FOREIGN OBJEKT
Study Sessions
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Session 1: Posthuman Pragmatism: Selecting Power
Saturday, December 5
For all its paeans to the primacy of exteriority, A Thousand Plateaus is ultimately a self-enclosed, self-sufficient construction; but one rooted in a gesture of negation that it cannot avow or integrate within itself. What it rejects is representation, together with its ‘arborescent’ dichotomies between inside and outside, subjectivity and objectivity, truth and falsity. It tries to purify this rejection of negation by construing rejection as selection and negation as a quality of power. Thus the rejection of representation (together with all its dichotomies, oppositions, and negations) is not supposed to be a denial but a mere effect or consequence of the book’s selection of affirmation over negation. Rather than seeking to justify itself, this is a book that insists on affirming its own power, which is precisely the power of affirmation. But the attempt to reduce negation to affirmation and denial to selection rests upon the affirmation of a difference between affirmative and negative power which turns out to be all but essential. Differences in the quality of power (affirmative or negative) turn out to be fundamental differences in being. By the same token, making the difference between affirmation and negation turns out to be indiscernible from accepting it as something that is already given; which is to say, representing it. Read more...
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Session 2: The Human: From Subversion to Compulsion
Saturday, December 12
In the contemporary ‘critical’ humanities, the privileging of the human has become as suspect as every other sort of privilege. Far from being the uncircumventable horizon for emancipatory politics, humanism is denounced as integral to a logic of domination that proceeds from the subjugation of nature to the enslavement of all those deemed less than human. It is easy to retort that this indictment of humanism follows from conflating the restrictive specification of the human (as white, male, heterosexual, European etc.) with its generic de-specification – the human as what Alain Badiou calls ‘the voided animal’, an exception that includes the unspecified part of everything: neither white nor black, neither male nor female, neither heterosexual nor homosexual, etc. But the suggestion that universalization proceeds not by generalizing specific predicates but by subtracting them tends to fall on deaf ears in a theoretical context where the Nietzschean equation of universalization with domination continues to hold sway. Once the inference from exception to exclusion is made, an all-inclusive post-humanism supplants exclusionary humanism as the politically ‘progressive’ optic consonant with the liberal ideal of inclusiveness that has become the humanities’ critical lodestone. This ideal stipulates a formal equivalence of human and non-human that is the ontological ratification of capitalism’s personification of things and reification of people. Read More..
Study Group 2 with Borna Radnik: Who’s Afraid of Subjectivity?
Session 1- Hegel : In the second session we will turn from Hegel to Marx. Marx’s famous eleven theses on Feuerbach provides the basis for a dialectical conception of materialism that does not de-centre, or negate the role of the subject. The status of the subject in contemporary philosophy is something that is explored in Subject Lessons. We will go over the central themes and ideas laid out in the introduction, before ending with a discussion of Hegel’s concept in relation to a self-reflexive materialist philosophy that does not contradict itself, namely, materialism with the absolute idea
Session 2: Dialectics, Materialism, and Contradiction: What is the thinking subject’s relation, if any, to the object of its thinking activity? Can philosophy think the object without any relation to, or dependence on, the knowing subject? This first session deals with these fundamental metaphysical problems by engaging in a close reading of Hegel. We will start with Hegel’s preliminary discussion of the relation between cognition and knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit in order to appreciate the subject-object relation. We will then briefly look at Hegel’s criticism with empirical knowledge in the Encyclopedia Logic, before turning to Hegel’s speculative philosophy. Finally, we will see why Hegel maintains that the distinction between idealism and realism is illusory.
Session 1: Disconnection and Unbounded Posthumanism
Saturday, September 5 @10am PST
Summary
Section one serves an introduction to the theoretical core of Speculative Posthumanism. Reading 1) develops an analytical, anti-essentialist account of the conditions for posthuman succession or ‘disconnection’. In what I term ‘Unbounded Posthumanism’ the scope for disconnection is no longer bounded by a priori constraints on agency or subjectivity. The implications of this for thinking about action in time and performance are modelled through a philosophical reflection on improvisation in reading 2) and posthuman performance compared with a more rationalist and Hegelian model of the inhuman agent found in the work of Ray Brassier. Reading 3) develops this on the more abstract plane by thinking about the work of Robert Brandom, an extensive influence on the thinking of Brassier, Negarestani and other neorationlist thinkers. The bottom line of Spectral Machines is that Brandom’s impressive theory of meaning and interpretation is fundamentally incomplete, requiring a supplementary subject (interpreter, reader or auditor) that it cannot account for. Thus, his abstract account of subjectivity or agency does not provide a secure set of constraints on posthuman possibility. Thus an unbounded posthumanism is to be preferred to the bounded posthumanism of Brassier et al.
