Regarding Evil
April 3rd, 2005
MIT, Cambridge MA
Building 10, Room 10-250
Free and open to the public.

The transnational summit, Regarding Evil, will be called to assembly
with the simultaneous sounding of the trumps in six sites around the
world projected simulcast.  In collaboration with the six individuals who
were issued the instruments, each will announce their particular state of
emergency and will converge at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a
seventh blast.  Gordon Smith will assume the role of 7th piper.      

Artists and scholars of international reputation have been invited to
present visual and discursive material confronting the elusive and  
immeasurable subject of Evil, its transpolitical behaviors, charismatic
aesthetic, and viral disbursement in the vast enterprise of simulation,
symbolic power, and catastrophe. Panel discussion and audience participation will
provide a public forum to expand this dialogue.

Engaging in the discourse of ethics as a codal system by which we can only hope
to define a subjective good, continues to undermine the intelligence of Evil
and fuels the perpetual orbit around exotic 'otherness' as an opaque foreigner
situated in an archaic Other World of saboteurs.  How then can we speak to/of
evil while choosing to sidestep the subject using rhetorical strategies at the
risk of sacrificing symbolic power?  Must we rely on the performative death act
to regain this symbolic power?  Including ourselves within the equation of Evil
is necessary for a richer appraisal of our condition which may in some cases,
require the invocation of such an unwanted guest directly into our universe.

                                                                                                        - Cisneros