"Reclaiming the Future"
May 24-26, 2019 | Toshi Center & Tokyo Garden Terrace
Kioicho, Tokyo
Love as an
Algorithm
Keynote
Presentation: Gloria Montero
While cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
keeps assuring us that prosperity, safety, peace and even happiness are on the
rise worldwide, other scientists and philosophers as diverse as Stephen
Hawking, Timothy Morton and Yuval Noah Harari warn us that the world as we have
known it, and even ourselves, are on the verge of a devastating change. Climate
catastrophe might well lead to global destruction, while artificial
intelligence and biological engineering threaten to make human beings
redundant. Extinction, we are told, is the norm, survival the exception. Living
amidst the devastating possibilities which in this age of acceleration could
prove remarkably close, have we humans already been subject to a mutation: a
growing fear translated into a generalized disregard for the other, a refusal
to pay attention and accept responsibility if it threatens our own comfort,
even a developing propensity for hate? As conscious beings with the ability to
distinguish between cause and effect, means and ends, we are witnesses to what
goes on in our world. While many of the practical and ethical decisions vis a
vis the immediate future need to be made with knowledge and power beyond that
of the ordinary citizen, my personal conviction is that Love presents each and
every one of us with a clear and vital algorithm for our endurance. Love in its
most comprehensive connotation as a recognition of our profound
interrelatedness – humans, animals, plants, the earth itself, the stars – every
single element in the universe. True awareness of this extraordinary
interconnection demands an attentiveness to what is going on, exacts not only
an active concern for the other but an outright respect for our differences,
along with the ineluctable conviction that only by sharing responsibility can
we hope to survive. As we are thrust headlong into the pending Anthropocene,
Love might well be our one viable path to a future.
Gloria Montero - Novelist, Playwright & Poet
Biography
Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria
Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North
Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and
theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress,
singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.
Co-founder of the Centre for
Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until
1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973)
she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural
Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.
She organised the international conferences
"Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to
support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last
years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York
University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the
Spanish Civil War".
With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton,
she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social,
cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the
effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982.
Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O
Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won
international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film
Festival 1975.
Among her many radio documentaries for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series
of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia:
the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the
Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).
Since 1978 Montero has been living in
Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The
Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was
printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A
cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia,
provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful
exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).
She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato
for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story
in English.
Well known among her theatre work is the
award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and
Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic,
Poland, Sweden and Latvia.
Photo by Pilar Aymerich.
Keynote Presentation (2019) | Love as an Algorithm
