10th May Sunday 12-2pm

Shona Macnaughton & Luke Cooke-Yarborough
Pastoral Futures

God of the poor! shall labour eat?
Or drones alone find labour sweet?
Lo, they who call the earth their own,
Take all we have-and give a stone!

Based in Dorset, where the workers union pilgrimage site of the Tolpuddle Martyrs rubs up next to Prince Charles model town of an idealised rural Poundbury, this is a reading group about local radical history contrasted against current shifts in power related to work, brought about by data technologies. Above is a Chartist chant from an older, industrial concern. The rural labour movement of the 19th c. sometimes liked to meet under trees. They were persecuted by restrictions of public assembly. Thinking about how the reading group is usually a private affair between a small group behind closed doors, we are wanting to make our group a public act.

The event proposed for Part 1. How to Write: Reading Groups will be an exercise in how to devise texts to be read out collectively for this age of fragmented union. Contagious Architecture by Luciana Parisi proposes to work at a formal level within the parametric architectures of algorithmic computation. How can we read the unsaid in the abstract data structures that control us? What words sung out would challenge or provide comfort to this situation? Part discussion, part participative performance we will think about and read out together agitating word forms from then and what they would consist of in a digital age.

Contact: Shona Macnaughton
shonalesley@gmail.com