Tanzquartier Wien

Not in some distant future, but ten years ago, the US passed a law that explicitly allowed private companies to exploit resources on other celestial bodies commercially. This so-called ‘Space Act of 2015’ effectively translated the popular science fiction trope of space mining into legal reality, preparing future interplanetary extraction schemes.

In his exercise of Un·Earthing, Ralo Mayer invites participants on a cosmic journey across the natural and cultural history of meteorites: rocks that are older than our solar system and yet deeply entangled with life on Earth and human cultures. Space Acts looks into existing meteorite cultures on Earth and asks how human interaction with rocks from outer space can help us to reimagine possible futures beyond colonial exploitation of resources, on and off our planet.

Fortune Telling is a 15-minute performance for one guest at a time. David Bloom will tap into his diverse backgrounds as a dancer, bodyworker, performer, musician, parent, desire researcher, and fermenting Jewish mystic to make a prediction about the guest’s short- to medium-term future. The prediction will be 100% accurate. However, the reading is cleverly framed as an art piece, so everyone can relax and enjoy the experience.

Listening for Dinosaurs? Ok! But wait… does this mean we are listening for traces of dinosaurs, or are we the dinosaurs and this is an instruction for us to listen? What is all this stuff, and how will it help us to think about the Anthropocene and extinction processes? And what’s with the chicken?

This will be an audio recording and listening session. No prior knowledge, skills, or equipment needed.

In a world long changed by disaster, a small community survives by a fragile pact: to provide care, aid, and access for all. In this role-playing game, community members bring their personal, social, or environmental problems to the council, and council members respond as best as they can. Through collaborative roleplay and strategic time management, you’ll contribute your most precious resource – time – while balancing capacity with need. Not always perfectly, not always enough, but with the will to care for all.

The game is designed by Kara Stone and will be facilitated by Liv Schellander.

Mitchell Travis: Futures of Law and Justice; Challenging the Epistemology of the Ever-Present

A rowing body of work in cultural studies has lamented the slow cancellation of the future. This loss of futurity has resulted in the production of an epistemological ever-present characterised by both its freneticism and lack of social change. This talk analyses this phenomenon through a discussion of neoliberalism and its focus on short-term economic goals alongside relentless attacks on the humanities. In order to challenge this, Futures of Law and Justice advocates for science fiction as a legal method, examining the important work that science fiction can do in terms of stimulating new and innovative approaches to justice, providing alternative conceptions of political and legal structures and extrapolating the dangers of current social trends.

Ammar Bustami: The Legal Relationship Between Present and Future Generations – How to Address Intergenerational Equity?

It is the year 2100 on planet Earth. Life has dramatically changed, not only due to the effects of climate change. The international community decides to send a time-traveller back to the year 2025, tasked with confronting this earlier generation with one question: Why did you violate your duties of intergenerational equity? But is this question the correct one to ask? Or is the question instead whether intergenerational equity is legally binding at all? Do future generations have rights? Which institutional means do they have to be represented? This contribution attempts to answer these questions but goes beyond traditional legal analysis. Instead, its intertemporal method allows us to address our relationship with the future by taking our own and their future perspective on the law.

In their DJ set, zey challenges the dancers’ perception of time as linear and offers a time-making through sound which stands in opposition to a systemic clock, a tool of control. Queer time and Black time come together to shake up the timeline, and to honour the legacy of Sun Ra by letting music dictate where and when.

In this workshop, we enter the rhythm of clay to feel and think about the various narratives that exist around what we call time. Faced with the multiple social and ecological crises and the need to organise ourselves as a community, this encounter aims to create a space to rethink the colonialist capitalist construction of time (kneading time) from a pluriversal framework that centres vital knowledges.

In a world long changed by disaster, a small community survives by a fragile pact: to provide care, aid, and access for all. In this role-playing game, community members bring their personal, social, or environmental problems to the council, and council members respond as best as they can. Through collaborative roleplay and strategic time management, you’ll contribute your most precious resource – time – while balancing capacity with need. Not always perfectly, not always enough, but with the will to care for all.

The game is designed by Kara Stone and will be facilitated by Liv Schellander.

Fortune Telling is a 15-minute performance for one guest at a time. David Bloom will tap into his diverse backgrounds as a dancer, bodyworker, performer, musician, parent, desire researcher, and fermenting Jewish mystic to make a prediction about the guest’s short- to medium-term future. The prediction will be 100% accurate. However, the reading is cleverly framed as an art piece, so everyone can relax and enjoy the experience.

Not in some distant future, but ten years ago, the US passed a law that explicitly allowed private companies to exploit resources on other celestial bodies commercially. This so-called ‘Space Act of 2015’ effectively translated the popular science fiction trope of space mining into legal reality, preparing future interplanetary extraction schemes.

In his exercise of Un·Earthing, Ralo Mayer invites participants on a cosmic journey across the natural and cultural history of meteorites: rocks that are older than our solar system and yet deeply entangled with life on Earth and human cultures. Space Acts looks into existing meteorite cultures on Earth and asks how human interaction with rocks from outer space can help us to reimagine possible futures beyond colonial exploitation of resources, on and off our planet.

Listening for Dinosaurs? Ok! But wait… does this mean we are listening for traces of dinosaurs, or are we the dinosaurs and this is an instruction for us to listen? What is all this stuff, and how will it help us to think about the Anthropocene and extinction processes? And what’s with the chicken?

This will be an audio recording and listening session. No prior knowledge, skills, or equipment needed.