The Indeterminacy Festival opens tonight with this screening and continues Tuesday, May 15, with a screening of the film Particle Fever. Workshops and lectures sponsored by the UB Technē Institute will be given by visiting international artists as part of the Indeterminacy Festival. The festival culminates on May 18 & 19 with two large-scale, site-specific performances at Silo City, with musicians, dancers, projections, and aerialists.
"Alone, in our separate kinds of expertise and experience, we know both too much and too little, and so we succumb to despair or to hope, and neither is a sensible attitude… Neither hope nor despair knows how to teach us to 'play string figures with companion species.'" ~ Donna Haraway
"A rare, candid, intellectual portrait of a highly original thinker; Haraway is a gifted storyteller who paints a rebellious and hopeful universe teeming with critters and trans species in an era of disasters." ~ Concreta Journal
The festival opens with Story Telling for Earthly Survival as a way to inaugurate this year's theme of Emergence, in which an unlikely set of ideas and disciplines are brought together in the formation of something new.
Internationally renowned feminist theorist and historian of science, Donna Haraway is perhaps best known as the author of two revolutionary works: the essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" (a canonical essay in graduate school courses in the humanities) and the book Primate Visions. Both set out to upend well-established "common sense" categories: breaking down the boundaries among humans, animals, and machines while challenging gender essentialism and questioning the underlying assumptions of humanity's fascination with primates through a post-colonial lens. Her work spans subjects including: capitalism and the Anthropocene (a term she "uses but finds troubling"); science fiction writing as philosophical text; the suppression of women's writing; and the need for new post-colonial and post-patriarchal narratives.
This year string is used as the primary medium with which to enact the felt-experience of threading, stretching, connecting, and binding new ideas into an interconnected whole. The festival is working across mediums: with engineers, to create large-scale string instruments; dancers, who are choreographing works with string; textile artists who are designing environments with string; and specialists from Poetry and Philosophy to Physics and Geology, in an effort to find new ways of "weaving" together our relationships between the disciplines.
We hope that you will join us for these two screenings, which are integral to the ideas being explored in this year's festival.
