CITTIPUNKT Radio – CP Lesekugel #10 with Xenoverse reads DUNE by Frank Herbert

Scenes from the Alien Party is a series of audioplays by Xenoverse. The cycle is based on the trope of the 'party scene' common in sci-fi novels from the US-American New Wave. A party denotes a festive social event, or a political group with a certain ideological program, that in revolutionary times could function as a governing body. A party is more generally a collective of people, as in a hunting party. “To part" as in “to separate” is common in the various meanings of the word. It marks a groups distinction from the larger social world to care for each other, lift each other out of repression (both political and libidinal), and may create a space of identification that can function as a vehicle of utopic transformation. Parties are both spaces of intensity in the present, and have a strong historical and future driven perspective. They hold a polyvalent temporality hosted in the collective.

The third episode reads from Dune (1965, Frank Herbert). The scene depicts a dinner by the new administrators of spice mining on Arakis, House Atreides. The duke and his family give insight into their paranoia and the possible networks of betrayal at table. The scene is read by of Alexander Hong, John MacLean, Maria Tammik, Elbe Trakal, David Iselin Rickets, Andres Villareal, Steph Holl-Trieu, Nick Koppenhagen, and Timothy Neate, Sound edit and effects by Zach Hart and Elbe Trakal.

The series was produced at Cashmere Radio in collaboration with CITTIPUNKT.

Xenoverse – is a Berlin-based science fiction and theory study group. Since 2019 we read, read to each other, listen, discuss and collaborate. Themes we slingshot are radical alterity, alienation, utopia and its discontents, queer temporality, dream work, people’s punk and the alien party.