Dr [M] Dudeck
IASH-CTPI Duncan Forrester Fellowship, March - June, 2025
[M] Dudeck is a performance artist and queer theologian whose work explores the role played by art and the speculative imaginary in the construction of new belief systems. For the past fifteen years they have devoted themselves to the invention and dissemination of a fictional queer religion and gnostic space opera called RELIGIONVIRUS (http://religionvir.us), whose transmedial episodes have been performed, screened and exhibited in over 35 countries worldwide. As a theologian and scholar of religion they publish and lecture widely on the intersection of art, religion, and speculative fiction in the information age. Dudeck is the co/director (alongside of Martina Raponi) of The Ansible Institute -- a nomadic research laboratory for artists using speculative fiction to imagine new futurities -- as well as curator of the online video festival RUINS (http://ruins.digital) probing the intersection of religion and contemporary media art, commissioned by the British Association for the Study of Religion (BASR.)
Project title: The Megalithic Imagination in Scotland
As The 2025 Duncan Forrester Fellow of Public Theology, Dudeck is partnering with The Scottish Crannog Centre (a living history museum practising experimental archaeology on the mouth of Loch Tay) to excavate and explore the role played by megalithic archaeology on the religious imagination in Scotland. They will be curating a series of artistic interventions probing the religious imaginary through the artistic consecration of new rituals in ancient sites. This project combines artistic interventions in public space, field research, interviews, auto-ethnographic writing, videos, performances, lectures and will culminate in a curated festival of new artistic rituals at the Crannog Center called NEOLITHIC TRANSMITTERS.