[-empyre-] Week 4: Welcome Lindsay Kelley, Anna Munster, Randall Packer, and Ana Valdex

[Anna Munster]

HI Patrick and others,
I had composed another message which pretty much reiterates what you are suggesting but in slightly more abstract terms:


>  I have been thinking about how to create alternative futures using science fiction.  This is an upcoming project that I am part of with Alaskan artist Nathan Shafer.  Taking this approach references writers like lem, Roddenberry, Clarke, and Heinlein who approached critical content through the metaphorical scrim of fiction.

I’d just insert instead of ‘fiction’ here that we think of the term ‘fabulation’….fabulation engages a collective mode of imagining other modes of living…whereas ‘fiction’ with its association with canonical literary traditions can (although not always) veer toward the imagination of an author or artist. Here I am drawing from Deluge’s concept of fabulation, which he also drew from Bergson, in which fabulating always also involved the invention of  ‘a people to come’, hence implied a political or collective dimension to imagining new modes of life.

I couldn’t agree more that what we need now is to unleash art’s capacities to fabulate new modes of living collectively and that all kinds of ‘fakery’ might also assist in such fabulation!
cheers
Anna