Berlin and the New Weird with Elvia Wilk

Interdependence

For the second part of our conversation series with contemporary fiction writers we are over the moon to have a chat with Elvia Wilk, who released her debut novel “Oval” last year to great acclaim.

Oval is a beautiful book that depicts a world at vastly different scales, not least addressing the contemporary role of the artist as embedded in wider economic systems. We discuss how art communities in the shifting economic landscape of Berlin inspired some of the books themes, the increasingly entangled relationships between artists and corporations, the hyperstitional anxiety of seeing gestures from marginal scenes influence wider culture from your bedroom while also simultaneously feeling very little agency over the future, and how some of her writing related to machine learning takes on new dimension in the wake of OpenAI’s release of the GPT3 API.

Thanks again for listening and have a great week :)

Links

Read Oval - https://softskull.com/dd-product/oval/

"My Kid Could Do That" - https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/my-kid-could-do-that/