Confusion 2021 – Academic Track

Friday 2nd April 2021

Session One: String Theory Made Easy

Presented by: Maciej Matuszewski

String theory is often considered to be one of the most difficult branches of modern physics. However, it is far from an impenetrable subject and the basic ideas can be readily understood by a layperson.

String theory is the result of a long-time trend in physics to attempt to arrive at unified theories of seemingly distinct phenomena. The great successes of twentieth century physics have been general relativity – which explains how gravity behaves at large scales – and the standard model – which explains the subatomic world. However, it has been difficult to see how these two theories work together – for example, we do not know how gravity works for subatomic particles. String theory was created to describe subatomic particles called mesons – however it was also found to naturally ‘predict’ gravity. It is therefore hoped that it can be the missing ‘Theory of Everything’.

Even if it is not correct as a fundamental theory in and of itself, the mathematics of string theory is very interesting. The so-called AdS/CFT correspondence is a trick that uses this new mathematics to simplify complicated calculations in areas such as high energy physics and solid state physics. My work has, in particular, looked at how the AdS/CFT correspondence can be used to make simpler, but hopefully still accurate, models of how mesons decay.

This presentation will provide an accessible but detailed historical and scientific background which led up to string theory and the AdS/CFT correspondence, and then briefly outline the specifics of these theories themselves.

Bio: The same as many other people working in STEM subjects, my interest in science was first stoked by watching and reading SF. I completed an MSci in Physics with Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London in 2014 and a PhD at the Durham University Department of Mathematical Sciences and Centre for Particle Theory in 2019. I have remained at Durham University, where I work as an Assistant Teaching Fellow and Research Facilities Manager. While my work now mainly focuses on teaching and providing support for the Math Department's computer network, I have retained an interest in the string theory work that was the focus of my PhD. I have attended many SF conventions, including multiple Worldcons, but this will be my first Eastercon. https://www.dur.ac.uk/mathematical.sciences/people/profile/?mode=staff&id=13117 Session Two: Games, Frames, & Flames: Utopian Worldmaking While the World is Burning

Presented by: Francis Gene-Rowe, Avery Delany, and Jo Lindsay Walton

a) Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Have Fun: Generative Play in Dystopian Times

Already a thriving (sub)genre across sf media, dystopias have proliferated in recent years. It’s no wonder: doomy trends and developments abound in both world politics and our awareness of unfolding climate disaster, to say nothing of Covid-19’s exacerbation of existing inequalities. Dystopian imaginings can be parsed in a variety of ways – as proleptic visions, as calls to arms, as painfully honest social realism, as fetishised commodities – and I find my thinking lingering on suggestions that dystopian imaginaries may be counterproductive, even figments of a privileged gaze. To have the luxury to contemplate representations of oppression may be to enjoy a comfortable distance. It is important to centre the reality that for those in marginalised communities and identity positions, dystopia and ‘the end of the world’ are past or recurring events. The generative response to the dawning realisation that it was All Dystopia All Along may be to invest our energies into seeking to instigate and build different futures.

The distortions of pandemic life have not been evenly distributed. With that said, common experiences for many include restriction, compelled exposure to danger and impoverishment of pleasure and sociality. The pandemic has also foregrounded the importance of mutual aid and our ties to each other. Among the more pressing concerns of how to keep living, Coronareality also asks questions about the ways we choose to play and imagine together. This highlights the importance of utopianism in gaming, of channelling experiences of play in order to escape alienated pessimism, to better know the kind of work we need to be able to do.

I don’t, however, want to give up on dystopianism, but will instead submit these ideas to a stress test by asking questions about how dystopian gaming can provide generative fun. The latter part of this presentation will consist of a critical evaluation of Paranoia RPG. Featuring an irredeemably dystopian setting, it is my view that Paranoia’s ramshackle-by-design worldbuilding and disregard for heroism opens up a liberating form of play, a way of gaming dystopia that escapes teleology and mastery. The road to utopia is deeply uncertain, but I hope to show that dystopian play can fit inside whatever hopeful Le Guinian carrier-bag we sf fans may assemble.

