Materia: Asynchronous Avant-Gardes

Speaker(s): Justin Read (University at Buffalo), Chad Wellmon (University of Virginia)

We are pleased to announce on Monday, February 24, 2020 at 6 pm we will be joined by Professors Chad Wellmon (German Studies, University of Virginia) and Justin Read (Spanish and Portuguese, University at Buffalo) for a session about knowledge, search, and the self-actualization of technology. The theme of this upcoming event will be Asynchronous Avant-gardes. 

Professors Wellmon and Read have shared the following descriptions of their talks:

Chad Wellmon (German Studies, University of Virginia)

“Googling Before Google: Notes on a History of Search"

Google did not invent search. In this presentation, Chad Wellmon probes and historicizes the origins of searching in German romanticism and beyond, leading to a critique of contemporary techno-Utopianism.

Justin Read (Spanish and Portuguese, University at Buffalo)

“Death Programs: In-Forming the Borderzone”

Following Vilém Flusser’s observations about the increasing self-actualization of technology, in this presentation Justin Read reads Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo [Signs preceding the end of the world, 2009] as a cartography of programmed reality along contemporary borderlands.

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Dinner and wine will be served. RSVP here (encouraged but not required).

For more information, please contact the organizer rwain [at] stanford.edu (Romina Wainberg).