We are the Elsewhereians of the future—a future where things are vastly different:

The Muppets have made a comeback! Physical texts are rapidly being supplanted by hexadecimal encodings beamed to flat, gray boards! The sum total of the world’s ideas and information are rapidly being made available through vast interconnected networks, then beamed to flat, gray boards! Communication is possible with people instantly around the world, regardless of their location (except when they’re underground, or when there’s data interference, or when there’s heavy cloud cover, or when too many people are trying to communicate at once into their small black lozenges, or when the lozenges are without juice)! And people! There are billions of them. We confuse people with their surroundings! We confuse people with their objects! Most importantly, we confuse reality with virtual worlds, or rather reality keeps interfering with them. Ours is a perilous and exciting time, entirely different from your own.

But—thankfully!—Elsewhere is still in existence, far into the future.

But—less thankfully!—thanks to your, er, interesting custodianship of the fabric of spacetime vis-à-vis Sylvia’s wonderful library, we have been sucked backward through time into the past! In order to again breach spacetime and return to the ruined world of our own epoch, we will have to somehow agitate the library of Elsewhere. Unfortunately for all of you (who no doubt want us to stay and teach you the many secrets of the unenviable future), we know just how to do this: Stories.

We must bring into a superharmony that chorus of voices found in the library, that chorus of discontiguous times.

Join writers/artists-in-residence The Hollow Earth Society on their journeys through time

Future Fictions Workshop #1: The Future Tarot
Saturday, April 2 1pm | Elsewhere
After a brief discussion of narrative structure and archetypal images, we will create our own stories out of the tarot of the future! Using images from Living Library books—printed out and cut into cards—pairs of writers will construct narratives a la the travelers in Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies: Silently, one partner will arrange a set of 20 cards into a short-short story, but a story that exists only in her head. Her partner will write his own story based on the arranged cards. Then the pair will switch roles. Finally, they will compare their stories and the arrangement of their cards (all arrangements will be photographed). These “tarot” cards create totally new stories. The process will be fun, unpredictable, and messy.

CONFERENCE | Post-Space on Obscura Day
Saturday, April 28 5pm-10pm | Elsewhere
Post-Space asks philosophers, writers, artists, museum professionals, archivists, digital sociologists, ecologists, and other academics and para-academics to consider what happens after the classical, modern, and postmodern concepts of “space” are exhausted—in art, in architecture, in our daily lives.

SALON | Performance & Reading
Saturdays, May 12 2pm | Elsewhere
Join writers-in-residence Hollow Earth Society for a reading and performance in Elsewhere’s Living Library.

Featured

Apr 26, 2012

The Hollow Earth Society

Apr 26, 2012

The Hollow Earth Society is a cabal of aesthetic scientists, writers, artists, paraphysicians, and philosophers who create fake science in order to open up new discourses about real science. Recent works include the books Suspicious Anatomy and Suspicious Zoology, group art shows RETROFUTUROLOGY and The Pop-Up Museum of the Gowanus Canal, and many salons on the intersection of art, science, and bullshit, including the Para-Academia & Theory Fiction series with The Public School New York and the Body As Funhouse Mirror with The Cornelia Café. http://hollowearthsociety.com // twitter.com/hollowearths

Stephen Aubrey is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, dramaturg, lecturer, storyteller, and recovering medievalist. His writing has appeared in Publishing Genius, Commonweal, The Brooklyn Review, Pomp & Circumstance, Forté, and The Outlet. He is the co-writer and editor of The Hollow Earth Society’s Suspicious Anatomy and Suspicious Zoology. He is also a co-founder and the resident dramaturg and playwright of The Assembly Theater Company. His plays have been produced at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Flea Theater, The Collapsable Hole, The Brick Theater, Symphony Space, the Abingdon Theater Complex, UNDER St Marks, The Philly Fringe, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where his original play, We Can’t Reach You, Hartford, was nominated for a 2006 Fringe First Award. He has an MFA from Brooklyn College where he received the Himan Brown Prize and the Ross Feld Writing Award and a BA with Honors from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. He inexplicably holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Hollow Earth Society and is currently an instructor of English at Brooklyn College.

Wythe Marschal is a writer interested in how technologies influence eroticism, religiosity, and other areas of human culture. He believes that weird science will ultimately make "real" science more ethical (and funnier!). With artist Ethan Gould, Wythe is the founder of the Hollow Earth Society, LLC, and a member of Observatory, an art-and-science gallery/events space in Brooklyn. With The Public School New York, the Society organizes an ongoing series of free classes on Para-Academia & Theory Fiction. For Elsewhere, the Society and collaborating producer Kamomi Solidum recently organized Post-Space, a virtual para-academic conference. With Gould, Wythe is the creator of Suspicious Anatomy, an illustrated book of evil neuroscience, and Suspicious Zoology, a children's book of patently false animal science. Wythe's Surreal fiction and criticism have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. By day, Wythe writes advertisements for money. On weekends, Wythe teaches Brooklyn College students about writing, biopunk, Deleuze, Lovecraft, and so forth.

Elsewhere Project / Post-Space Conference

Apr 26, 2012

Elsewhen | The Hollow Earth Society

IRC Mural | Giada Tagliamonte

Floor Extrusion | Michael Webster