Bio: Francis Gene-Rowe is a PhD student at Royal Holloway. His doctoral thesis investigates the work of Philip K. Dick and William Blake. Other areas of research and interest include Ursula Le Guin, Walter Benjamin, tabletop gaming, decoloniality, petrocultures, ecocriticism, contemporary poetry and goblin futures. He codirects the London Science Fiction Research Community (lsfrc.co.uk) and is one of the Science Fiction Research Association’s UK representatives. He also serves on the editorial board of Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy’s A New Canon series. b) Welcome to the Future: Inclusion, immersion and belonging in video game futures and worlds

In many ways, video games allow players to escape from their "AFK" (Legacy Russell, 2020) selves/lives/worlds by allowing players to virtually experience/inhabit/play in and with other bodies, lives, stories and worlds. This capacity for escapism vis-a-vis avatars and worlds has proven crucial during Covid-19, as more people than ever from all over the world have immersed themselves in video games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, The Sims 4, Among Us and Hades. At a time when much of the world was under lockdown and people were left feeling isolated, unable to physically venture past their own front doors or connect with others, these games allowed players to escape into, communicate with and co-create other bodies/lives/stories/worlds.

However, the opportunity to ‘escape’ into these virtual realities is not possible for everyone, and neither do players experience escapism equally. In this talk, I unpack the notion of ‘fun’ asking who is fun for and explore how video games create immersion for some groups whilst occluding it for others. I focus specifically on video games which construct and transmit ideas about imaginaries of the future, examine who these futures and worlds are for, and linger on what it means to build and play in these futures/worlds. I look firstly at video games which are based on futures and worlds built upon appropriation, exclusion and inequality. I then turn to examples which provide both players and developers opportunities to co-create more inclusive futures/worlds which envision futures and worlds where marginalised folk don’t just belong but thrive.

In doing so, this talk aims to highlight why inclusive worldbuilding in video games matters, how video games provide a unique medium in which players and developers can co-create futures/worlds together, and their liberatory potential to craft and communicate futures and worlds of belonging.

Bio: Avery Delany is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths University. Their thesis examines historical and social constructions of what it means to be “human”/”non-human” through narratives about and characters of artificial intelligence in single-player science fiction video games. Throughout their work, Avery explores personhood and the body, imaginaries of the future, worlding, decolonising and decentering, video games, and practices of care. Avery is a codirector of the London Science Fiction Research Community (lsfrc.co.uk), member of the Beyond Gender research collective, and on the editorial board for Decol Anth @ Gold (decolanth.co.uk). Avery tweets @redrocketpanda and blogs at fieldnotesfromthefuture.com

c) ‘Liliputopia: Being and becoming little, from The Borrowers to J. Balvin’

This paper explores a rich tradition of science fiction and fantasy about miniaturization. The animals of Brian Jacques’ Redwall series (1986-2011) are discreetly resized as the series progresses, until mice, otters, hares and badgers can comfortably feast together in Redwall Abbey. In Adam Roberts’s ‘David, Goliath, Adam’ (2020) we see how zooming in never just produces quantitative shifts, but qualitative transformation. From the crumbs collected by Mary North’s Borrowers and Terry Pratchett’s nomes, to the dangerous dollops of ketchup dodged by the rapper J. Balvin and the townsfolk of Judi and Ron Barrett’s Chewandswallow, shrinking in the presence of food can spark new ways of thinking through scarcity and post-scarcity. Such fantasies of miniaturization are also often encounters with dark ecology, fraught with dangers, as normally innocuous nonhuman agencies unveil their latent violence. Works such as Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2017) explicitly connect miniaturization with the politics of planetary limits, voluntary simplicity, and degrowth economics, and what Timothy Clark terms the Anthropocene’s “scale framing” problem, the challenges of conceptually integrating articles as infinitesimal as a microfiber or a carbon atom with the vast sweep of human and more-than-human history.

Speculative miniaturization also has a special relationship with the speculative and critical affordances of play. The toys of Julie Taymor’s Titus and Peyton Reed’s Ant-man (co-written by Joe Cornish, and prefigured by the parodic toy Hollywoods of The Adam and Joe Show) can express a strange hybrid violence, simultaneously real and virtual. Likewise, we quite nonchalantly turn ourselves into titans when we play board games. What does it mean to gather with friends in a rough circle and peer down onto something that is both a map and a territory, pinching and prodding the little lives that thrive there between our ginormous thumbs and forefingers -- while perhaps also identifying with those pieces? Bringing together Susan Stewart’s classic work on the miniature with Mary Flanagan’s notion of “critical play” the paper concludes with insights into the phenomenology and politics of contemporary tabletop gaming, and what it might mean to be simultaneously very big and very small.

