novum.

A Compendium of Theories, Ideas, & Explorations For the Curious and the Creative

Novum is an interdisciplinary lecture series for the curious and the creative. The series aims to present new and unusual ideas, bringing together explorations and investigations from the fields of art, writing, science, history, religion, and philosophy. Because of our fondness for the uncanny, and our belief that interdisciplinary collaboration ignites creative brilliance, we bring together a series that will hopefully push audience members towards a “blankness of horizon of consciousness… formed not by the past but by the future… a not yet conscious ontological pull of the future, of a tidal influence exerted upon by that which lies out of sight below the horizon, an unconscious of what is yet to come.”*

* From Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, who quotes and reinvigorates Ernst Bloch’s concept of the Novum. We name our series after this concept in hopes of the effects the series will have on attendee consciousness. Bloch defines the Novum as “a moment of newness in lived history that refreshes human collective consciousness, awakening it from the trancelike sense of history as fated and empty, into awareness that it can be changed… the unexpectedly new, which pushes humanity out of its present toward the not yet realized.”

See: Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction & Darko Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction