Can a rave temporarily represent an alternative future when the world is in danger of collapsing? During this talk, Wark takes us to New York's thriving underground queer and trans rave scene, evoking a trans practice of raves as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.
Australian writer and theorist McKenzie Wark has published many groundbreaking works, including A Hacker Manifesto (2004), Gamer Theory (2007) and Capital is Dead (2019). She is also a professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College in New York. Wark is an example of how to practise intellectualism as a form of everyday life. Her writing is as critical as it is generous, as nostalgic as it is moralising. She insists on the need to imagine other possibilities for life, but refuses to let this imagination obscure the seriousness of our current political and cultural climate. In her book Raving (2023), Wark makes a particularly incisive and poetic case for raves as an aesthetic and political practice.