Bio: Jo Lindsay Walton is a Research Fellow in Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Sussex, and editor-at-large of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. His academic research focuses mainly on speculative fiction and speculative economies, including alternative and speculative currencies, alternative and speculative organizational forms, and automation, democracy, and the future of work. His fiction has appeared in Big Echo, Fireside Fiction, MIT Technology Review, and The Long+Short. Twitter: @jolwalton. Web: www.jolindsaywalton.com.

Saturday 3rd April

Session Three: Undermining the Fun in a Fairytale Retelling: Examining Power Differentials and Cultural Construction in Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver.

Presented by: Gillian Polack

Power differentials are critical to fiction: who can do what and when and what consequences they face can back up a novel or undermine it. In a fantasy novel, these differentials help explain the cultural constructs that form a setting. The drama and the romance and even the feel of a tale can rest on social disparities or religious disparities or gender disparities.

Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver challenges the Rumpelstiltskin story by making the story about a Jewish moneylender in a fantasy land. One of the most interesting questions relating to Spinning Silver is how Novik incorporates power differentials, especially given that her main protagonist is both Jewish and female. The way the culture is built and the way differences in power play out are critical to how a woman achieves life goals in many fantasy novels, especially those with plots that include elements of romance. More than this, Jewish stereotyping in wider culture is often measured through Christian and antisemitic lenses, which can leave Jewish characters in novels as victims or as wielders of extraordinary power. Examining the power differentials and how conflict is resolved in Spinning Silver will help explain how Novik reshapes the Rumpelstiltskin story and, through this, will assist in evaluating the culture Novik has constructed in the tale’s setting.

Bio: Dr Gillian Polack is an award-winning Australian writer and editor. She was recently given the A. Bertram Chandler Award, for lifetime achievement and the Ditmar for Best novel for The Year of the Fruit Cake. Her most recent novels are Borderlanders (Odyssey) and Poison and Light (Shooting Star) and her next novel will be The Green Children Help Out (Aggadah Have It) which riffs on the idea of a Jewish pocket universe that produces Jewish (and the occasional non-Jewish) super heroes. Her novels are mostly science fiction and contemporary fantasy, which is a bit odd, for she is an ethnohistorian. Her hobbies include cooking, researching historical foodways and reading. She claims to have a collection of select and very attractive fans.

Session Four: Transformers & Butler

Presented by: Isabella Macleod & Jonathan Thornton

a) Exploring how nostalgia and fan engagement informs themes of transformation and sandbox play in IDW’s The Transformers (2005-2018)

Since its first iteration in the 1980s, Hasbro’s Transformers franchise has remained a staple of children’s entertainment, whether on the TV, in films, or through toys. Its modern view in the mainstream, perhaps unfortunately, remains the Michael Bay helmed live-action films. A series that, while not necessarily for children, does not achieve any real development beyond the simplistic good Autobots versus evil Decepticons plot established by the original animated TV show. It would be fruitful then to turn to The Transformers (2005-2018) comic books series, distributed by IDW publishing, as a product concerned not with recreating, or even completely reconstructing, its previous iterations, but with engaging with the transformational nature of the very narrative content.

Developed concurrently with numerous other, and often more reductive, Transformers products. IDW’s The Transformers deals with the aftermath of a war lasting millions of years between its central two factions. Previously, the weightier issues of post war political strife, traumatisation of soldiers, and the flexible identities of transforming robots, were only explored in the margins by long time fans of the franchise. The Transformers marked the first time such explorations were allowed a place within the main narrative.