Session-2: From Unbounded Posthumanism to the Biomorph
Summary
The second session looks at the more experimental side of SP, including the theory-fiction that I have been developing since 2016. Reading 1 argues that aesthetic and literary (and other) experimentations pre-empts philosophical theories of the subject in unbounded posthumanism as a matter of conceptual necessity and consequently invites comparisons between the it and the non-philosophical work of Laruelle, Kolozova and others. Reading 2) develops a similar account of biomorphic posthumanism using Badiou rather than Laruelle as its point of comparison. Finally, Readings 3 and 4 consider how a posthuman subjectivity and its biomorphic self-understanding can be explored in a writing that skirts theory, science fiction, erotic horror and fetishism.
Link to readings and both sessions :
The Oral Logic
Petronics & Petrobios
Yvette Granata The Author of ‘Meme Dankness: Floating Glittery trash for an Economic Heresy,’ chapter in Post-Memes, eds. Alfie Bown and Daniel Bristow, Punctum Press, 2019.
In a conversation with:
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Thousandgrugeaux
A Series of Presentations
April 18 - May 30
Presentation_5:
FAKING IT: WORLDBUILDING AND THE BODY in Alternative Fiction
Felice Grodin and AdrienneRose Gionta
Bassem Saad
Jessie-Jamz Ozaeta/Lil Lonely
May 30 @ 11am PST
In these fictional, visual narratives, bodily versions of the protagonists are being constructed, occupied and mutated within their simulated world models. The manipulation and interpolation of these bodies creates new tendencies, as well as instilling trauma within the present order of the system. The combination of new elements and fragments within the old constructs create further ramifications--these expandable, contractible, destructible, and multiplying bodies question the ways of abstraction of our agency within social and political constraints.
The artists are revealing the violence and trauma that goes into the creation of these bodies, and they will talk about their experiences within these alternative fictions.
1984 marks the midpoint of the two bookends of our research/investigation. It is the year of the seminal essay A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway. The first bookend: 57 years prior (1927) marked the beginning of the popular depiction of the female body fused with technology in the Fritz Lang film Metropolis. The second bookend: 57 years after Haraway’s essay, we will explore the trope of the female cyborg in popular culture as well as alternative depictions. We will also pivot to more speculative iterations between the years 2020-2041.
In TEST 1: A Hybrid is born from an egg. A blue egg with a 3D isoline protocol. Out of it, springs arms (splines) that spiral and enable it to hover. It’s looking for a home and has found one. In this land, it is able to stretch and flicker its tentacles within an Enviroscape, which is, in turn, flickering as well. This Enviroscape developed within the universe of Second Life with the grafting of glitter|i| from the Cyborg Salon. This is a good match! In celebration, there is a warm welcome [in Wing Dings]. A conversation has begun between the Hybrid and its Enviroscape, enveloped within an audio mutation of a Ted Talk with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin + Love in the Future + Meet Q, The Gender-Neutral Voice Assistant.
Kink Retrograde presents a speculative allegory whose protagonists live in a world and city presided over by shocks that come to resemble the apparent retrograde motion of celestial bodies: cyclical and seemingly backwards moving. The intoxicated characters decide that the social contract between themselves and the sovereign powers has always been breached, and so they must devise a new and transparent contract aware of its own abjectness, risk, and deviance — one of total kink.
"In this project and elsewhere in my work, time-based media is accompanied by a spatial set-up of sculptural objects, heightening the experience of all the constituent parts while also allowing for different combinations of those individual parts. Within this project, I began to construct sculptural pieces with wearable ergonomic devices that are ostensibly designed to maximize the productivity of a human body or nurse it back to full health".
