Seán Cubitt (Lecture)

He/him
Sunday 14 May — De Brakke Grond

Within the framework of our festival theme Fragments, we invite writer and professor Sean Cubitt for a keynote lecture on his upcoming book Truth (MIT 2023) and in what ways sound, listening and technological developments are intertwined. This book argues that the only truths possible in the 21st century are mobile, inventive practices involving everything European communication models exclude: technologies, nature, and leftover humanity.

Tracing histories of their separation, Truth analyzes the struggle between the new dominance of information systems and the sensory worlds it excludes, such as the ancestral wisdom that the West has imprisoned in its technologies. Drawing on a wide range of aesthetic practices, from literature, film, art, music, workplace media, scientific instruments, and animal displays, Truth seeks out ways to create new commons and politics grounded in aesthetic properties of creativity, senses and perception that will no longer be restricted to humans alone.

Seán Cubitt is a Professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect, Ecomedia, The Practice of Light and Finite Media. As a series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his current research is on aesthetic politics, eco-critique, media arts, and media technologies. Cubitt works across film, television, media, and communication and researches the relations between film, media studies and ecocriticism.