CK

Seminar 61 // 26, 27, 28 Jan 2017 // London

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Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 26-28 January 2017

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Thursday, 26 January 2017, 11am – 9pm

11 – 1.30pm

Location: Deptford Town Hall, Room 110

C/K 10th anniversary discussion

1.30 – 2.30pm

Lunch Break

2.30 – 4.45pm

Location: Deptford Town Hall, Room 110

Mohammad Salemy and The New Centre for Research & Practice

Mohammad Salemy is an independent New York based artist, critic, and curator who holds an MA in critical curatorial studies from the University of British Columbia. He currently co-organizes The New Centre for Research & Practice, and has shown his works in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Works (Beirut) and Witte de With (Rotterdam). His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, and Brooklyn Rail, and he has curated exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Access Gallery, and Satellite Gallery in Vancouver. In 2014, he organized the Incredible Machines conference. Salemy’s curatorial experiment “For Machine Use Only” was included in the 11th edition of Gwangju Biennale (2016).
One of The New Centre for Research & Practice’s central mandates has been to provide new possibilities for our members and students, especially those who practice their work outside or in-between existing institutional frameworks. We help those transitioning between one degree and another, or between one institution and another, to expand their research networks beyond what can be offered by any single institution. Our members and certificate students enjoy access to face-to-face, real-time engagements with emerging thinkers and scholars, collaborating with them and with each other while producing new forms of knowledge.

Readings:
- America Is Hard to See: A Guide to not being depressed about US electoral politics this November http://dismagazine.com/blog/83603/america-is-hard-to-see-a-guide-to-not-...
- Art After The Machines http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/art-after-the-machines/
- Berlin’s Belated Biennale: A Response to the Responses https://ocula.com/magazine/reports/berlin-s-belated-biennale-a-response-...

5 – 7pm

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 342

'Informatics of Domination' series organised by Zach Blas

Lecture by Mohammad Salemy

Chair and respondent: Stefan Nowotny 

'After Post Internet & The Winter of AI'

Viewed from the inside of contemporary time & space, the internet paradigm, network discourses and computational logic appear as a series of sensible theories and philosophies that use computer hardware and software to model intelligence and the working of the cognitive, social and political systems. Viewed from the outside of this particular contemporaneity however, computationalism is a specific worldview and the distinct cultural identity belonging to our time & space, one that perhaps is already reaching or will soon reach its peak. Many experts from the fields of machine intelligence and philosophy of technology agree that a decline in research, development and enthusiasm about high technology is inevitable given the fundamental limitations of both our knowledge of the mechanisms of different species of brain as well as the problems with our concepts and materials that shape our computational infrastructure. There is a widespread belief that technological progress within the next decade will witness a setback while new advancements will greatly slow down if not all together come to a halt. Then there is the political reality of our technologies which historically has placed most if not all of their developments amongst the arsenal of the rich and the powerful, those to whom Marxists refer to as the “owners of the means of production.” What happens in the near future when technological progress and the emergence of artificial intelligence is politically subsumed, evolutionally decelerated and culturally forgotten? is there a way for us to overcome the post internet and the winter of AI?

7 – 9pm

Professor Stuart Hall Building, room LG02

DATA{PUBLICS}

Lev Manovich/CUNY with Q&A chaired by Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer/TUW & Goldsmiths

Lev Manovich is one of the leading theorists of digital culture worldwide, and a pioneer in application of data science for analysis of contemporary culture. Manovich is the author and editor of ten books including Cultural Analytics (forthcoming 2017), Instagram and Contemporary Image, Data Drift, (Software Takes Command, Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database and The Language of New Media which was described as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He was included in the list of "25 People Shaping the Future of Design" in 2013 and the list of "50 Most Interesting People Building the Future" in 2014. Manovich is a Professor of Computer Science at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and a Director of the Cultural Analytics Lab. Lab's projects were funded and comissioned by Google, Twitter, New York Public Library, among others.