It is my argument that this change in focus is less a surprise and more a logical conclusion of both the comic book form’s infinitely transformable nature and the titular characters’ status in flux as genderless humanoid robots. To highlight this I will identify a strain of nostalgia present in the series that does not uncritically look backwards but engages with the nature of the characters there within as adaptable as their toy counterparts. Through this, The Transformers can be understood less an an unfolding linear plot, but as a sandbox in which creators can explore, reinterpret, and ultimately transform the franchise’s own history. Bio: Isabella Macleod is a PhD candidate starting at the University of Queensland where she will be completing a thesis on the outback as a space of trauma and reflection in modern Australian cinema. Her interests include a focus on forms of marginalisation in media spaces and how national cinemas are constructed and received in the cultural consciousness. She has written multiple articles for Fantasy/Animation, including on the construction of the family sphere in Hosoda Mamoru’s films and the divide of the real and the imagined in stop-motion animation. She recently had a chapter published in Culture: Raise ‘Low’, Rethink ‘High’ that explored the phenomenological aspects of fan fiction.

b) Parasitism and Posthuman Embodiment in Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and Xenogenesis Books

Given that her work so frequently subverts the power dynamics of relationships, it is fitting that when parasitism and the image of the parasite occurs in Octavia Butler’s work it is similarly used to subvert expected power imbalances across race, gender and species. In Bloodchild (1984), the human boy Gan and the insect-like T’Gatoi attempt to have a loving relationship despite the fact that Gan must host T’Gatoi’s parasitic eggs as part of the price for humanity’s continued existence on T’Gatoi’s planet. Similarly, in the Xenogenesis books, comprising Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988) and Imago (1989) Butler explores the relationship between the three gendered, invertebrate-like Oankali, who undergo metamorphosis and need to interbreed with other species, the human survivors of a nuclear war, and the resulting Oankali-human hybrid children. This paper will explore how Butler uses the parasite to disrupt the expected heteronormative power dynamics across binaries of male/female, insect/human, and colonised/coloniser, and so imagines new posthuman ways of being that resonate with posthuman feminist anticolonial reimaginings of embodiment such as Rosi Braidotti’s ‘Becoming Woman/Animal/Insect’ (2002) and Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985). They also represent an attempt to negotiate the human relationship with other species, and hence give us new ways of thinking about how humanity can coexist with other species as part of nature in better, non-destructive ways. This talk will demonstrate how Butler’s subversion of the parasite can help us rethink our own entrenched attitudes of power, privilege and biological imperatives, and give us hope for the future during challenging times.

Bio: Jonathan Thornton is in his first year studying for a PhD in Science Fiction literature at the University of Liverpool. He is interested in the portrayal of insects in speculative fiction and fantastika. He has an MA in Science Fiction literature and an MSc in Medical Entomology, and works as a technician at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He has had articles published in the SFRA Review, The Polyphony, and the Routledge Handbook to Star Trek (in press). He also writes criticism and reviews and conducts interviews for internet publications Fantasy Faction, The Fantasy Hive and Gingernuts of Horror. Session Five: Narrating the Anthropocene: mythic fantasy and Chakrabarty’s Four Theses

Presented by: Tom Robinson

Dipesh Chakrabarty’s paper The Climate of History: Four Theses (2008) identified the narrative challenges posed to the humanities by the Anthropocene: namely that our theoretical and scholastic tools are ill-suited and unaccustomed to conceiving of human beings as global agents whose actions have consequences not only in the human sphere, but also for the rest of the natural world. To elucidate the problem and to discuss possible solutions and depictions I have attempted in my creative practise, I will discuss Pramod K. Nayar’s (Posthumanism, 2014) conception of human beings as a boundless, permeable category constitutive of the contexts it encounters and resides within: linguistic, historical, ethnic, gender identity, cultural, political, and so on. I intend to relate both to the creative practise I am currently undertaking in my PHD as I write my novel, Folly, which tries to narrate or at least mythologize the ideas and philosophical beliefs I believe to be central to both the origin of the Anthropocene and its perpetuation through fantasy fiction writing. This paper will specifically look at how I have attempted to translate these redefinitions of the human subject into a fantasy creation myth that emphasises interconnectivity and categorical permeability, before discussing possible ramifications and impacts from this adaptation. I expect the presentation to take around 40 minutes, allocating half to introducing both the Anthropocene and a brief summary of both Chakrabarty and Nayar’s main points (while also establishing the interconnections therein). The final twenty minutes will focus on practise, extracts from the creation myth I have constructed for my thesis, and demonstrating how features and facets of the fantasy genre can be used to bypass many of the issues Chakrabarty identifies.

