The organisation I work for, Culture&, is curating a really exciting night of music, film and performances at the Wellcome Collection on Friday 15th March on the theme of Cyborgs.
Culture& is excited to announce ‘Cyborgs’, our Friday Late Spectacular curated in collaboration with the Wellcome Collection.
Join us for an evening of irreverent performance, conversation and cocktails where we’ll rethink the boundaries we perceive between human and non-human, or between races, genders or classes.
Hear from artists, designers and engineers who are challenging assumptions about how we classify things as animal, human or machine, and asking whose voices we listen to when designing the future.
Talks will be British Sign Language-interpreted.
Date: Friday 15th March 2019
Time: 7-11pm
Venue: Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London, Nw1 2BE.
Tickets available here: https://wellcomecollection.org/events/XGFi9BAAAAWsm24n
Programme
19:00—19:40
Discussion: ‘Return of the Cyborg’
Join us to hear from Joanna Zylinska about why the cyborg has returned at a time when there’s a boom in AI, research into immortality and an unfolding ecological crisis. The talk will include a screening of Zylinska’s short photo-film ‘Exit Man’, which explores the problem of human extinction and proposes ‘a feminist counter-apocalypse’ as an alternative cyborg scenario.
20:00—20:40
Performance: ‘A Shoal of Lovers Leads Me Home’
Listen to, breathe, taste and incite alternative Black queer liberations with speculative writer, artist and pleasure activist Ama Josephine Budge. You will explore possible climate-changed futures via her speculative fabulation ‘A Shoal of Lovers Leads Me Home’.
21:00—22:00
Screening: ‘The Last Angel of History’
Watch a screening of ‘The Last Angel of History’, a film by Black Audio Film Collective. This film follows the journey of a data thief and uses Afrofuturism as a metaphor for cultural displacement, presenting a new way to understand the relationship between Black identity and the body. The film will be introduced by Errol Francis.
From 19:00
Refreshments: ‘Cyborgian Cocktails’
Enjoy a range of cocktails specially created by mixologist Mairi Nolan. The drinks, named ‘Stars at Night’, ‘Human and Machine’ and ‘Asclepius’ will reference Cyborgian themes of space travel, the body and machine and the Greek god of medicine.
19:00—19:15
21:00—21:15
Performance: ‘Long Straight Pubic Hair’
Watch a newly commissioned and irreverent performance by artist Mamoru Iriguchi about a humble enhancement to his body that would change his life forever.
20:00—20:15
22:00—22:15
Performance: ‘Are You There?’
Join artist Rebekah Ubuntu to experience an Afrofuturist sound, video and performance work exploring unbelonging, questing and intersectional utopianism through the speculative gaze of an artificially intelligent cyborg.
19:00—23:00
Workshop: ‘Flesh and Machine’
Meet designers and engineers from UCL who are creating devices to extend our bodies’ capabilities. Come along to try out a third thumb designed by Dani Clode, learn about how new limbs could affect our brains and see prototypes of future technologies in surgery
19:30—00:00
Workshop: ‘In the Kingdom of Impossible Life’
Join a participatory workshop run by Zia Álmos Joshua X and explore classification and how it relates to the cyborg. Your activities will focus on the legacy of Carl Linnaeus (who created the system of naming organisms that we still use today), modern ideas about symbiosis and interspecies relationships, and on the political and ethical power of technology.
19:00—22:00
Discussion: ‘Cyborg Reading Groups’
Join a reading group to discover and discuss writing by Octavia Butler, Donna Haraway and Samuel R Delany and others.
Jenny Pistella Associates 