event-icon

2020 Program Sessions

692. Infinite Energy: Speculative Fictions, Reticular Futures

10:15 AM–11:30 AM Jan 12, 2020 (US - Pacific)

WSCC - Chelan 4

Session Information

Description: Panelists explore fantasies of infinite energy, including twentieth-century cybernetics, logics of extraction in the “African renaissance” in fiction, the recent “mycological turn,” and China’s “Digital Silk Road” project. These fantasies suggest that the notionally autopoietic, self-sustaining network form can provide energy without consumption and value without matter. Yet they obscure the violent dispossession on which they depend.

Speakers

Natalia Cecire, U of Sussex

Seb Franklin, King’s C, London

Shaoling Ma, Yale-NUS C

Phillip Maciak, Washington U in St. Louis

Christine Okoth, U of Warwick

Samuel Solomon, U of Sussex

Allan Stoekl, Penn State U, University Park

Tags