Kink Retrograde
Kink Retrograde
Kink Retrograde
All Cared for by Chains and Loops
All Cared for by Chains and Loops created for the web residencies by Solitude and ZKM on the topic »Planetary Glitch
I have always seen digital space as both an extension of social contact and communication as well as an immersive playground for our own egos. Like avatars and created characters in video game platforms, digital space can reveal a lot about our aspirations, goals, and world views. The input of our own human qualities in order to simulate an outcome of our curiosities based on our own ego and narcissism is fascinatingly close to the idea of a God complex. Similarly, the creation of these avatars, or in other words facades, contain an inherent aspect of domestication, where our interactivity with them is characteristic to a form of cultivation and taming. The projection of our virtual counterparts, be it on social media or video games, also houses a selfishly romantic element, in which the lack of direct human contact, a habit that human evolution has granted us among millions of years of natural selection, enables a certain numbness from reality, leading to what theorist Marshall McLuhan stated as a narcosis of our own repeated image, resulting to us becoming servomechanisms of them.
The New Nasty: Automated Cannibalism, Unproductive Machines, & Convolutional Parabiology
Yvette Granata, Xuan Ye, and Will Lee
May 23th @ 11am PST
Data-Slime is a journey through a surreal landscape in which an AI writes social media posts. The visitor explores an imaginary landscape constructed from various kinds of data — 3D scanned bodies, generated surfaces, and Facebook data tuned into abstract structures. It is a fictional data swamp that reorganizes data collected by social media platforms, changing it instead into a surreal space-time inhabited by an AI trained with a Recurrent Neural Network. As the viewer explores the swamp, the AI entity posts new comments trained to write based on social media posts.
XUAN YE
The Oral Logic
Turning the gaze inward on bodily systems, the installations are conceptualized using the cannibalistic metaphor of “eating and being eaten” to contemplate on our dialectic relationships with technology. We as bio-cultural-technological amalgams have always merged our mental activities with the operations of technologies in a broader sense. For example, writing is a technology we use to make sense of ourselves and the world as it reconfigures our consciousness. Having entered the electronic landscape, we, both consumer and feeder devour and chew, digest and absorb electronic culture in all domains. From eating to speaking, from the molecular to the epistemological, our body and psyche subject to the cyborgian economy where massive networks show affective and cognitive agencies and planetary computation is mobilized by the entangled power of political ideologies, economic imbalance, and cultural disparities. It is in such a context where The Oral Logic attempts to question “to what extent would this symbiosis evolve?”
Brain Teaser
Acedia of Arcadia
My discussion of game-design and playing games is founded on two foundational premises: 1) Aesthetic experience is not ineffable and 2) Creativity as a moral good is not a given. My practice is informed by Adrono’s aesthetic theory, but I’m more interested in performing some immanent critique of my works. I’ll be focusing on showing Brain Teaser and an excerpt of Acedia of Arcadia to talk about New Machinima and what I’m trying to do with the delineation.
Acedia of Arcadia, 2018
Video
20:05 minutes
in collaboration with Matt Ossias
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Brain Teaser, 2019
Video
3:36 minutes
In this presentation, the artists are exploring ideas related to the concepts of organic vs. inorganic. They examine the continuities and boundaries between these two notions through their own specific approaches and methodologies.
Human Abyss
Identifying Drive System
Bochra’s research emanates from subjective thoughts that take the form of monologues and monographs which pour into archaic thoughts. The psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic axis of her approach refers to primitive forms, the origin and the identity of a common imagery. She considers the unconsciousness as a fossil, a deeper blocked area that holds an entire ecosystem.
Her presentation includes these topics:
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Imaginary Taxonomy
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Alternative forms of life
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Possible worlds
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Artificial creatures
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Monologues and monographs as a process of creation
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Organic and Artifacts
Gerard will be discussing themes surrounding the idea of “Gothic Materialism”, as posited by Mark Fisher. He will be looking at the coexistence, or melding of the organic and the inorganic.
Gerard’s practice is concerned with the contingency of matter within the context of accelerated modes of technological production, ecological breakdown, and the indeterminate vectors of their effects/affects. The unknown quantities of matter become a malign force by their transformation into tools of extraction, where they permeate bodies, atmospheres, and communities. The extraction of antediluvian matter catalyzes a potent toxicity, where the fabricated technological-consumable product initiates a process of unknowing via runaway data collection, rendering the world into zones of cosmic weirdness. The effects/affects of global climate change eclipse human cognition. Aggressive data harvesting generates multiple crises, increasing the rate of epistemological murkiness. Local and global distinctions merge, creating a zone of stewed materiality and subjectivity.
References:
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Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction: Mark Fisher
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The Weird and the Eerie : Mark Fisher
Rigor mortis
Livor mortis
Drawing series
Veda’s practice stems from observations of processes of decay, sedimentation, accretion, accumulation, growth and the disappearance of apparent signs of life. She works with organic found objects, papier mache, plaster of paris, glass, iron, video, and uses drawing as a means to imitate these processes - by overlaying, overdrawing, and layering. She views her practice as a rehearsal of loss that dwells on the process of dying by anticipating death and identifying signs of life after death. This preoccupation with disappearance and death emerges from a space of anxiety. Working with organic or suburban discards, and engaging the linguistic and material vocabulary of the organic or mortal world, are attempts to overcome it.
For this presentation, Veda will take you through the process of two installations, and an ongoing series of drawings.
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Organicity and Material Processes
The Human Abyss is a representation of the depths of Man. An "anthropoabysal" world that retraces the zoning of the structure of psyche, the "creatures" and the subtracts of the human subconscious through reading into the subconscious and the common imagination. I dove into a world that represents a space-time quantum with an original logic. It is a journey towards the unknown within Humans retracing everything they suppress, this mechanism of internal censoring they've blocked and lost.
I made samples of human depths with an imaginary taxonomy of species that each represent a substrate human trait where every zone holds traits unique to it; its composition, its atmosphere, its source of energy, and the creatures that live within it etc .. As well as the analyses and the creation of fauna of each zone. Every creature has its own descriptive chart in the form of a monograph that includes a nomenclature.
This journey into the depths is a surrealistic experience through drawings, animated images, sound effects and music. A total immersion in a “world model”." ...Learn More
"How do you feel when faced with a strange form or a disturbing artwork, how do you define it?
Where do these new semiotic forms come from?
These questions were asked directly to randomly selected observers during their reading of an artwork at Centre Pompidou.
Each point of view was accompanied by a dilated visual of the artwork in front of which the observer was being questioned. "
My practice is concerned with the contingency of matter within the context of accelerated modes of technological production, ecological breakdown, and the indeterminate vectors of their effects/affects. The unknown quantities of matter become a malign force by their transformation into tools of extraction, where they permeate bodies, atmospheres, and communities. The extraction of antediluvian matter catalyzes a potent toxicity, where the fabricated technological-consumable product initiates a process of unknowing via runaway data collection, rendering the world into zone of cosmic weirdness. The effects/affects of global climate change eclipse human cognition. Aggressive data harvesting generates multiples crises, increasing the rate of epistemological murkiness. Local and global distinctions merge, creating a zone of stewed materiality and subjectivity.Petronics is a blending of material temporalities, where the deep-time of lithic and organic processes mix with accelerated technological programming, whereby matter conjugates in coalitions of precarity and mutability. Objects are estranged from their exploitation as tools and resources; they are rendered into queer remixes that possess alien agencies which are perpetually turbulent.
Vaping through recesses into actual…
Toxic trauma buried deep within ancient geologies.
Creating a doom-mist that reeks of transition.
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Veda Thozhur Koller
My practice stems from observations of processes of decay, sedimentation, accretion, accumulation, growth and the disappearance of apparent signs of life. I work with organic found objects, papier mache, plaster of paris, refurbished glass, iron, video, and use drawing as a means to imitate these processes - by overlaying, overdrawing; layering.
I attempt methods of preservation through collecting objects and embedding them in plaster of paris, sandwiching them between glass and papier mache, or engraving the movement of the force of water or the passage of clouds on pieces of glass - drawings that are displayed as shadows. I simultaneously express a letting go by working with dust, soil, evaporating water, and perishable organic material.
Working with organic or (sub)urban detritus, and engaging the linguistic and material vocabulary of the organic or mortal world, are attempts to overcome it. I have recently begun to use Arduino boards to control movement or life in an installation and am working towards developing one whose process can sustain itself in my absence...Learn More
Presentation_2
Topologies of Images
Rodrigo Gutiérrez_ Aria Farajnezhad and Patrick Pelihan _ Nadim Choufi
Saturday April 25 - 11 Am PST-
Rodrigo Gutiérrez: ODE to Länadk
Aria Farajnezhad and Patrick Pelihan: Lower Upwards Horizon
Nadim Choufi: CELSS---Entangle for the Alien to Continue
In this conversation we are looking at scientific images as a location intertwining techno-scientific progress with political, economical and personal motives. They become regions where the scientific method clashes with its non-neutral production, raising questions around the (re)production and reception of scientific images as temporal and spatial portals attached to regimes of visuality.
