Ereignis ePod

This episode is a recording of Philippe Beck in conversation with Gorica Orsholits and Torgeir Fjeld on the topic of Documentaries: electronic speleology and the archive of the future. Philippe Beck, in his latest book of prose – Documentaries – brought together rewritten texts from his Facebook news feed running from March 27. 2015, to July 7. 2024. He created new stories, a book of documentaries which contains traces of the past, erasures, losses and heterotopias. It is a work of poetics and political meditation, criticism and evocation. It seems that this exploration of the electronic archive and media-driven friendships reveals a world of complex relationships, between participants: people and the institution of Facebook, where meaning is constantly deferred and inherent tensions and contradictions create dense discursive networks of stories, particularly in the realm of the political. These stories became inspirations for Philippe Beck's book of poetry Abstraite et Plaisantine.

In this episode, dramaturg, poet, and academic Matthew Goulish and director Lin Hixson talk about their innovative approach to theatre with Torgeir Fjeld. Their ambulating theatre, Every house has a door, stages performance works and performance-related projects of historically or critically neglected subjects in many media. Based in Chicago, their company has become a hub for diverse, intergenerational project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognised artists. We spoke to them in conjunction with Matthew's keynote address to the 4th Ereignis Conference in Gdynia, Poland, on 11 August 2024. Image by Nathan Keay, 2020. Used by permission.

This podcast features an interview with Dr Adam Staley Groves, who teaches a course on Wallace Stevens and the technique of poetry for Ereignis Institute. To Dr Groves, to be a poet is to become aware of circumstances that are in our lives; it is to understand the poetry that is with us all. In this podcast, we also discuss the figure of former US president Donald Trump as an artist, as someone who creates the familiar from the unfamiliar. The important thing for Dr Groves is that by 'understanding him as an artist we can get past some of the barriers we have to accepting him as a human being, and then we can guard in a supremely sympathetic way our own humanity from the sort of gross polarisation we see.'

In this podcast, we hear Christopher Norris read from and discuss his new collection of poetry, Damaged Life: Poems After Adorno’s Minima Moralia, in a recording from the launch event for the book on 9 December 2021. The poems respond to some cryptic and dialectically wiredrawn passages from Theodor Adorno’s book Minima Moralia with its highly condensed and, on occasion, strikingly poetic prose. Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff and author of many books on philosophy, literary theory, music, and the history of ideas. Hosted by Torgeir Fjeld, the ePod gives you fresh views on philosophy, art, and society. The poems include: 'Commitment: Adorno/Brecht' (selection); 'Little Nails'; 'Magic Flute'; 'Splinter' (read by Val Norris); 'Hegel and the Robot-Bombs'; 'Gaps'; and 'Promise me this, my child’ (read by Val Norris).

In this episode, we meet Dr Mehdi Parsa to talk about the upcoming Ereignis Conference, Being and Event. Parsa specialises in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his logic of event. We talk about subjectivity, desire, and the transcendental unconsciousness. Hosted by Torgeir Fjeld, the ePod gives you fresh views on philosophy, art, and society.

Welcome to ePod, the Ereignis Podcast. In this first episode, Torgeir Fjeld introduces the Ereignis Center in Norwegian and English. Then painter and filmmaker Stefan Chazbijewicz talks about his vision of how the pandemic ushers us into what he calls a post-utopian society, and about what he sees as the role of art. Hosted by Torgeir Fjeld and produced by Stephen Reyna, the ePod gives you fresh views on philosophy, art, and society.