Seminar 64 // 8, 9, 10 June 2017 // London
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Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 8-10 June 2017
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Thursday 8 June 11am-4.45pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 325
Practice Generating Machines
Luciana Parisi
If computational machines are no longer instruments of representation, and if their modus operandi no longer follow the linear model of deducing conclusions from already set premises, it is because these machines generate ideas and practices of another kind. The dominant image of data and its empirical imperative of retrieving and transmitting information shall be contested in view of a reinvention of a computational image of thought exposing a new tension between information processing and processual information.
Readings:
- Parisi, Luciana and Antonia Majaca. "The Incomputable And Instrumental Possibility". E-Flux Journal #77, 2016.
- Parisi, Luciana. Contagious Architecture. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Introduction.
5-7pm The Fisher-Function, Visual Cultures Public Programme
Richard Hoggart Building, Room 256
MUR MUR [8::1] 0D><CCRU
with Maggie Roberts (0rphan Drift)
https://fisherfunction.persona.co/WEEK-SEVEN
The Fisher-Function is a seven week series focused solely on the work of Mark Fisher. Instead of taking the traditional lecture format, The F-F will take the form of collective reading and listening sessions, all open to anyone interested - inside and outside of Goldsmiths, whether you know Mark's work or not.
Friday 9 June 11am-5pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 325
MRes presentations by Marta Columbo and Mahan Moalemi
11am – 1.30pm Morning session
MRes presentation:
Mimesis and iconoclasm: the case of Isgrò and Cattelan
Marta Colombo
My research looks at the contemporary meaning of two concepts which have characterised our relationship with the image from the beginning: iconophilia and iconoclasm. The underlying thesis is that, even if our relation with images could be nowadays seem iconophile, since the huge amount of images we produce and consume, this iconophilia is not pacific as it seems and hides iconoclastic implications.
In order to articulate this thesis, the concepts of iconophilia and iconoclasm are investigated on the ground of mimesis in contemporary art. Specifically, I have used as a case study two contemporary Italian artists, Emilio Isgrò and Maurizio Cattelan, whose arts can be respectively considered a representation and a target of a certain kind of cultural iconoclasm.
The comparison between the two artists is based on the analysis of the mimetic relationship between their art and the represented reality. Starting from an involuntarily shared poetic claim of realism, Isgrò and Cattelan achieve opposite aesthetic outcomes in terms of mimesis. The analysis aims to show how the mimetic distance between the two artists can be considered, rather than just a diversity, a clue which reveals their common ground: a radical complaint of a particular form of cultural iconoclasm silently operating in an apparently iconophile society.
Emilio Isgrò (b.1937) is an Italian artist and writer known for his artistic practice called 'Cancellatura (Deletion)' which consists in physically deleting some parts of iconic books. Despite Isgrò is nowadays considered a precursor of international conceptual art, his first Deletion, showed in 1964, was met with scandal and disapproval by the public.
Maurizio Cattelan (b.1960) is an Italian artist known for his satirical hyperrealistic sculpture. Considered by the critics as one of Douchamp's greatest contemporary heirs, his extremely provocative art has often been contested and has triggered violent reactions among the audience.
Readings:
- Georges Didi-Huberman. Form as movement and dissociation: 'Picture = rupture’
- W. J. T. Mitchell. What Do Pictures "Really" Want?
1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch
2.30 – 4.45pm Afternoon session
MRes presentation:
From Time to Times: Techniques of Trans-Temporality
Mahan Moalemi
The questions this research tries to raise are from the outset haunted by the resonances of another question: Is there an outside? Resisting every bet on resolution, this question might incarnate whether in the relationship of a totalizing locality to its global outdoors, or in the extents of intimacy between one body and the other. However, an introductory method of paradoxical intervention hosts the complexities that grow into this question and the too straightforward spatial relationships that underlie it. These spatial complexities, at a closer look, are loaded with the weight of time, which unfolds across different temporal zones and builds upon the gender relations that have again and again come to saturate the public space, the workplace, and the domestic sphere. This is to probe into how humans have been disciplined and administered by the techniques of chrononormativity. What, then, is public time? How can the experience of time be depersonalized? How do we step in and out of the temporalities of different experiences? Queer temporalities provide the main frame of reference for engaging with these questions — gender transition, transvestitism, and/or queer coincidence are the first points of entry into the question concerning the techniques of trans-temporality. How can the straight time of history be identified, and how can it be queered? How does the linear time expand laterally into many times? Simultaneously, this is a question of that which distorts the boundaries of empirical encounters in and with time, that which alienates and pushes one’s temporalities to the outsides of human experience. Trans-temporality, then, branches into a discussion around inhuman temporalities, which serves not only as a continuation of queer time and its expansive suggestions for the human but also as a necessity in the face of transhumanist ventures into an impending technological singularity. That is a confrontation with contingent futurities that are not merely lingering down the line of an evolutive time but are already intensifying the present — extracting it for their own maintenance. How can we then register for the temporalities of inhuman survival whose ethical and political valences are indifferent to the time of human evolution and its undulating rhythms of development and deterioration? This makes way for the final ramification of trans-temporality in terms of a politics of time in the context of transnational flows and neural networks of microcommunication across cyberspace and cybertime. How should we draw a conceptual matrix for chronopolitics at the time of desynchronized globalization?
Readings:
- Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds. 1st ed. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2011. Preface pp. 9-24
- Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then And There Of Queer Futurity. 1st ed. NYU Press, 2009. Conclusion pp. 185-9
8pm – Dinner together
This is the last seminar of this academic year and I would like to join you for dinner. If you let me know who wants to come along I can book a table for all of us.
Saturday 10 June 12-4pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, Room 325
Reading Group
Chaired by Stefan Nowotny
Following various discussions around 'the subaltern' as well as a collective decision during our last reading group meeting, we will read Gayatri Ch. Spivak's essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' in its most well-known version from 1988. Building on work started by the Subaltern Studies group around 1980 and combining postcolonial, feminist, marxist, poststructuralist and other lines of critical thinking, Spivak here famously investigates the interrelationship between exclusion from social mobility and exclusion from discourse: in short, a foreclosure that operates at – and through – the conjunction of power and knowledge. The text is quite long and we will specifically focus on selected passages, but please do read the whole text in preparation.
Readings:
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can The Subaltern Speak?”, 1988.