square white world

Margaret Atwood’s essay on climate change

I had to ask for directions. Follow the dirt path, I was told.

Late, I went in the first door I came to and found myself trapped in front of a card-entry gate. The door had shut behind me. I pulled the handle, breaking the plastic security tie and the alarm rang. Unable to go back or forward, I was lucky that someone opened the door to come in and I could slip out again.

I registered, received a badge proving I am a daughter of chaos and, having missed the keynote by Daniel Smith earlier in the day, attended my first session: Marc Rölli on L’immanence: une vie; Aleksander Mijatović, ‘Fabulating Chaos’—comparing Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis and Deleuze’s syntheses of time; Sean Erwin’s extrapolation from “control society” to consider the ‘false positives’ or failure of contemporary algorithm-based surveillance systems. Here are some seats from that session:

Konstfack students mounted exhibitions which changed daily over the conference.

A sticker in the toilet:

Snaps of hallways:

Daughters of Chaos disport themselves in the main hall:

Another angle:

Sponsors, Edinburgh University Press and Routledge, was it?

An installation, one of the more successful, inside the square formed by the banquet tables:

Rocks pushing upwards at a rate of 3mm annually after several kilometres of ice melted, a snap taken at Telefonplan metrostation:

A perspective on the number of presentations being given over the 3 days of the conference represented by their printed abstracts taped to a wall: mine is the recently amended one, for a paper called ‘A Picturebook of Practice: Jacob von Uexküll’s Raids on the Unknown’ …

Another session, this one chaired by Gary Genosko, with Shih-Hung Chuang, standing next to Gary, talking about Gilbert Simondon and Daniel Fineman, seated, engaging with the implications of non-representation for political representation:

Konstfack library:

A more impressive perspective:

A performance by The Blob after Simon O’Sullivan’s keynote which roamed around the control society…

The table was all set up for dinner, which in fact I had paid to attend, but did not, in the end, preferring to catch the metro home to Slussen. I stayed for the “cocktails” that The Blob said were being served after Simon’s keynote, a glass or so of bubbly, and I remember the menu began with gazpacho as a starter. I was told the next day that chaos had not broken out and that everyone left soon after dinner, despite the event being scheduled, promisingly, to finish at 11pm, a promise of chaos that was never in fact kept. (I asked for the speaking order in my session to be altered to accommodate the inordinate length of my paper but was told that was too much chaos.)

More Blob action, text-sampling Simon’s presentation.

Water bottles prominent:

A statement on the terrace outside, where the sun shone brightly, temperatures reaching 27-8 degrees celsius.

I don’t know why.

It sounded good, but ‘Deleuze and Ballard Meet at the Shopping Centre’ made me photograph the curtains. Although, the contributions on either side of it were excellent: Andrej Radman’s architectural take on quasi-causes and Vicente Muñoz-Reja getting very excited by ontogenesis and rightly, I think, arguing that incorporeal effects do not belong to the virtual but the surface.

Shrimp sauce, a creamy mayonnaise, on salmon fillet, and slice of crumbed baked vegetable something, for lunch.

The servery:

Alternative options:

An aside:

A vent:

The wind-down, following Adrian Parr’s ‘Walking in the Dark’ and Gary Genosko’s take on Oasis Skateboard Factory in Toronto and the “asphalt phylum”:

A symmetrical set-up outside Chaos:

Kenneth Surin, standing, and Pam Alldred, upstaging him.

There follows the parting gesture of Konstfack, a presentation, for which we were all asked to stand, while the presenter stood on her head. The parallel with Georg Büchner is obvious but unintended, wherein Jakob Lenz is annoyed that he cannot walk on his head, a phrase said to have been the beginning of modern literature.

And leaving the conference…