Abstract

White light, Aww white light it lighten up my eyes
White light, don‘t you know it fills me up with surprise
White light, Aww white heat tickle me down to my toes
White light, Aww white light I tell you now goodness knows, now work it.
The Velvet Underground

Jacques Rancière once said that, maybe, it is more important to save fiction from reality, than to protect reality from fiction. What if this is especially true in high times of simulation, when reality increasingly coincides with models that anticipate, predict, and regulate this reality? They say, we live in an age of simulation, fiction will disappear along with the old technologies that produced it. But, what if fiction has just changed its register? What if fiction has become a mode of critique, in its old-fashioned insistence not to be real, its persistence on a sprawling seam that distinguishes itself from reality? What if the issue is not the postfactional, but the postfictional?
The episode follows the glow of the strangest of all elements, Phosphorus, from its extraterrestrial origins via alchemistic experiments, bird excrements, pacific islands, colonial expansions and dietary geopolitics to the new subaquatic and outer space territories of capitalism. In collaboration between various artists, theoreticians, a designer, and a space station architect, the episode measures the distance between islands and planets, tragedy and transgression, future, fiction, and past. “A myth can only be told in the language of the myth.
”The trip starts on Nauru, the phosphate island in the Pacific Ocean, formerly the richest republic in the world and the future test site for space travel and bio-currencies, these days the site of an Australian detention camp for refugees, about to disappear under water. Nauru is the perfect spot to fabulate about space colonies, interstellar green houses, and self-mining, to discuss life and resistance in hostile environments, to contemplate living organisms built from scratch, without original in nature, and to talk about the violent, gleaming white technologies of desire.

Open Discussion: November 5, 2017 18h
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