Events | "Slime Molds and Seasteads": A Conversation with Claire L. Evans and Theresia Enzensberger, moderated by Sherryl Vint
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles | June 13, 2024
June 13, 2024, 7.00 p.m. (PT) | Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
Join the Goethe-Institut LA and the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles for a discussion between writer and musician Claire L. Evans, editor of Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn, an anthology of near future science fiction technological speculations, and renowned author and 2024 Thomas Mann Fellow Theresia Enzensberger. Together with Sherryl Vint, Professor and Director of the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program at the University of California, Riverside, they will discuss technological speculations, potential new futures and the politics of innovation through a transatlantic literary lens.
In her 2022 novel Auf See (At Sea), nominated for the German Book Prize, author Theresia Enzensberger tells a story about utopian promises of new communities and happiness in the face of doom. The main character, Yada, grows up as a citizen of a floating city in the Baltic Sea. Her father, a libertarian tech entrepreneur, has designed the seaside town as a salvation from the chaos in which the rest of the world is sinking. Against the backdrop of current developments, such as “California Forever,” a plan for a future city for which a group of tech billionaires quietly purchased 60,000 rural acres of land in Solano County, utopian visions like in Enzensberger’s novel are not limited to SciFi literature anymore. Writer and artist Claire L. Evans recently published a volume titled Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn, an anthology of near future science fiction from VICE’s acclaimed, innovative digital speculative story destination. The book shows the predictive capacity of science fiction and seeks “new, vivid, and visceral ways to depict the future, translating the decay and anxiety that surround us into something else, something unexpected, something that burns like a beacon and upends the conventional ideas of where we’ll end up next.”
The conversation will be moderated by Sherryl Vint, Professor and Director of the Speculative Fiction and Cultures of Science program at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on speculative fiction, especially relationships with science and technology. In her publications she explores how science fiction can give us tools for conceptualizing and perhaps shaping the ways that science and technology have an impact on daily life. Together they will talk about the benefits of technological speculations, potential new futures and the politics of innovation through a transatlantic literary lens.
Participants
Theresia Enzensberger studied film at Bard College in New York and is a writer of prose, essays, reportage, and criticism. In 2014 she founded BLOCK Magazin which was named “best newcomer magazine” at the 2016 Lead Awards. In 2017, her first novel Blaupause (Blueprint) was published by Hanser Verlag. It was translated into several languages and awarded the Alfred Döblin Medal. Her recent novel Auf See (At Sea), published in 2022, was nominated for the German Book Prize. Enzensberger is a 2024 Thomas Mann Fellow.
Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture. She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform, and co-editor, with Brian Merchant, of the accompanying anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn (MCD Books, 2022). Her writing has appeared in MIT Technology Review, VICE, Rhizome.org, The Verge, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Document Journal, Eye on Design, and Aeon, among others. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow.
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she founded the Speculative Fictions and Cultures of Science program. She has published widely on science fiction, including, most recently, Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First Century Speculative Fiction(2021), Science Fiction: The Essential Knowledge, and Programming the Future: Speculative Television and the End of Democracy (2022, co-authored with Jonathan Alexander). She was a founding editor of Science Fiction Film and Television and is an editor for the journal Science Fiction Studies and the book series Science in Popular Culture.
This event is a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles and the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.
