Lecture with Tom McCarthy: The Making of Incarnation

Photo: Nicole Strasser

A special highlight of the event programme for the upcoming exhibition Holding Pattern will take place on 26 March 2025 at 19:00 in the HMKV Bookshop: Exhibition co-curator and renowned novelist Tom McCarthy will be reading from his novel The Making of Incarnation. Together with Irene Baumann, speaker (Arte, 3sat and SWR, among others), they will read selected passages alternately in German and English. This will be followed by a discussion with Prof. Dr Jörn Etzold (Ruhr University Bochum, Institute for Theatre Studies).

 

Admission is free. No registration required. Admission from 18:30

About the Book

The Making of Incarnation (2021)

Deep in the archives of time and movement pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for creating solid light trails that recorded the movement patterns of workers, Gilbreth had revolutionised the possibilities of mass surveillance and big data, to the delight of NASA and the KGB. But had she, as she suggests in one of her letters, actually discovered a ‘perfect’ movement towards the end of her life that would ‘change everything’?

A globe-spanning hunt begins for that one box missing from her estate, and we follow a young motion capture researcher named Mark Phocan through our shimmering present, across geopolitical fault lines and through experimental zones, and into the middle of the filming of the blockbuster movie Incarnation, an epic space tragedy that will finally unlock the secrets of human experience ...

The Making of Incarnation is a clairvoyant widescreen odyssey through medical laboratories, computer graphics studios and military research facilities, dark places where the limits of our capabilities - to entertain, to understand, to heal, to kill - are constantly tested and refined.

Tom Mc Carthy

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021.
McCarthy has held Visiting Professorships at the Royal College of Art London, Columbia University New York and Städelschule Frankfurt. Since 2022 he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute New Mexico. In 2019 he guest-curated the exhibition Empty House of the Stare at London’s Whitechapel Gallery and in 2022 a major exhibition, Holding Pattern, in Kunstnernes Hus Oslo, responding to the art institute’s invitation to explore the themes and motifs of his work. The exhibition Holding Pattern will be on display at the HMKV Hartware MedienkunstVerein from 15 March to 27 July 2025. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.

Irene Baumann

After studying speech art and communication pedagogy at the State University of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart, Irene Baumann works as a speaker on stage and at the microphone (Suhrkamp, arte, DLF and many more). She also is a speech teacher at the acting department of Filmuniversität Babelsberg and an audio describer for blind and visually impaired audiences in theatre, dance and performance. Irene Baumann is co-founder of the Richardchor Neukölln e.V., which is involved in the production Große Gewinne, Schwere Verluste at the Deutsches Theater Berlin this season.