We will address the themes of issue #22 of Šum, Angel Mode, together with one of the issue’s authors, the musician, artist, and philosopher Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, best known as the founder of the experimental black metal band Liturgy.
Hunt-Hendrix will begin with a 30-minute presentation of the project Byzantine Accelerationism, which was published as a text of the same title in Šum. In it, the author opens up the question of femininity as a problem of mediation: not as an identity category, but as the site where contact is established with the external, the non-human, and the sacred. In this sense, Byzantine Accelerationism connects the Byzantine tradition of icons, the question of the body, and contemporary accelerationist thought in order to show how a different relation between the human and that which exceeds it can be established today.
The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion, in which Hunt-Hendrix will be joined by Maks Valenčič and Tisa Troha. The conversation will proceed from the questions opened up by her contribution, above all the problem of mediation: how to think the contact between the human and that which exceeds it, without understanding this excess as a pure exteriority beyond all mediation. The discussion will connect Byzantine Accelerationism with the broader thematic framework of the Angel Mode issue, where the figure of the girl on the internet appears as the site of a new mediation: as a channel, messenger, or interface of forces that can no longer be simply controlled. This also opens up a connection with psychotic accelerationism: not as a return to control, but as a different mode of contact with the non-human, where the subject is no longer the master of the process, but the site of its passage.