Wednesday, 22 September 2021, 7.30 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical philosophy
Short films and drinks
As part of the WRITING LETTERS TO EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS programme of events (see below), diffrakt invites you to an evening of SF short films, conversations, and drinks. A screening of selected films will provide different perspectives, including a documentary observation of a persistent attempt to contact extraterrestrials, alien explorers landing on Earth, and an afrofuturist take on space exploration. The programme will function as a showcase of desires, fantasies, and affects – fear, excitement, anthropocentric frustration, colonial and toxic influences – as well as new and old speculative counterpractices. Around and after the screening, there will be time for more terrestrial attempts at communication, for the continuation or the beginning of exchanges between earth-dwellers of every provenance.
Since the event is an in-person event and the number of participants thus, in accordance with current COVID-19 regulations, strictly limited, anyone who would like to attend will need to register in advance with a short message to mail@diffrakt.space. Moreover, attendees will need to follow the “GGG” rule: they will have to present a negative test result from the same day, proof of vaccination, or proof of recent recovery.
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WRITING LETTERS TO EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS is a three-day series of hybrid online and in-person events at the ICI Berlin and the Technische Universität Berlin that focuses attention on the promises, dangers, and ambiguities of communicating with extraterrestrials and being ourselves ’extraterrestrial‘. The interrogation of the epistolary mode and other traditionally non-academic modes of writing in the name of expression, or coming to know the world outside-of-oneself (if such a distinction can be drawn), hopes to gain access into experiences of otherness and ways of navigating radical difference both real and imagined. Invited participants include performance, film, visual and sound artists, writers, theorists, activists, and scientists to be in conversation in a multi-disciplinary and multi-format event.
Organized by
Alison Sperling
An ICI Event organized in cooperation with TU Berlin ZIFG and IPODI Initiative, CoFutures/Science Fictionality at the University of Oslo, and the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw.
For more information, see: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/writing-letters-to-extraterrestrials/
