Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Albert Toscano
William Gibson's Spook Country, the second instalment in a trilogy including Pattern Recognition and Zero History, is in many respects an exploration of the powers of invisibility and the challenges of mapping a world whose real coordinates are intensely abstract and mediated by seemingly innumerable devices, agencies and interests. This talk will investigate the relationship between the ubiquity of the unrepresentable and the desire for mapping in Spook Country, and reflect on the way its narrative orbits around a banal and enigmatic object, one that functions here as a metonym of sorts for contemporary capital: the container. Aside from trying to recast a thriller narrative in an age of GPS, RFID, wifi and homeland security, Spook Country also resonates with recent attempts to think the convergence between artistic and empirical practices of mapping, as well as with what we could call a 'poetics of containerisation' that struggles with the challenges that monetary abstraction, logistics and the new spaces of capital accumulation pose to representation.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Mar 2011 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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