McKenzie Wark, Ariadne Randall, Nanna Heidenreich: Performing Transformation

What’s it like to be a woman when the world’s on fire? What’s it like to be transgender when people want you dead? Was ‘Nature’ always Trans*? Can its destruction then be understood as transphobia – another mode of transfem erasure?

If technology was always nature, and labor was always feminine, how might their interwoven worlding be shaped by artistic and academic modes of knowledge production?

What do trans* bodies know that art and science must now learn? Drawing on Luce DeLire’s analysis of McKenzie Wark’s ouevre and Ms. Wark’s performance art collaboration with Ariadne Randall, Ms. Wark and Ms. Randall will discuss modes of knowing in performance, media, and trans* life; the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary formal production; and ask if Cybele ever really left us. If World is a cybernetic, transgender goddess from the future – then, honey, who’s an alien now?

McKenzie Wark

is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. Her most recent, post-transition works of autofiction and autotheory – including Raving, Reverse Cowgirl and Love and Money, Sex and Death – brought her new audiences. She is a professor of media and cultural theory at the New School in New York.

Ariadne Randall

is an American artist, composer and writer based in Vienna. Her work practices worldbuilding through transmedia narrative. Through strategies of material depth and formal juxtaposition, she creates spaces for imagination in sound, language and image. She holds degrees in classical composition and contemporary art from UCLA and Bard MFA. Her work has been heard widely, from Lincoln Center and a recent song cycle for the Volksoper Wien to countless basements. Her Reverse Cowgirl Quartet rides her gender transition towards larger questions of identity and becoming. Her debut record as a transgender woman was released to critical acclaim in 2024 on Oxtail Recordings. She is represented by Galerie Peter Gaugy (Brussels/Vienna).

Nanna Heidenreich

is a media & cultural studies scholar and professor for Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She is also a curator for film/video art and political and theoretical interventions. Her (book) publications include Spectacle and Space of Possibility. Art and the Long Summer of Migration (in German, OA, 2022) and the anthologies fAKE hYBRID sITES pALIMPSEST: Essays on Leakages (edited together with Madhusree Dutta, 2021) and Tidal Thinking. Research beyond the nation-state system (in German, edited together with Rana Dasgupta and Katrin Klingan, 2019). Her current research focuses on the discourse of invasive species and (rage) as a queer-feminist arena.