The Exploded Map: Gravity’s Rainbow @50 with Joanna Freer, Duncan Marquiss, Tom McCarthy, John Douglas Millar, David Musgrave, and Sung Tieu

 Technologies installed in the most secret realms of the self, a war that doesn’t end so much as mutate into a set of socio-industrial projects, conspiracies nested in conspiracies, a culture which is both a playground for human desire and an abject ruin — not a summary of the last five years’ news, but a snapshot of the content of Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow. 

Organised by John Douglas Miller and David Musgrave, and supported by Research at Camberwell, Chelsea, and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts at University of the Arts London, UK, The Exploded Map comprises of screenings and discussions around art, technology, politics, fiction, truth, and the future.  

Joanna Freer is a writer and academic concerned with counter-communities. She is the author of Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and two edited essay collections, Thomas Pynchon, Gender, and Sex (Georgia UP, 2018) and The New Pynchon Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions (Cambridge UP, 2019), as well as a special issue of Textual Practice (2019) on Pynchon and economics. She is a lecturer in American & Postcolonial Literature at the University of Essex.

Duncan Marquiss is an artist, writer, and musician, known for his work with The Phantom Band. His first solo record, Wires Turned Sideways in Time, was released in 2022, and has been described as a “filmic album of wide landscapes and wider inner spaces, where the epic is always personal” (The Quietus, 2022). He was also the recipient of the Margaret Tait Award 2015-16. Exhibitions and screenings include Experimenta at the BFI London Film Festival, International Motley Honest Signals at Glasgow Project Room, Index screening at Microscope Gallery in New York, Foraging Economics ,and Information Foraging at the Artist Moving Image Festival at Tramway in Glasgow.

Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist. He has twice been nominated for the Booker Prize, and was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Literature Prize by Yale University in 2013. He won a Believer Book Award for Remainder in 2008. He has also written a critical study of Tintin called Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and published an essay collection, Typewriters, Bombs, and Jellyfish. His most recent novel is The Making of Incarnation. He lives in Berlin.

John Douglas Millar is a writer based in London. He published a book of literary essays titled Brutalist Readings with Sternberg Press in 2016, has published reviews, poems and essays in various places including Art Monthly, e-flux Criticism, Frieze, The TLS, Mute, Radical Philosophy and The White Review amongst others. He is currently working on a book about the photographer Peter Hujar and grief, political and otherwise. 

David Musgrave is an artist and writer living in London. Over the last two decades he has held solo exhibitions nationally and internationally, including at Tate and greengrassi, and his work features in many public and private collections worldwide. His novel Lambda was published by Europa Editions in 2022.

Sung Tieu is a visual artist concerned with critical examinations of psychological and bureaucratic warfare. This interest resulted in video and sound installations such as In Cold Print, Song for Unattended Items, and Remote Viewing. Likewise, installations such as Zugzwang and What is your |x|?, and her ongoing series Newspapers 1969 examine the culture of information and its institutionalised dynamics of transmission. Tieu is also part of several art collectives, engaging in collaborative, non-autonomous production including TROI OI, East London Cable and Asia Art Activism. She lives in Berlin.

The Exploded Map: Gravity’s Rainbow @50 is part of a.p.'s Spring Season, a series of discussions, readings, and screenings that investigate the ever evolving relationship between literature, visual art, and technology, with a specific emphasis on both readers and writers' relationship to the screen. Each event is intended both to stand alone, and to form a dialogue with those of the other participants within the wider context of what might be loosely termed art-writing.

Please note, the event will be in English. Places are free but booking is recommended:

https://www.eventbrite.de/e/the-exploded-map-gravitys-rainbow-50-tickets-513996185427