Kasper Opstrup | Inner Paths to Outer Space: From Cosmism to Cosmic Futurism

 Dr. Kasper Opstrup is a writer and researcher based in Copenhagen. The Danish translator of Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs, among others, he is currently working on a post.doc. project about Cosmic Futurism while finishing a monograph with the tentative title An Imaginary Kingdom in the Wastelands of the Real: On Art, Esotericism and the Politics of Hope. His most recent publications are The Way Out: Invisible Insurrections and Radical Imaginaries in the UK Underground from 1961 to 1991 (Minor Compositions, 2017) and the anthology Unexpected Encounters – Possible Futures (Antipyrine, 2019)

 

Lecture “Inner Paths to Outer Space: From Cosmism to Cosmic Futurism”

This talk explores the notion of cosmos as an artistic imaginary in the 20th century with special emphasis on, on the one hand, Russian Cosmism, which can be seen as a type of esoteric futurism, an idealistic materialism predecessing the Western modernist avant-garde movements in its attempt to create a new society built upon an overcoming of the category of the human itself, and, on the other hand, the 1970s cosmic futurism of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson which resulted in their proposed global solution to a string of global crises and problems: SMI²LE ( = Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension).

Students wishing to present their artistic work, please fill in registration form.

The lecture will be held on VAA, November 19th, 4:00 pm, auditorium 102, Malūnų st. 3, Vilnius. 

Open lectures and discussions are in English.

Moderator prof. Henrik B. Andersen.