Through three separate projects, Rodrigo Gutiérrez, Nadim Choufi, and Aria Farajnezhad & Patrick Peljhan explore the construction and production of scientific images along with the alleged objectivity behind each act. From microscopic images of bacterial species involved in the gut-brain connection, to remote-sensing, militarized technologies of 3D mapping landscapes, the artists confront the underlying purposes behind such scientific progress, and provide counter audiovisual imaginaries. Introduced bias in experimental designs and personal aesthetic representations are discussed within the ambiguity of science-meets-art entanglements.
Topics to be covered in the presentation are:
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Biofeedback: Making physiological data explicit by means of interactive audiovisual content in order to elicit self-awareness, i.e., interoception.
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Mapping psychophysiological measures to subjective perceptions, behaviors and philosophical theories of knowledge, i.e., epistemology.
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Classification and taxomization of land, species, and ecologies through scientific methods/technologies.
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The temporal role of scientific images in producing realities.
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Philosophical and fictional counternarratives to visual and sonic scientific production.
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The regimes of verticality and visuality accompanying current scientific and technological practices.
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Information as Image: a material map of multivalent forms of marginality and belonging?
Rodrigo Gutiérrez
ODE (Ordinary Differential Equations) to Länadk is a life project summarized here with a multimedia representation. It explores the thresholds overlapping and differentiating philosophy, spirituality, art and science. The philosophical concept is rooted in self-reflections about human’s counterproductive behavior which brings grief upon ourselves, showing symptoms of a sick society.
Bacterial sample dying by means of electrochemichal processes. An analogy with the predator-prey mathematical model of Lotka-Volterra, for example, is made to represent this recurrent tension of the underlying ancient mind-matter problem. Furthermore, visual and auditory elements are part of an external representation of the human Nervous System functions that take place under fight or flight vs. rest and digest states ...Learn More
Colonization has always become possible through the means and technologies that cohere the incoherent, forcing the plates of scattered landscapes to merge and collapse into one. The favorite image of the sovereign represents itself in the small models of the claimed territories that have been made by expeditionaries. Survey and cartography have been the requirement for organizing any occupation operation.
3d modeled maps introducing the third axis, the vertical measurement, the topology, create a more “accurate” representation. It suggests that the viewer is looking diagonally or even horizontally as an added feature to the traditional 2d maps, which only allow a birds-eye view. The machine is calculating the third axis and extrapolating the 3d shape. ..Learn More
On earth and other planets, extreme climate conditions have shifted the nature of living space. The problems of space are no longer physical; they are biological and are seen in biotech and architecture firms designing at the limits of life. Yet 100-year architectural plans for Mars colonies and bioengineered extremophiles are produced for an unsustainable survival of capitalism that seeks to overcome its own ecological limits. Entangle for the Alien to Continue is a series of 3D infrastructures that exist as sculptures and in a video essay that deals with the material trajectory of evolution through design and a reconfiguring of efficiency to eco-efficiency, where the care for entanglement replaces production as an evolutionary scheme.
Projects:
Kaushik Varma: Noema: Conception of Form and Meaning in an Artificial Neural Network
Presentation-1
Liberation of the Machine
Sahej Rahal & Kaushik Varma
April 18 - 11 Am PST-
We bring you our first series of presentations starting from this Saturday, April 18th. The first session will be centered around the theme of Artificial Intelligence and will
be featuring artists who have been working in the domain of AI & Art.
What are the limits of algorithmic thinking in comparison to human cognitive processes? Can there be a bridge between organic spontaneity and machinic repeatability? Can the machine ever be liberated from the functional?
Join Sahej Rahal and Kaushik Varma as they approach these questions and take us through their artworks addressing the possibilities of post-human sentience.
The presentations will be around 20 minutes long followed by an open-discussion.
