new media artist and will be caring for the physical layout of the space, and Fenella is an artist-chef and will make special treats conceptually aligned with our readings 🍵 👀. More details will follow closer to the time.
The first session, called 💭 Speech to Realities 👽, will feature Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin, which describes a society where all the efforts of feminism have been undone, and earth has colonised a huge variety of other planets. The book discusses a group of women in charge of "interfacing" (as they call it) with various aliens during infancy and learning their languages as native tongues. The book talks about language as power, as interface, as a tool that generates reality. It's a pretty angry book and an excellent read. We will pair it with the film Arrival (2016), which also discusses alien languages, approaches it from more of a queer way of thinking, and beautifully demonstrates the themes discussed in the book. We will then bring in the Hyperobject concept by Timothy Morton in order to discuss language as a system so large and all-encompassing we can't see it from the inside. We’ll do this by listening to him speak on his YouTube channel.
For this event we will have a YouTube Watch Party, in which we can all watch the film in sync. The film costs £3.49 to rent, or if you are in Israel, it is available for free on Yes VOD. If you’d prefer to torrent it, feel free to do so, but it would be nice if we all watched it at the same time regardless. I will send details on how to set up the Watch Party closer to the date; it usually comes down to a Chrome plugin.
After the film we’ll discuss Native Tongue in relation to Arrival and Morton’s Hyperobject. Please note the film is 1hr 56 minutes, so if this is your dinnertime we can do a dinner-and-a-movie type of evening (I will be snacking during the film for sure!). We will have a little break before discussion on Zoom, and try keeping our conversation to about an hour. We’ll do our intros before the film.
Native Tongue is a little difficult to get in older editions but available on Amazon as both paperback and audiobook. Older editions are available on AbeBooks, you can find links to both below.
Our next session, 🦑 Glitch, Mutate, Dissolve to Water ❄️, will be a more involved, hybrid IRL and online event, and we’re planning something pretty special for it so please stay tuned.
See you on Zoom, July 6th 6-9pm BST!
x Yuli