Shapes of Knowledge Speculative Fiction Through Artscience
Channel: Clarissa Lee
Date: 2021-04-26

(From the Lloyd Fernando Seminar Series, April 2021)
Bees, mirror neurons, Frankenstein, curiosity cabinets, colonial eclipse watching, anonymous artists, indigenous folktales, Chinese fantasy video game turned xian xia drama, shadow puppet play, Einstein, time travel, media physics, particle physics, quantum informatics, instruments of knowledge popularization….these are all just some of the characters and scenes that made their appearances in the recently published Artscience: A Curious Education by Gerakbudaya. Clarissa Lee will talk about how her book is informed by her decision to couple each of the main seven essays in the book to an exercise aimed at inviting the reader to participate in the unfinished story begun in each essay, through the fictive universes constructed via each exercise, not merely for the reader to complete as one would expect of exercises in a book, but rather, to create their own speculative narratives, theories, and even creative or imaginary products. There is no definite outcome, and each outcome is shaped by the cognitive and creative zones that the reader possesses, and which the reader may choose to reshape. She talks about her decision to turn what would have been a set of linear theoretical arguments into a maze of narrative puzzles that draws from an eclectic collection of subjects that are seemingly worlds apart, but which could come together to produce the emergent and the unfathomable. All of these are done through the jurisdiction of an epistemic practice called artscience, a practice that catalyses old narratives with fresh conjectures, while kindling new discoveries for experimental play.


More information on the book and how to obtain it could be found at https://modularcriticism.blogspot.com/2021/04/my-new-book-artscience-curious.html