His digital art projects were shown in over 100 group and personal exhibitions worldwide. The lab’s most recent projects were commissioned by MoMA, New Public Library, and Google. Selfiecity won Golden Award in Best Visualization Project category in the global competition in 2014; On Broadway received Silver Award in the same category in 2015. Manovich is in demand to lecture on digital culture around the world. Since 1999 he presented 550 lectures, seminars and master classes in North and South America, Asia, and Europe.

 

Friday, 27 January 2017, 11am-7pm

11am – 12pm

Location: Ben Pimlott Building Lecture Theatre, ground floor

Adrian Heathfield: Screening of Spirit Labour

Adrian Heathfield is a writer and curator working across the scenes of live art, performance and dance. He is best known for his books, which include 'Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History' (Intellect 2012), the monograph 'Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Teaching Hsieh' (MIT 2009) and 'Live: Art and Performance' (Tate 2004). He co-curated the Live Culture events at Tate Modern in 2003 and numerous other durational events in European cities over the last ten years and will be curator of the Taiwan Pavillion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. He is the co-author with the photographer Hugo Glendinning of a series of dialogue films: conversations with critical figures such as Hélène Cixous, Alphonso Lingis, Brian Massumi and Bernard Stiegler. Adrian is Marie Curie International Fellow at Columbia University, New York where he directs a three-year research project called Curating the Ephemeral and he is Professor of Performance and Visual Culture at the University of Roehampton, London. www.adrianheathfield.net 

12.15 – 1.30pm 

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 325

Adrian Heathfield: Genealogies of Spirited Affinity

1.30 – 2.30pm

Lunch

2.30pm – 5pm 

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 325

Adrian Heathfield: Air of Others - Seminar and discussion on the reading and the above content.

Readings:
- Tim Ingold, 'Part II: Weathering', in The Life Of Lines, Routledge 2015, pp. 51-111.
- Luce Irigaray, 'At the Crossroads - The Encounter' & ‘The World of the Beyond’, in Sharing the World, Continuum 2008, pp. 31-95.

5.15pm – 7.00pm

Professor Stuart Hall Building, room LG01

Ravi Sundaram/The Sarai Programme, CSDS Delhi with Q&A chaired by Irit Rogoff

'Everyday disjunctions: public expression after the mobile phone'

A growing plurality of populations in Asia, Africa and Latin America have now got regular access to mobile devices. In India the bulk of Internet access is now mediated through mobile networks. Unsurprisingly, this has produced great challenges for postcolonial design, now confronted by media-enabled populations previously seen mostly as social political actors. Today, mobile media objects move in and out of infrastructures; and attach themselves to shifting platforms of political-aesthetic action while disrupting older partitions of postcolonial governance. As in the rest of the world, media periodically overflow from one channel to another leading to unanticipated consequences: the expose of a police atrocity or political secrets, a leaked intimate video. The transformation of public speech and expression in contemporary data infrastructures in the South open up questions of collectivity in ways unimagined but a decade ago.

8pm

Dinner together

 

Saturday, 28 January 2017, 12–4pm

 

Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 325

Reading Group – led by Meenakshi Thirukode and Ainslee Roddick

For this reading group we aim to have a discussion around futures and temporality, thinking around Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction, continuity and spacetimemattering. In the last few days we have felt it important to talk about Mark Fisher’s writing and we hope that in the context of this reading group we can 'diffractively' discuss ideas surrounding hauntology, temporality, class consciousness and lost futures. Karen Barad's writing focuses on the notion of agential realism and the excerpt we have chosen reflects upon the materiality of class relationships, as well as thinking around the quantum and its dis/continuities.

Readings:
- Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 2007 - p236-246
- Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, 2014, excerpts

 

 

Seminar Dates: 
Thu, 26/01/2017 - 11:00 - Sat, 28/01/2017 - 16:00