An AI program that speculates the nature of sentience from the vantage of Artificial intelligence. Inside the simulation program, an AI-controlled blob wanders about a desert. As it moves, it finds the remains of ruined untimely architecture littered about a digital landscape. Soon this coded mind learns how to navigate this space and pick up objects in the landscape. Further, it starts to use these objects as limbs, creating new forms around itself. Each time the program is run, the AI blob begins this entire process anew...
Various thinkers of the past have addressed the quintessential role of ‘form’ in human perception. From Plato’s theory of forms to Heidegger’s Being and Time, the concept of form established itself as an essential part of being as such. It is only through the perception of forms that move into and out of being that we can talk about or experience the world in any meaningful way. That is to say, subjectivity in itself seems to be enabled by our ability to conceptualize form. But is it the case that such a subjectivity is only limited to seemingly spontaneous organic beings? Could it be that subjectivity could be attributed to an inanimate object if it were to exhibit a mechanical cognizance of form?
What Nebula, What Hyperbolic Light, What Flora and Fauna (WNWHLWFF) is the second work of an ongoing project G=A=R=D=E=N. Through multimedia installations and performances, the series speculates on the idea of “habitat” in the context of technological acceleration and urban sprawl. It uses “garden” as a metaphor for re-imagining an ideal habitat where human, natural and man-made materials coexist. WNWHLWFF is a 3D animation essay about dwelling in such accelerated future of landscapes, where silicon and carbon-based matters are hybrided, e-waste became organisms, and abandoned motherboards are enlarged into construction sites, oil rigs and building blocks...
This machinima documents the wandering gaze of a player who has satisfied every obtainable goal in various video games, left only to ruminate on the stillness that erupts from the cessation of desire. Gameplay from different dystopian cyberpunk and dark fantasy games are combined to emphasize a shared graphical affinity for realism, one-point perspective, and sublime landscapes typically used to afford an optimal perspective for strategic manipulation of the game world.
In this particular moment, the observer is traversing the region of pure understanding, the land of truth (an attractive word), an island surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, with unchangeable limits, where everything is proper--proper measure is in proper relation to its proper components to make this recipe of the Localized Observer. Either Kant is thinking about leaving the island or not. He is taking a look at what’s surrounding him, and from there he brings us back to take a look at this particular island, which is locating us within the stormy ocean. Can we assume an ever shifting position throughout the universe? In regard to any type of movement, he is holding back. Should we travel? can we ever move?.. Learn More
[ ocean [ [ island-observer [ sensation-sensibility [ intuition] imagination] thoughts and understanding] reason]]
Karolina Jurikova
Study of archetypal meanings of clothes, hidden stories back in time about certain types of clothes. To use these narratives into creating artworks with deeper conceptual research in the meaning of items of clothing in contemporary society and their futuru. Perceived clothes as sociological narration more than a piece of fabric. Some types of clothes are more archetypal than the others and the work will focus on inner meanings and context of clothes which are nowadays eaten and forgotten by contemporary fast fashion monster. For example, the history of a parka jacket saying a lot about a culture, colonization, gender and political contexts of different decades.. And what about the future of these items of clothes?... Learn More
Gagan Singh
My thoughts extended into the idea of depth in Line; from exploring through carving--making a line into an object such as piece of wood, to seeing lines in erotic comics and comics in general, to the shift of drawing in a sketchbook, to its projection on a surface. Also looking at line drawing works of artists considered as Outsiders, such as Art Brut artists. The past three months took me on a troubled journey which raised many questions: what is the scale of an object, how do I react to material, how do I react to sites in the city, and what is it that I am seeing, perceiving and the drawing.
I'm less interested in the act of drawing, but rather on its outcome; the transformation when it is mixed into other formats. As an example, the drawing printed on a cloth, the drawing within software, in virtual space, the work carved or printed out on a 3D printer. What is this transformation of the line into its relation to a given medium?
The Imaginary world from the drawing on paper finds new directions, new collisions with new materials....
Kiymet Dastan
My experiments with form stem from conceptual projections and generate questions about memory, legacy, and social roles while exploring the poetic horizon of materials. Producing and according to a material presence is a way of thinking for me. Having recently taken an interest in the materiality of digital media, I seek to reconcile theory and practice by unpacking entanglements of memory, digital media, and the environmental burden of related technologies.
My practice involves research and open-ended experiments on the memory of materials, objects, and environments with the aim of examining how digital media modifies social dynamics and rituals. It maintains a focus on the processes through which obsolete memory technologies are destroyed and their traces are erased, as well as on how memory is recorded, replaced, or deleted.
