Artist, writer, and musician Johannes Heldén joins us to discuss his new book Astroecology. This surreal novel begins in an eschatological place: the world as we know it is ending, and its cosmic ending can be witnessed within a private estate, where a house and garden are filled with meaningful details arranged with the precision of a Twin Peaks-like murder mystery. In a series of filmic visual frames and corresponding textual notes, Heldén offers a poetics that twists the organic (plants, pets, decay and growth) and the inorganic (drones, data systems, AI) into each other as a kind of avant-garde Mobius strip. An intertexuality unfolds, where Inger Christensen’s indexical impulse meets Hayao Miyazaki’s surrealism, Chris Marker’s stark montage meets Robert Smithson’s iconography, Ursula LeGuin’s social investigation meets Norbert Weiner’s theory of cybernetics. In letting the reader-viewer get “stuck in the stream of evolution” over and over again, Heldén brings us to profound unanswerable questions about the origins of the universe: its processes, systems, and vanishing species of creature and thought. Katrine Øgaard Jensen will moderate. Following the book talk, copies will be available for purchasing and signing. About the Author Johannes Heldén is a visual artist, writer and musician. His work deals with artificial intelligence, ecology, poetry, science fiction, sentience and interactive narrative structures. He has published twelve books, most recently Astroecology (2016) which was published in three languages and made into an interdisciplinary performance at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and a digital artwork published by Bonniers Konsthall. Heldén was the recipient of the Åke Andrén Art Prize in 2015, and his Evolution project won the inaugural N. Katherine Hayles prize in 2014. He has published four music albums, most recently System (Irrlicht), and seven digital online works of poetry and visual art. His work has recently been shown at ISEA in V