In conjunction with the exhibition The Otolith Group: Medium Earth, REDCAT presents Body Tremors: The Geopoetics of Prediction and Premonition, a series of presentations and conversations exploring the agency of the seismic and the sensitive. The program will be accompanied by intermittent screenings of related audiovisual works. 

With presentations by Kodwo Eshun, Dick Hebdige, Susan Elizabeth Hough, Charlotte King, Norman M. Klein, Aram Moshayedi, Anjalika Sagar, Rebecca Solnit, and Aurora Tang.

Sunday, April 21

12pm
Internal Tantrum (1975)
Charlemagne Palestine

12:15pm
Introduction
Aram Moshayedi

12:30pm
Medium Earth
The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun)

1pm
On the history, present, and future of seismology as prediction
Susan Elizabeth Hough

1:45pm
Dark Matter in the Urban Landscape
Rebecca Solnit

2:30–3:30pm
Lunch break

3:30pm
Grapevine Landscan (2010)
Center for Land Use Interpretation

3:45pm
On the CLUI landscans
Aurora Tang

4pm
On seismic flu and other sensitivities
Charlotte King

4:30pm
Whole Earths
Norman M. Klein

5:15pm
On desert poetics
Dick Hebdige

Schedule in progress and subject to change.

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Participant Biographies:

Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar are co-founders of The Otolith Group.

Dick Hebdige is a media theorist and sociologist, and author of such pioneering titles as Subculture: The Meaning of Style. He is current director of the Desert Studies Project, a pilot program in interdisciplinary California-embedded arts-centered research, immersion pedagogy, and process curating organized by The University of California Institute for Research in the Arts in collaboration with the UC Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery.

Susan Elizabeth Hough is a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, and scientist in charge of the office. She has served as an editor and contributor for many journals and is a contributing editor of Geotimes Magazine. She is the author of five books, including Earthshaking Science: What We Know (and Don’t Know) about Earthquakes. 

Charlotte King is an earthquake sensitive best known for her accurate prediction of the major eruption of Washington's Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980. She currently resides in Salem, Oregon where she maintains a list serve and website dedicated to biological earthquake prediction and sensitivity. Active in the field of earthquake prediction for over three decades, she is co-author and co-investigator of Volunteer Project Migraine, an initiative with Dr. Christopher H. Dodge of the U.S. Library of Congress that sought to prove, beyond coincidence, that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions could be forecast, prospective of the event, giving time, magnitude, location, and probability.

Norman M. Klein is a professor in the department of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, and author of such acclaimed books as The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory and Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. A critic, historian, and novelist, he has written extensively on the culture and politics of Los Angeles, on cinema, and on architecture.

Aram Moshayedi is the associate curator of the Gallery at REDCAT.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist, and the author of thirteen books about ecology, environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, most recently Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Other published titles include A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper's and frequent contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com.  

Aurora Tang is a program manager at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a non-profit research and education organization dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

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For more information about the exhibition The Otolith Group: Medium Earth, visit: http://redcat.newcitystaging.com/exhibition/otolith-group