This coming Friday, Spike Art Quarterly and artgenève are hosting a reading by award-winning author Tom McCarthy, followed by a discussion with renowned curator Nicolas Bourriaud, moderated by Spike’s editor-at-large Alex Scrimgeour.

With his new novel Satin Island, McCarthy carries his longstanding preoccupation with media, power and inauthenticity into the digital age. With its “corporate anthropologist” (anti-)hero U., a 21st-century Man Without Qualities, the book explores the absorption of cultural networks by those of capital; the ethical and political quandaries facing creative agents of all types; and the near-impossibility of mapping or “rendering” (from within or -out) the contemporary landscape, let alone of reshaping or transforming it.

The reading from Satin Island will be accompanied by a conversation with Nicolas Bourriaud, in which the two thinkers will discuss the potential and the limits of artistic and literary attempts to analyze or contest the contemporary condition. Are we seeing glimpses of a new digital sublime that is forming a new horizon for current art and writing? What forms of resistance are still possible, necessary, or desirable?

The event also marks the launch of the iPhone and iPad exhibition Strange Strangers, a group show, curated by Lou Cantor and Harm van den Dorpel, exploring the consequences of the digital condition for the materiality of artworks. The app can be downloaded from iTunes from May 8.