New knowledge for a new planet: critical pedagogy for the Anthropocene

Abstract

Petar Jandrić (PJ): Ken, thank you a lot for this interview – and for your valuable advice regarding other interviews in this series. Upon completing my research on your rich bibliography, I could not help but wonder how it arrived into being. You are an academic researcher – but your book I’m very into you: Correspondence 1995—1996 (Acker & Wark, 2015) is a collection of emails. A hacker manifesto (Wark, 2004) speaks of the present and future caused by digital technologies – but The beach beneath the street: The everyday life and glorious times of the Situationist International (2011a) is firmly dedicated to the past. Your writing style is dense and ambiguous, yet your multimedia works such as Totality for kids (Loyer, Pyle, & Wark, 2009) speak loud and clear, and you often engage in experimental writings such as Speed factory (Cohen, Kinsella, White, & Wark, 2002). Certainly, these diverse ways of probing reality are focused to similar questions – for instance, Gamer theory website (2006) served as a base for the book with the same title (2007), while Totality for kids (Loyer et al., 2009) talks about the Situationist International (Wark, 2008, 2011a). What is your inspiration for asking similar questions using different approaches? What do you expect to achieve with such approach?