&Now 2015: Blast Radius

A panel on the use of divinatory practices as related to writing and writing experiments. We will investigate traditional and non-traditional “divine” modes of communication and their impact on personal and political writing practices. Emerson Whitney will moderate a panel discussion between Schutzman, Kapil, and Saterstrom.  Mady Schutzman will discuss an array of practices that acknowledge the contract between the known and the unknown world, practices situated in radical doubt and that keep ambivalence (and creativity) healthy.  Bhanu Kapil’s practice is deeply rooted in personalized ritual and unbridled experimentation, for example: “bibliomancy — the art of divination in libraries — [has] always been an instinctive part of my life…” she said in a recent interview with Tinge Magazine. “I let my hand drift, palm down — to sense through the palm, as in palmistry — the way I learned it. An under-art. The sense that it is never the line that holds the news of a life, but what flows beneath and through it.” Saterstrom too engages what she calls “divinatory poetics,” or exercises into writing through tarot, channeling techniques, and hermeneutics. Finally, Whitney is a writer currently working on a project involving divining for strangers, embodying the fortune teller stereotype as a means to explore his ethnic gypsy (Romani) heritage, while also engaging the history of chance operations in art and writing, coincidence, correlation, and faith.