Liam Mooney and Speaker Ackbar Abbas, Ph.D.

Liam Mooney’s Flatland (2019) is a work loosely patterned after Edwin Abbott’s novella, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Abbott’s examination of humanity—and the natural and constructed categories contained therein—still seems to have the sting of relevance, and the listener might not find it at all difficult to connect Abbott’s observations to features of present-day societies.

An aficionado of fakes, Ackbar Abbas is the author of some of the most influential texts on Hong Kong culture and literature, and on culture, literature, film, art, architecture, and critical theory more generally. A professor of comparative literature and film at the University of California, Irvine, Abbas was born, raised, and—as he puts it—corrupted in Hong Kong. He insists on thinking with whatever is at hand, materially and ideationally, on finding the deeply revealing in the obvious, significance amidst desolation, possibility in vulnerability, a map of culture in the design it authorizes.

This event was planned in collaboration with the wulf. & Coaxial.