Book Launch: Kid of the Internet & Faun
23 June 2021, 17:00
Keile Cafe
On June 23rd Geo Barcan and Martin Osowski will be launching their publications Kid of the Internet and Faunal Thoughts on the Carnivalesque at Keile Cafe in Rotterdam.
Kid of the Internet
Kid of the internet is a collection of visual and written essays about living and growing up in late 2000s Romania. Autobiographical and at points fictional, the hybrid work follows the life-changing impact of the internet in the artist’s hometown and community. An embodied, local history of the world wide web in Eastern Europe.
As 21st-century networks started to dim onto the collapsed sky of failed utopias, an escapist deliverance through fibre connection became the norm for the post-communist youth. Infinitely recessive corridors in this gleamy nowhere space plugged one inside like the roving vortex of a dark star. But was this diamond blue web a caring womb or a sly trap?
Just like The Flying Man of Romanian mythology, the internet becomes an alluring incubus-like being who visits nubile girls at night, disturbing their sleep with rattling feelings and hypnotic thoughts - a seditious teenage demon in Y2K povera fashion. Against the dreamless exhaustion of working-class sleepers, coddled in communist austere architecture, a girl in her pyjamas gets to know that division, segregation and inequality are vectors that draw the world and refuse to die. Kid of the Internet is the story of technological abductors, failed utopias, deceitful promises and twisted becomings of age.
This formally dissident text where collage, found image, quotes, instant messages, love songs lyrics, and flash fiction meet traces how the internet mutates one’s sense of self bringing soft yet permanent transformations.
Faunal Thoughts on the Carnivalesque
The Carnivalesque is an under-explored and fruitful avenue for politically motivated worldbuilding. While capitalist realism cancels the future, the carnivalesque will de-petrify it by relativizing the givens of the present. In celebrating alterity, the carnivalesque will remind us that other worlds are possible and will offer pathways for destabilizing established and normalized hierarchies and systems of truth.
Faunal Thoughts on the Carnivalesque galvanizes the carnivalesque to help us manifest alternative imaginaries, to dance the dances of other times, reap the joy of other places, and gaze fearlessly towards a selfbuilt future. Our exploration of carnivalesque forms allows us to conduct the procreative humour of the carnivalesque tradition as a process of worldbuilding. By engaging the regenerative, carnivalesque politics of pleasure, Faun begins to provoke a decomposition of the totalizing facades in late modernist ideology and fertilizes the proliferation of adjacent and overlapping worlds.
