McKenzie Wark (Lecture + Q&A)

she/her
Fri 31 May | de Brakke Grond

FIBER is delighted to invite the international author and scholar McKenzie Wark for the festival lecture on Friday, May 31. Known for her earlier influential books A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory – working across media theory, critical theory, and new media – her later books Reverse Cowgirl, Raving and Love and Money, Sex and Death connect to her coming out as a trans woman. Working with the styles of a diary and memoirs, she’s weaving theory with intimate storytelling.

With Raving, McKenzie Wark invites us along through various personal encounters and undisclosed locations in the New York queer and trans rave scene. She asks: What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? Through her deeply confessional writing, we discover raving as art and a technique that is for everyone, but for which queer and trans people have an acute propensity. Raving to techno—first and always a Black music—is a means of temporary respite and a way to access alternative sonic and temporal possibilities during an era of diminishing futures. 


About the speaker

McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer, critic, and Professor of Culture and Media at The New School. Having published a plethora of books and articles on network technology, media theory, the compounded crises of (late) capitalism, environmental catastrophe, and technological transformation, her writing has more recently taken an autobiographical turn; her latest books, Raving and Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir, are fierce, evocative explorations of the queer and trans experiences, temporal dysphoria, and transcendence.

This artist is part of the session “In Conversation with McKenzie Wark”
Date: 31 May 2024
Time: 16:30 - 17:30
Location: de Brakke Grond

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