Up and Coming
The Center for Research and Utopian eXchange (CRUX) is a space to tell our bigger stories of the world around us; a space for brilliant people to share ideas and experiments; a space for local communities to engage in dialogue.
Logistics
When: Friday, October 6th. Set up at 6:30, lectures begin at 8:pm
Where: Common AREA Maintenance (2125 2nd Ave, Seattle)
Who: Frances Lee and Eli Steffen
Cost: Donation at the door (which will go to support the lecturers)
Facebook Event: here
CRUX is an experimental lecture series exploring utopian thought and practice within art, activist, queer and urban development circles. There is a dearth of any real intellectual engagement with the future of possibility and this project seeks to challenge that. CRUX is explicitly idealistic, pro-intellectual, future oriented and dedicated to personally and socially expansive praxes. We aim not at a narrowing perfect future but at a lived capacious present in which future possibilities are embodied in the here and now.
Each performance will have 2-3 presenters offering 20-30 minutes lectures, which will be followed by an experiment in communal discourse between the speakers and the audience. We aim to co-create a welcoming environment and invite audience to join us in setting up the space before each show.
On October 6th, Frances Lee and Eli Steffen will present lectures responding to “Utopia Tools: the In and Out of Expansive Potentiality.” They will explore the vast possibilities for what it means to be human contained within queer existence and seek to offer practical suggests for a utopian toolbox.
Drawing from ideas of experimental lecture, each presenter will be encouraged and supported to consider how best to present their ideas, whether or not they fit within traditional lecture forms. Rather than a theme to confine the discussion, each night will have an anti-theme a point of departure from which each lecturer can travel as far as they like. This will give those present the opportunity to find their own resonances between the disparate lectures. CRUX emphasizes the chance to play and try things out, both for the speakers and the audience. We resist the need to be coherent or to feel confined to any particular medium or form. At CRUX messy and fun and deadly serious and vitally important and have-no-fucking-clue can all have a dance party together.