Nonfiction Writer Claire L. Evans on the Future of Tech, Ecology, and Culture

Claire L. Evans, a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture, was the featured artist in this edition of MacDowell Downtown on Friday, August 2, at the Monadnock Center for History & Culture. She discussed her work, research, and the project she’s working on while in residence, Wild Information. With the book, she’ll be pushing frontiers of biocomputing in essays, reportage, and visual presentations.

As she explores future technologies, how they’re built, and what they’re built from, Evans draws upon philosophers and pundits debating the sentience of artificial life, at the cutting-edge of current theory. In contrast to the extractive model of exploiting natural resources, Evans posits a generative version of computing, resilient, even alive?

“I’d like this book to express my hope for the future, which is also a call to the deep past: that we might learn from the creativity and resourcefulness of the living world to survive, to persist, to thrive,” she says.

(Jaclyn Campanaro photo)

When she isn’t delving into this research, Evans is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform, and co-editor, with Brian Merchant, of the accompanying anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn (MCD Books, 2022). Her 2018 history of women in computing, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, published by Penguin Random House, has been translated into six languages and was named one of the Top 10 Best Nonfiction Tech Books of All Time in 2023.

If you go:  
Who: Writer Claire Evans 
What: MacDowell Downtown August 2, 2024 from 7:30 – 8:30 p.m. 
Where: The Monadnock Center for History and Culture at 19 Grove Street, Peterborough, NH