Bio: Based in Colchester where he lives with his wife Hollie and two sons Hunter and Whittaker, Thomas Robinson is a second year Creative Writing PHD candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Essex whose creative research Folly attempts to narrate the history and historic myths of the Anthropocene. He has published short fiction in the British Fantasy Society’s Horizons magazine (On Well-Wishers, Vol. 8, 2018 & Broehain, Vol.12, 2020), and hopes to contribute more. In his spare time he makes awful noises on the guitar with Colchester based prog-metal band, Afterthought.

Session Six: Going Medieval: How Pop Culture Reflects the Past

Presented by: Paul Sturtevant

The Middle Ages are everywhere in our pop culture. Just look at “Game of Thrones” and the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Knights and castles are all over video, tabletop, and role-playing games. And we can spend a day at a medieval-style festival and an evening at a theme restaurant featuring jousts, swordplay, and revelry.

Why are we so culturally obsessed with this distant time period? What, if anything, can these pop-culture rehashes of history tell us about the past? And perhaps more revealing, what can the ways that we re-imagine the medieval era tell us about how we see ourselves today? Medievalist and sociologist Paul B. Sturtevant embarks on a colourful journey through the castles, cathedrals, and battlefields dreamed up by contemporary culture. He examines how history is not just history: that what we remember, and how we remember it, is always a mirror that reflects ourselves.

Bio: Paul B. Sturtevant is an author, an historian, and a public medievalist. He is a leading expert on the public’s perception of the past, and has explored how education, museums, and popular culture shape how we understand the past and the present.

His historical subject is the Middle Ages; his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds (UK) developed a new evidence-based approach to understanding how people perceive the medieval world, and how their historical consciousness affects their worldview. But he is not just interested in medieval history; he has done research on the crisis in the humanities, the career prospects of History majors, the development of the Affordable Care Act, and even the history of American Barbecue. The thing that links all of these together is his passion for understanding the links between the past and the present, and presenting those links—in all their complexity—to the public. Furthering this personal mission, he is the founder and Editor-in-chief of The Public Medievalist, a popular collaborative online history magazine.

Session Seven: Oh The Humanity: The 36 years when airships were the future

Presented by: Nick Bradbeer

Rigid airships captured the public imagination although they only existed for a relatively brief period. A hundred years after the crash of R-38, Nick Bradbeer talks about the history of airships, the sometimes surprising ways they worked, and how fiction gets them right and wrong.

Sunday 4th April

Session Eight: World-building as theft – reducing exposition in speculative fiction

Presented by: Sue Dawes

The problem at the heart of any speculative fiction is that, for scientifically plausible events to exist within an entirely created world, that new world must be convincing. One way to suggest authenticity, without exposition, is to provide a sense of experiential layering. This paper will look at a variety of written and visual texts, used by a range of authors of Speculative Fiction, to explore their invented worlds.

Works will include Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker, Phillip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. These works, though very different in both structure and content, all use external real-world references, ranging from art, characters, books and myth, to build their invented world through reviewing and reworking cultural and historical layers of experience. These details from our known world allow a strong element of familiarity when introducing a reader to an unknown world. It can also create a strong sense of place in a way which entertains rather than instructs.

Based on my exploration of these speculative authors, and the narrative tools they use to present the social and cultural basis of their worlds, I will discuss my own reasoning for including invented texts in my work-in-progress, a utopian novel called No Place. No Place is a non-binary feminist thought experiment, where a mid- nineteenth century shipwreck deposits the survivors on an island in a parallel universe.

I will discuss how creating a pastiche of nineteen century speculative stories for inclusion in my speculative world has allowed me to juxtapose the period of history my characters originally inhabit with the world I have created.

Bio: Sue Dawes lives in the wilds of Essex with her family, and is writing a non-binary utopia as part of her PhD in Creative Writing at Essex University. Sue writes in several genres and has over 30 writing credits to her name: short stories, flash fiction, and poetry. She has been published in magazines, anthologies and on-line publications, including Mslexia, Potato Soup Journal, Writer’s Forum and the Island Review. She has also had some success in competitions.

Sue is an associate editor for the Short Fiction journal, and a member of Colchester Writenight, which she helps to run. She can be found on Twitter @Wivenhoewriters.

Session Nine: How do you map fantasy and should you?

