Repost from @mark.a.dery • "VIRUSES REAL AND IMAGINED ("Virus reales e imaginarios. Pensando con J. G. Ballard"): A TRIALOGUE WITH NAIEF YEHYA, MAURICIO MONTIEL, AND MARK DERY, May 12, 12 CDMX (Mexico City time), 1 PM EST, 10 AM PST. (Part of "El Mundo Hoy: Ciclo des Conversaciones," hosted by Museo del Chopo/UNAM.) Transmission: Museo del Chopo, via Facebook Live and YouTube Live: https://www.facebook.com/MuseodelChopo/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCVhfpajl8dVi1sTVZ9FXSw I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to play brain pong with two of Mexico's most incisive, cutting-edge cultural critics, essayists, and novelists, and hope you'll join me for our wide-ranging, unapologetically digressive conversation about pandemic mythologies and America (and Mexico) on the brink, refracted through the prism of speculative fiction and Applied Ballardianism. Born in Mexico City and now an expat in Brooklyn, Yehya is a film critic and cultural critic whose work focuses on Net culture, SF, and the cultural impact of the digitalization, virtualization, and networking of the world around us. He is the author of three novels and short story collections as well as such works of cybercrit as Pornoculture and, most recently, Drone Wars. Mauricio Montiel Figueiras, who lives in Mexico City, is an essayist, novelist, poet, translator, editor, and, like Yehya, a film critic. His books include Paseos sin rumbo. Diálogos entre cine y literatura (Aimless Roamings: Dialogues Between Film and Literature, essays, 2010), La mujer de M. (The Woman of M., novella, 2012), Ciudad tomada (City Taken Over, short stories, 2013), and Los que hablan. Fotorrelatos (The Ones Who Speak: Photostories, short stories and photographs, 2016). He pioneered the genre of the Twitter novel, The Man in Tweed (El Hombre de Tweed), which he composed entirely in tweets. #unam #mauriciomontiel #naiefyehya #markdery #culturaltheory #culturalcritic #pandemic #jgballard https://www.instagram.com/p/COwljFoj1lF/?igshid=jgrjpg4jaiut