“Quite Frankly: It’s a Monster Conference”

2018 marks 200 years since the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley’s “Creature” is usually conceived as a human creation, the stitched-together, tragic victim of scientific and technological experimentation. We rupture these stitches, revealing that the Creature is more than the sum of its parts. SymbioticA and Somatechnics join forces to present Quite Frankly: It’s a Monster Conference. We invite you to explore the dynamic ecosystems evolving within and from the gaps between the Creature’s fragments.

Life has become a raw material for re-assembling organisms, tools and consumer products. We are firmly entrenched in a “[bio]informatics of efficiency,” where both biology and technology are subjected to control, optimisation, computation and surveillance at ever decreasing and increasing scales. In light of current ecological and bio-political devastation, we induce extinction. Keep calm and contaminate. There is hope, there is resistance; the Creature offers the potential to escape control and fight back.

Quite Frankly invites explorations that (re)form kinships and provide niches of refuge and asylum for explorations at the limits of precarity. We encourage liberations of Frankenstein’s Creature from its anthropocentric singularity to an intra-active entanglement; from the living-dead to the compost-able. We revel in re-craftings of biotechnical industrialisations and commodifications and managerial aesthetics. As Karen Barad reminds us, “the political potential does not stop with regeneration, for there are other wild dimensions within and without that rage with possibilities.”

Join us to unpick the Creature’s stitches and liberate its companion species—we are calling for all voices to provide critical re-examinations of diverse re-creation stories.

To co-incide with the conference SymbioticA presents Unhallowed Arts: a collection of art events—a monstrosity—occurring in Perth, Western Australia throughout September and October 2018. Unhallowed Arts is timed to celebrate the bicentenary of Mary (Godwin) Shelley’s Frankenstein and features exhibitions that explore the book’s influence on contemporary life and culture.

“In the late 18th century Victor Frankenstein travelled to Perth, Scotland to rest. He wanted to ‘view again mountains and streams and all wondrous works with which Nature adorns her chosen dwelling-places’. Perth was his last respite before he headed to ‘some obscure nook in the northern highlands of Scotland’ where he would finish his labour: the creation of a companion to the creature.

Two hundred years later, by a strange twist of history, the city known for its unhallowed biological art practice is Perth, Western Australia. For almost twenty years SymbioticA, at the University of Western Australia, has been recognised as the destination for artists and researchers with latent Frankensteinian tendencies to visit and learn the (sometimes dark) craft of wet biology as cultural practice.

The hard-to-shake comparisons to Frankenstein and his lab were not chosen by SymbioticA. Rather, they were imposed by the cultural shadow cast by a book written by an 18 year old Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley back in 1818. As with Stockholm syndrome, the people of SymbioticA learned to live with the constant reference to Frankenstein and his creature. They ended up owning it, so much so that in the year of Frankenstein’s bicentenary they commemorate and celebrate the work which became a point of reference to the strange workings of, and with, life.

We at SymbioticA are working the only way we know: by making and showing artworks together, talking about life and other things. All are welcome to come and ‘view again all wondrous works’, with their bodymind, and see the adorned and disturbed in their ‘chosen dwelling-places’.

Quite frankly, you must come and share the Perth syndrome of Unhallowed Arts with us; it will be monstrous.”

–Oron Catts, Director of SymbioticA