Presented by: Madison McLeod

What kinds of places prompt magic to occur? Is it the cold, grey high-rises of the financial section that cry for magical re-imaginings? Or is it the ancient, twisty, almost secret backstreets that seem only visible to those in-the-know that convey magical possibilities waiting to be discovered? Is it the gorgeous fairytale-like architecture that makes Victorian London a location for the fantastic? Or is it the eclectic mix of whimsical buildings with their beautiful spires and domes alongside dreary tower blocks and council estates that gives us the sense that anything can happen in the city - that anyone can live and move through London, including wizards, waifs, princesses, and poltergeists? Liminality and geography are often seen as incongruous elements. Fantasy, on the other hand, transforms geography and allows a ‘real’ geography to integrate the possibility of liminality. Literary London is a palimpsest that uses fantasy to blend liminality and geography to create a world that looks like our own but that can assimilate magic into its topography. In this presentation, I will explore the ways in which digital mapping software can be used to study fantasy locations, teach others how to go about mapping their own urban fantasies and explore the endless possibilities available to those curious enough to start mapping the fantasy worlds around them. Session Ten: The Radical Joy of Queer of Colour Geekdom

Presented by: Ibtisam Ahmed

Personal acts are inherently political in nature, and the more marginalised an individual’s identity is, the more radical their personal politics tend to be. As a queer person of colour, my experiences, both academic and lived, have been shaped by my identity and the ways in which I am allowed to enter and engage with different spaces. This means that my interactions with geekdom have always carried the caveat of being shaped through the lenses of queerness and race.

While this carries some obvious frustrations, I want to use this paper to reflect on the power of “Fun” in these interactions. I use Utopian Studies as a framework, especially drawing on the works of Sara Ahmed, Lynne Segal and Lucy Sargisson. The crux of my argument lies in the fact that geekdom – as a microcosm of global dynamics – tends to privilege some voices over others. As a result, celebrating geek culture from these precarious positions (queer, of colour) ends up being a radical act of self-love and community building.

I weave in the following personal reflections into this: (1) my experience of masculinity vis-à-vis the superhero genre, including the increasing diversity within it; (2) the shift of queer characters and stories from being tropes and stereotypes to being nuanced and told by own voices; and (3) the experiences of race in a white-centric culture as someone from the Global South, including in the fandom and associated practices like cosplaying. I do not erase any of the challenges or ongoing problems, but I hope that, by focusing on the responses to said issues, I am able to offer a thoughtful insight into the experiences of being a queer geek of colour.

Bio: Ibtisam Ahmed is a Doctoral Research Student at the University of Nottingham, currently completing corrections to his thesis on utopianism and decolonisation. He has a specific interest in popular culture and the potential it has for radical story-telling and world-building. His work has always focused on the ways in which marginalised voices interact with social structures, a commitment that is underlined by his own experiences of facing queerphobia and racism. His publications include the chapter “The Queer Immigrant Body as a Space of Utopia: the Politics of Young Avengers’ Wiccan and Hulkling” in the book The Politics of Culture (2020, Cambridge Scholars Publishing) which he co-edited. His full research and publication profile can be found at: www.nottingham.ac.uk/politics/people/Ibtisam.Ahmed and he tweets at the handle @Ibzor.

Session Eleven: The Tangent Factory: How can the cutting up and rearranging of the work of Philip K Dick be useful in articulating new narratives for the role of intuition in painting?

Presented by: Alexander James Pollard

The Tangent Factory is a practice-based PhD taking the form of a graphic novel (work in progress). I have cut-up (ala Burroughs, Gysin) and re-ordered the novels of Philip K Dick with the intention of creating new narratives helpful in updating our understanding of intuition in painting. The visuals of my graphic novel will be collage/painting hybrids made from highly enlarged sections of the P K Dick’s stories that have already been made into graphic novels such as Electric Ant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and a A Scanner Darkly.

The central questions within this research are as follows:

∙ How can hauntological approaches to world building help the formation of context and meaning in contemporary painting?

∙ Does fictioning open up new ways to explore an allusive subject like “intuition”?

∙ Can “intuition” be reimagined for a post-human context and how might this reading problematise existing assumptions of the role of intuition in painting?

