Groundwork Reading Group Session Two
January 17, 2024, 6:30–8:30pmGroundwork Reading Group Session 4 Organized by Prem Krishnamurthy with David Giles
Book: On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant and Imaginary Magnitude by Stanisław Lem
Pleaser register here.
Please come with a sentence or short section from each text to read aloud and discuss.
Groundwork Reading Group’s second gathering takes place on January 17, 2024. We will be reading On the Inconvenience of Other People by Lauren Berlant and Imaginary Magnitude by Stanisław Lem, both chosen at the reading group’s first session.
Organized by David Giles and Prem Krishnamurthy as part of Department of Transformation‘s residency at Canal Projects, the program invites participants to propose complex or challenging texts that merit collective engagement. The reading group asks: Can we redefine our futures through the redefinition of our forms? How might reading together itself be a transformative act?
Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, author, and educator. His multifaceted work explores the role of art as an agent of transformation at an individual, collective, and structural level. This manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts, and workshops. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. He has curated several large-scale exhibitions including FRONT International 2022: Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York.
David Giles has worked at the intersection of urban policy, community development, and design for the last 15 years, first as the research director at the Center for an Urban Future and more recently as chief strategy officer at Brooklyn Public Library. He is interested in tactical urban design, public library innovation, community-driven planning, and convivial pedagogies. At BPL, David helped to design and launch the BKLYN Incubator, an innovation fund and support system for library-community partnerships. He has spoken widely on the changing role of libraries in the 21st century information economy. David lives and works in New York City and the Catskills.