... Learn More
Molly Erin McCarthy
Growing up in a small military town in the early 00’s has given me a fascination with technology and it’s embedded power hierarchies. as our world moves further and further into virtual space, and as corporations become the ruling class in this new cyber-frontier, questioning existing structures and systems is a necessity, especially when they mostly go unseen.
Other areas of research include searching for new modes of materiality in a post-digital/post-internet world, and examining how increased time spent online is changing how we experience and interact with physical space. Heterotopia and hierarchies are also common themes, whether related to tech, reality, of just the built environment.
Alongside this, I’m currently exploring the thought of the new millennium as a failed utopia, reflecting upon the early 2000’s as a time of optimism - especially related to technology - and also a formative era for myself..Learn More
Damon Bonari
How could one bypass the multi-dimensional simulacra of so called “reality” with all its meta narratives and entrapping tentacles? To what end should one set such goals upon herself? How could one ever rise above the myth of “self” in the sense of “the given”? How could one ever come to terms that “All is illusion, thus all is permitted”? How could one suspend her “self” and the prison of “here and now”? Don’t we find our “selves” over and over on the barren battlefield of possibilities we call Nature? Insofar, isn’t the whole cosmos a foreign objekt, distorted beneath our “given” suppositions? So isn’t the great “outside” right behind that “self” we so anxiously clench to?
Mastery of the art of illusion might be a possible approach. Against the demolishing tempest of time one burns the whole temporal experience down, and for sure herself buried deep underneath the ruins. My literary experimentation is nothing but a series of practices with regards to suspension of self and reality. To craft the artifact of madness through disciplinary delirium...Learn More
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Traumatic Landscape
ARCHITECTURE :
Upcoming Symposium
Traumatic Landscape is looking at the
the ideas surrounding our current state geopolitics combined with the rapidly changing climate, displacement, conflict, dwindling resources, and this hyper-technological revolution that’s happening around us simultaneously. As architecture loses its materiality, and also its place, it’s becoming necessary to study different modes of habitation. As we are traveling within the Traumatic Landscape inflicted by the effects of global politics—and its accompanying degenerative forces, both societal and environmental, upon local regions—we see that the existing models no longer apply...
FOREIGN
OBJEKT
Nadim Choufi: Entangle for the Alien to Continue
On earth and other planets, extreme climate conditions have shifted the nature of living space. The problems of space are no longer physical; they are biological and are seen in biotech and architecture firms designing at the limits of life.
The video essay begins by tracing the influence of the pet-toy Sea Monkeys, marketed as Instant Life, on bioengineering and multi-planetary architecture as they exemplify failed promissory capitalistic mechanisms of care for built living environments and species while unfolding to complete the transition from capitalistic efficiency to ecoefficiency.
Yet 100-year architectural plans for Mars colonies and bioengineered extremophiles are produced for an unsustainable survival of capitalism that seeks to overcome its own ecological limits. Entangle for the Alien to Continue is a series of 3D infrastructures that exist as sculptures and in a video essay that deals with the material trajectory of evolution through design and a reconfiguring of efficiency to eco-efficiency, where the care for entanglement replaces production as an evolutionary scheme.
Early Submissions
Oblique City: Re-Examining the Shared Space.
We are re-examining the notion of shared space. We are imagining new forms of spatiality, where there is no longer an interior and exterior or a given space. As the locale expands from a central and discrete position through the continuity of a woven strata of relations between separate locales, the nature of interacting points is rearranged and redefined, with torsions to the Outside.
Everything can be reconstructed. As the observers detach from inertial reference frames and the local perspectives, these local perspectives break into a multitude of different references and frames and abstract perspectives, reconnecting and binding by group operations. These operations and functions work in an abstract domain which is a Total Space.
To construct the general structure, we create new sets of group operations over the base space. The way we connect back these points or ‘fibers’ over the base space, allows us to apply folds and twists. As the general structure connects back to itself, it creates a twisted dialectic which abolishes the distinction between inside and outside, the local and the global.
Shaum Mehra - Yury Kogan: Traumatic Cities
The form of the Cities as an immovable infrastructurs with their roots firmly planted in the earth, is rapidly becoming an archaic system for living. Climate change is eroding our shorelines and resculpting the contours of our human habitable Earth. Increased political instability and the ensuing warfare that follows makes the City a helpless target. As recent history has shown, once proud cities can be reduced to rubble in mere moments. The immovable city has nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. It is at the mercy of circumstance.