Tangent Factories tells the surreal cut-up story of an art school in the future selling experience economy packages. Within the art school strange practices are carried out using carnivorous Ganymede Slime Molds that allow the participants to tap into flow states that literally take them outside of their subjectivity.

I intend to perform a short reading from the work whilst showing some “work in progress” visuals. I will unpack my methodology and approach, outlining some of the key concepts involved - such as Katherine N. Hayles' work on "Non-conscious Cognition" and Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow Theory” and touch on the notion of “Fictioning”, as theorised by Simon O’Sullivan and David Burrows (Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, 2019) and “Hauntology” discussed in many texts by Fisher, Jameson, Derrida etc.

Monday 5th April

Session Twelve: ‘The Midnight Sky/Good Morning, Midnight: Impossible to Ignore Iris’

Presented by: Sophie Squire

With a rise in climate fiction and the development of dystopian fiction, how is the way that humans treat the world being represented any differently? Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Good Morning, Midnight (2016) is a novel that draws on our understanding of both science fiction and global changes. George Clooney’s film answer to the book, ‘The Midnight Sky’ (2020), is a cinematic representation of the earth as a wasteland. But what happened? Why aren’t we told about the catastrophe that destroyed the Earth? The truth is, we already know. In this presentation, I explore the ways in which Brooks-Dalton and Clooney represent the earth’s last remaining landscapes, as well as the narrative tools they employ to draw on our pre-existing fears of global warming/global warfare. I argue that provoking fear is important in science fiction. It is a genre that allows the author/director to scare us into action; we choose that action ourselves. We are forced to confront consequences that are of our own making. Taking Good Morning, Midnight to be set in the aftermath of catastrophic global warfare means that we can examine it as our possible future. Augustine Lofthouse is a scientist staying behind on Earth as the rest of humanity flees to find other habitable planets. The earth is a desolate wasteland, covered in uninhabitable zones. He seems at peace with his loneliness until he finds a young girl on the same Arctic base as him. He immediately tries to contact the fleeing ships, an attempt to offload this newfound burden. But she has to stay, Augustine is forced to acknowledge her, just as we are forced to acknowledge the destruction of earth. The young girl, Iris, is impossible to ignore, she follows him everywhere. Augustine is ‘angry because he [does] care, despite his best efforts not to.’ This presentation examines the parallels between the spectrality of Iris, and the ephemeral hope for a habitable earth.

Bio: I am a first year Creative Writing PhD student at Aberystwyth University researching the ways in which science fiction can offer an interdisciplinary approach to teaching. Titled ‘Anthroposcenery: Provoking Fear in Pedagogy, Invoking Action in Reality’, my project focuses on the Anthropocene, the current epoch we are living in, and the climate crisis. I am also interested in the way humans are depicted to abuse the earth and its natural resources in science fiction. I am interested in the accessibility of scientific information in science fiction compared to scientific journals that tend to use paywalls, as well as news media. I am also a fan of all things sci-fi and like to play around with the constraints of ‘academic’ boundaries: using the oft maligned genre of science fiction to support my work. Originally from Staffordshire, I love the outdoors and am more than likely reading, watering my (obscene amount of) plants, or re-watching Doctor Who and trying not to shout at the TV.

Session Thirteen: The Art of Star Trek

Presented by: Daniel Huckfield

This presentation considers the art of Star Trek (ST), the artworks that characters live with and those that are seen on planets and other settings.

Star Trek has been a cultural force for over 50 years and its various incarnations have reflected the concerns and events of their times. An aspect that has stayed pretty constant within the shows and films is the use of abstract art as a shortcut for ‘future’ art. Abstract Expressionism was the dominant art form of the 1950s and 60s and was seen as forward looking and exciting, it could be argued that it was the natural choice for TOS to use this art form to depict the future, but why has Star Trek continued this employment of abstraction?

Contemporary art has developed many new forms and yet these developments do not seem to be influencing contemporary Star Trek set design, my presentation will discuss the use of art in the franchise and how this has both developed and in some senses remained lodged in the 60s. The presentation will provide a brief overview of the art seen in various iterations of the franchise and to go on to discuss similarities between series and why the use of abstraction has remained common.

Daniel’s presentation comes from his work writing his MA Fine Art dissertation which he is currently completing at University of Brighton.