The Earth's Core Stopped to Think
Lecture performance (2023)
“Creative activities are useful only if they produce new, so far unknown relations."
Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo. “Production-Reproduction” (1922), in Moholy-Nagy, Passuth (ed.), (Thames and Hudson, 1985), 289-290.
In creating So, I'd like to talk to you today, I sought to enact the technology of neoliberal rhetoric. But if this form of oration serves to fix certain subject positions and relations of consumption (e.g. expert to audience member, CEO to investor, etc), is pointing back at these relations enough to destabilize them?
In my work developing The Earth's Core Stopped to Think, a live lecture perfomance, I am called back to both Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s charge (above), and Christina Kiaer’s interpretation of Boris Arvatov’s “socialist object,” that is, one that functions to “produce new relations of consumption, new experiences of everyday life, and new human subjects of modernity.”
Kiaer, Christina. “Boris Arvatov’s Socialist Objects.” October, Vol. 81 (1997). P. 105.
How would one practice a rhetoric that not only calls into question the construction of its own meaning, but celebrates and enacts the collaborative, the non-hierarchical, and the radical?
In this wandering PowerPoint lecture, I touch on topics including the Microbial "We", the CIA tummy ache gun, black holes, the United States' Pluto return, the shifting direction of the Earth's core, and desire lines.
