Note: we are not here to teach each text in depth, but take inspiration from them and use them for our own needs.
We could use the concept of diffraction to look “through” instead of “at”. Like looking at the texts through ripples of water passing through multiple points in space and time, we could alternate between the texts and the works in the show and use Barad’s text as a diffraction mechanism.
For instance, we could diffract Lola’s ideas of radical hope and blindness and use these notions to look at all the other texts, so reading hope or despair and discussing notions of seeing and unseeing in the works, in This Rot, and in Cancellation of the Past (where interesting; I don’t think we HAVE to discuss all the works in relation to ALL the other works. Would be long). Then we’ll rotate and look at the text through concepts in some of the works for example. Rotate again and look at Lola’s text through This Rot, thinking of societal collapse and its potential for growth, of what will die and what will grow and what it would cost.
This methodology would incorporate Barad’s essay into HOW we discuss, so would be inherent to the form of the talk. I’m not sure we have to discuss it separately too, but we should make sure the concepts are well explained to everyone as it is quite complicated. I like this because it creates a mesh of ideas and delineates it from a standard format of a talk, without completely ignoring some linearity (as Barad says at the end of their essay; things exist in addition to, not instead of).
Yuli: I started A Sci-Fi Curriculum when I watched All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis and learnt about the stories science told us about eco-systems. There was a concept in the 60s, conceived by the Odum brothers, that environments are akin to very complex electrical circuits. If one were to map the system in great enough detail, we would have a perfect understanding of, and therefore control over, the ecology, the environment, and eventually nature. Almost 60 years later this theory not only failed to prove itself to be correct, but has also been repeatedly dis-proven. The general Western public still thinks of the natural world as a system with an input and an output we can manipulate from the outside, rather than being an integral part of.
This story made me aware of the power of speculation; the concept of ecology as eco-system came from two people who told themselves a story, and we all believed them, and now this story has very real effects not only in our world, but how we treat and manage our environments and each other.
A Sci-Fi Curriculum is a format in which we get together to discuss stories that align with queer outlooks on the world we live in, believing that by telling these stories we practically and physically create the realities we want to see in the world. We discuss multimedia content in book, film, food, podcast and audio forms in a reading group format. Today will be a slightly adjusted version of this, where you are welcome to just sit back and listen, and read the texts in your own time, if you’d like to.
We are going to discuss 4 articles we will introduce and that you got as PDFs when you registered for the event in relation to each other, to speculation, and most importantly, to FUTURES PAST and the works within it.