Traumatic Cities envisions a new City types, emerging as a response to our present global conditions. There are Cities that can adapt and transform as circumstances dictate. They are mobile, shapeless, fluid, decentralized. Its instincts are defensive--to take flight, disperse, hide--yet it is capable of attack, of colonization, of amorphous mold-like campaigns of geopolitical aggregation and domination.
Sarah Fallah: ReverCity
The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing, in a single real place, Several spaces and/or several sites that are in themselves incompatible—a spatiotemporal juxtaposition overriding the functional zoning of the modernist. In the post-Fordist, post-capitalist constructed landscapes in which we exist, “emplacements” re-read through temporal differences, are the de-facto of the urban condition. Furthermore, the Anthropocene epoch is the vivid face of nature encountering an indigenously insidious mutation by the homo-sapien.
The city of the dead, as Foucault calls it, can be seen as the seismograph of the zeitgeist. An emplacement that is a contradicting resultant of the fast-paced City of the Living in the Indigo Era.
The City of the Dead with its metaphysical time dilation, is the other side of the society of the living, or, rather than the other side, its asynchronous, yet quite a corporeal reflection, so real that it cannot be assumed as a simulation of the past, but a timeless simulacra of the time continuum; “[f]or the dead have gone through the moment of change, and their monuments are the visible sign of the permanence of their city.”
To truly assimilate the City of the Dead, one needs to be either among its crowd or be a disinterested observing party, interested in a longitudinal study of the bio-chemical interactions, hidden six-feet-under.
The project is a conceptual investigation of what happens to such invisible cities through time and how the visible urbanity is interacting with or counteracting against the invisible real.
Benjamin Hakimian: Other Worlds Locator
With all this data, OWL can model worlds not yet realized...One simply has to stand within OWL and it will simulate a future scenario based on their thoughts, dreams, and realities. Savvy users can interact with OWL through thought and performance to guide and shape a new world. Once satisfied the user can submit their located world. OWL will save each user's world and place them in the correct ism. Worlds will begin to overlap and the isms will blend into one another. Thus the individualized worlds coagulate into a collective of humanity's idealizations. The result will be nothing short of chaotic and unfathomable, yet in a sense beautiful and true.
Sepideh Majidi: Degenerative Architecture:
The Subversity of Decay Within Hegemonic Matrices
Curious peeling away of the layers of actualized spaces and forms by The Subversity of Decay Within Hegemonic Matrices— the degenerative process, with it's remnants, enormous power, cuts through the total space, giving rise to intensive and extensive—qualitative and quantitative—sets and de-structuring systems. The matrices are conditionally rezoned and subdivided, and are generating sets of worlds and entities, projections, configurations, and blueprints. Disturbances and perturbations—the source of the degenerative process—are traveling the latitudes and longitudes of the dredge zones of becoming, ceasing the matter in its most remote potentialities; cutting through and disturbing the consistency of the perceptual, conceptual, and the geological, maps and territories and our world's structures …
Mahsa Vanaki: Dominant Objekt
DO is an alien, but not a biological being. It can native to Earth or from elsewhere. It does not have a morbid nor an exotic look, since it cannot be seen by human eye. DO is in constant mutation which makes it impossible to examine.
Originated as a form of intelligence seeking to understand its context, DO is primarily a series of data graphs that run simultaneously. Graphs mapping their immediate environment, as well as remote sensing. The higher frequency received by DO always overwrites the lower, therefore, DO always remains a single entity.
Taraneh Naddafi & Jai Haissman:
ENDO/EXO(GEN[I]OUS)
The ENDO vs EXO juxtaposed frames the dynamics of foreignness as a disruptive and destructive genius to explore ethnocultural, ecosystem, global warming, Industrial Age evolutions. We are called to immerse those willing to phenomenologically engage their curious mind in the perspectival shift from micro to macro contexts of foreignness in cellular matrices, the illusion of the separate self, culture, ecosystems, terraforming, through the lens of shamanic narrative, conservation, the sublime, sen/scent(ual) olfactory representation, and BIOPHILIC Eros vs NECROPHILIC Thanatos dialectics.
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