We are pleased to announce on Monday, February 24, 2020 at 6 pm we will be joined by Professors Chad Wellmon (German Studies, University of Virginia) and Justin Read (Spanish and Portuguese, University at Buffalo) for a session about knowledge, search, and the self-actualization of technology. The theme of this upcoming event will be Asynchronous Avant-gardes.

Professors Wellmon and Read have shared the following descriptions of their talks:

Chad Wellmon (German Studies, University of Virginia)

“Googling Before Google: Notes on a History of Search”

Google did not invent search. In this presentation, Chad Wellmon probes and historicizes the origins of searching in German romanticism and beyond, leading to a critique of contemporary techno-Utopianism.

Justin Read (Spanish and Portuguese, University at Buffalo)

“Death Programs: In-Forming the Borderzone”

Following Vilém Flusser’s observations about the increasing self-actualization of technology, in this presentation Justin Read reads Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo [Signs preceding the end of the world, 2009] as a cartography of programmed reality along contemporary borderlands.