This is the adapted web version of the lecture-performance: To Cough with Monsters – Seeking a Host for More-than-human Histories by artist Sina Seifee.

The adapted version of this lecture comes in the form of an interactive webpage. As soon as you open the page and click on one of the highlighted words, a voice-over should start and images start appearing in the background. In this audio narrative of 25 min. Sina Seifee elaborates on the topic of his lecture and rounds off with some questions.

While the audio narrative lasts you can search for a term in the search field or click on the yellow links. The links contain some partial notes and other related (clickable) keywords that are related to the artists' research on bestiaries. Yellow links connect to other related concepts and the content of the pages rearranges based on each query. Some things might appear twice. There is more visual material on the topic if you search for: "monster", "parasite", "bestiary", or "ajayeb".

We hope you enjoy this session and we would like to invite you to reflect on it together with Sina Seifee during a live Q&A, coming Thursday the 9th of April from 16.00 - 16.30.
(The live event will start on Thursday 9 April a few minutes before 16.00).

Lecture: To Cough with Monsters – Seeking a Host for More-than-human Histories

Within the legacy of 19th century philosophy of social progress, the parasite was defined outside the law (or metaphysical fantasy) of competition. Parasite, as one of our ways of dealing-with problems, now is completely transvaluated (as heritage of deconstruction). By grounding the work in a research on medieval bestiaries, this lecture performance questions the logic of interference, as a practice of tuning in noise, and it shares some vocabularies on the soundtrack of the emerging monsters in contemporary thought.

What does it mean to put the thought in direct relation with forces of the outside (as Deleuze and Guattari would suggest)? What kind of other dormant, inert, ambient sonic layers are offering themselves, or coughing in (our structures of obligation)? The significance of monsters, as potent and parasitic, characterized by missing transhumanist body parts, can it allow us to consider where we speak from? This lecture peruses those questions, and not so much looking for novelty in something that is impossible to systematize, nor to promise getting off the leash of controlled names.

Bio - SINA SEIFEE (Tehran, 1982) researches as an artist in the fields of narrative, performance and knowledge production. He has been working on the question of technology and storytelling in the arts and sciences of the middle ages and the past-present of material reading practices in collective life. He studied Applied Mathematics in Tehran, received his master in Media Arts in KHM Cologne and in 2017 finished an advanced research program in performance studies in a.pass.