Ignota Hosts: ‘Mercury Retrograde’ with Emily Segal and Michelle Tea
Ignota hosted Emily Segal and Michelle Tea to launch Mercury Retrograde, Emily’s debut novel published by Deluge Books, a new mass experimental queer press .
Emily Segal, artist and trend forecaster in her twenties, tries to tell the future by reading the present. Literature finds commercial form in the shape of eXe, a mysterious and well-funded internet start-up that offers her a job. A conceptual take-over is deployed; gendered power play ensues; queerness incubates; memes converge. Set in New York City, post-Occupy and pre-Trump, Mercury Retrograde is an autofictional, mixed media, pulp snack!
Emily Segal is an artist, writer, and strategist. Currently, she is the co-founder of Nemesis Global, a think tank for cultural research based in Berlin and Los Angeles, as well as the co-founder of Deluge Books. Previous to Nemesis, she was a founder of the collective and trend forecasting group K- HOLE (2011–16). As a strategist, Emily has worked on projects for Comme des Garcons, Prada, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Serpentine, Louis Vuitton, and many others. Emily’s essays and interviews have appeared in publications including Texte zur Kunst, Die Welt, e-flux journal, 032c, and Flash Art International, where she was the magazine’s Editor-at-Large from 2015–17. She was a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art from 2012–15, an assistant adjunct professor at Columbia GSAPP in 2015, and a visiting Professor of Design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie 2017–18.
Michelle Tea's work includes the cult classic Valencia, the dystopia Black Wave, the PEN Literary Award–winning Against Memoir, and the children's book Tabitha and Magoo Dress Up Too, inspired by Drag Queen Story Hour, the international sensation that she helped create.Share
