XenoEntities Network: Existential Futurities

Jun 23, 16:00–19:00
Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival – FULLY BOOKED

Jul 1, 16:00–19:00
Fluid Existence

Jul 28, 16:00–19:00
Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings

XenoEntities Network (XEN) is a platform for discussion and experimentation focusing on intersections of queer, gender, and feminist studies with digital technologies, organized by Pedro Marum, Lou Drago, and Zander Porter. The XEN-curated programs comprise events with performances, screenings, and panels. Programs revolve around contemporary art and philosophical-theoretical themes such as posthumanism, inhumanism, xenofeminism, cyborgs and prosthetics, surveillance and capture, virtual reality, and queer technologies.
“Existential Futurities” is a tripartite event cycle of performative curated workshops proposing alternative methods of being-together. Between traditional objects concerning image and text, XenoEntities (XEN) organizes queer strategies of sharing time with each other in sound, voice, and space.

Jun 23, 16:00–19:00
Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival – FULLY BOOKED
Film Screening & Talk

Donna Haraway is a gifted storyteller who paints a rebellious and hopeful universe teeming with critters and trans species, in an era of disasters. Brussels filmmaker Fabrizio Terranova visited Donna Haraway at her home in California, living with her – almost literally – for a few weeks, and there produced a quirky film portrait. Terranova allowed Haraway to speak in her own environment, using attractive staging that emphasised the playful, cerebral sensitivity of the scientist. The result is a rare, candid, intellectual portrait of a highly original thinker.
After the film screening we will have an assemblage to revisit Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”. After 34 years since its first edition, we hope to overview and analyse the manifesto’s influence on contemporary feminist and technological debates. Still seen as a cornerstone for intersectional discussion of feminism, technology, socialism, and materialism, “A Cyborg Manifesto” works towards a dismantling of patriarchal and naturalist discourses over the body and language.
Sparking early posthumanism, Haraway’s articulation of the cyborg rejects early feminist essentialism for more chimeric notions of animal and machine, eschewing phallogocentrism to make space for new affinities. We will examine the world-building potential of these affinities, from tentacles and invertebrate to new criticisms of Haraway’s work.

Jul 1, 16:00–19:00
Fluid Existence
Film Screening & Guided Listening-Performance

People-as-jellyfish and internet-ontological image-metaphors encourage spectator-participants to eclipse traditional notions of identity construction towards a thing more collectively concocted, a more fluid existence. Employing strategies of LARP (live-action role-playing) and guided somatic respites, Pedro Marum and Zander Porter of XenoEntities Network organize a meditatively curated visual and sonic performance. They work within and improvise against a planned schedule to develop something alien about relationships both to time and senses of selves. Between sonic dreamscapes and ambient utterances, P + Z usher in a new age of xeno-alien queerness: an exercise of thinking-as-making, an intersection of alien phenomenology and queer temporality. This workshop is developed for the conjuring of a video-gamey, anxiety-quelling, fleeting but dense fantasy-worlding.

Performance and curation by Pedro Marum and Zander Porter
Exhibition of the films “Paradise Loop” by Alain Garcia and “Jellyfish” by Maryna Makarenko
DJ set by marum

Jul 28, 16:00–19:00
Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings
Assemblage and reading group of Karen Barad’s “Transmaterialities”

“Particle self-intra-actions entail particle transitions from one kind to another in a radical undoing of kinds—queer/ trans*formations. Hence self-touching is an encounter with the infinite alterity of the self. Matter is an enfolding, an involution, it cannot help touching itself, and in this self-touching it comes in contact with the infinite alterity that it is. Polymorphous perversity raised to an infinite power: talk about a queer/trans* intimacy!”
Karen Barad magnifies the atomic composition of various layers of the universe to speculate on the potential queerness of interactions between particles. Matter experiences a constant reconfiguration of its state, as Barad says, “experimenting with itself—the queer dance of being-time indeterminacy, the imaginative play of presence/absence, here/there, now/then, that holds the disparate parts together-apart.” Highlighting the incongruencies and constant state of flux of all matter, Barad employs the electron as a tool to deconstruct naturalistic perspectives that dictate the notion of static identities and bodies, polarization and matter. Merging theoretical physics and feminist studies, Karen Barad draws on quantum physics to suggest that every unit of matter is in flux, a constant flow of intra-acting phenomena.
In this assemblage and reading group session, XenoEntities Network proposes a discussion of Barad’s article about matter’s experimental nature: “Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities.” Barad draws on her theory of agential realism, an ontology that the universe comprises phenomena, which are “the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies”, deploying a queer reading of various scientific phenomena to reinterpret their potentialities. The essay discusses the “electrical energy (that) runs through disparate topics in what follows: lightning, primordial ooze, frogs, Frankenstein, trans rage, queer self-birthing, the quantum vacuum, virtual particles, queer touching, bioelectricity, Franken-frogs, monstrous re/generations”.
We would like to highlight that XEN’s assemblages are community meetings for an informal sharing of ideas where everyone is allowed to freely intervene and participate. Please bring along other texts or media that you would like to share and discuss.