On View: June 14-June 15
The Kitchen at Westbeth
Time:
Event begins at 7pm
In Not Us Now, her vertiginous second collection, Zoë Hitzig delivers an astonishing act of ventriloquy in reverse -- speaking not through the voice of a singular, lyric "I," but through a consciousness that seems to have amassed itself out of the detritus of human life. The future world of Not Us Now is remembered in an even further future, where language is both the survivor and the cargo of an earthly wreckage.
Please join Changes at The Kitchen to celebrate the launch of this enthralling new book with readings from Hitzig, alongside Aria Dean, and a performance by Jaron Lanier. Following the readings, the three will join in conversation around self and subjecthood in an increasingly cellularized digital context.
"There was no need to dream; I could feel my organic machine taking in each of Zoë Hitzig's remarkable poems through my eyes, processed with the algorithm of breath into an epiphany. Imagine a book that can spur transfiguration; it is in your hands!"
--CACONRAD, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return
BIOS
Zoë Hitzig is the author of two books of poetry, Mezzanine (Ecco, 2020) and Not Us Now, winner of the Changes Book Prize (Changes, 2024). She currently serves as poetry editor of The Drift.
Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally; recent exhibitions include Aria Dean: Abattoir at ICA London (2024), Figuer Sucia at Greene Naftali, New York (2023), Abattoir, U.S.A! At the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2023); Quiet as It’s Kept: Whitney Biennial 2022 at The Whitney Museum, New York (2022). Her first book of collected writing, Bad Infinity, is out via Sternberg Press.
Jaron Lanier plays a pathological number of rare acoustic musical instruments, a malady he described in the New Yorker Magazine recently. Since the pandemic, he has played recently with Les Claypool, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson, T Bone Burnett, Sara Bareilles, Sean Lennon, Stanley Jordan, Will Calhoun, Harper Simon, Bill Frisell, and many others. Before the pandemic he played with tons of other people like Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman. He’s also a writer of books like You Are Not a Gadget and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. He’s won literary awards like the German Peace Prize for Books, one of the world’s highest lit honors. He’s that guy on Social Dilemma on Netflix. He’s also a scientist and technologist, known for his work initiating the field of Virtual Reality among other things. He won a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE. He’s also the Prime Scientist for Microsoft, against all odds.
RELATED
Constance DeJong, Jessica Hagedorn, Carl Hancock Rux, and Matvei Yankelevich
Literature at The Kitchen: A Roundtable
On Screen
Ethan Philbrick
Re:Group Works
On View