Seminar 67 // 1, 2, 3 February 2018 // London
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Curatorial/Knowledge Seminar, 31 January - 3 February 2018
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Wednesday 31 January 2-6pm
MRes students and everyone in C/K: please do come to this if you are here.
2-4.30pm Contemporary Art Talk
Location: Ben Pimlott Building, room 506
Choreographic 7: Andros Zins-Browne, Dance and Unmaking
Already Unmade (2016) is a durational performance by choreographer Andros Zins-Browne. The performance is conceived as a public rehearsal, where Zins-Browne practices the remixing, overlapping, extending and warping of his own repertoire, attempting to 'unmake' a personal history of choreography.
Andros Zins-Browne is an American choreographer who lives and works in Brussels. His work consists of live and hybrid environments at the intersection between installation, performance and conceptual dance. Crossing between stage and exhibition spaces, he explores the ways that image, movement and matter interact until they begin to take on each other's properties.
4.30-6pm MRes seminar
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
Following Andros Zins-Browne's presentation, we will discuss Andre Lepecki’s Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance, Chapter 5: 'Choreographic Angleology - The Dancer as Worker of History'.
Readings:
- Andre Lepecki, Singularities: Dance in the Age of Performance (chapter 5)
Thursday 1 February 11am-5.00pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
11am – 1.30pm Morning session
Administrative discussions:
- collaboration with BA Curating
- proposal for NTU, Arts Faculty, Trondheim, Norway
- shaping C/K 12-year anniversary
1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch
2.30 – 4.30pm Afternoon session (Irit)
Continuing with the thematic of ‘Breathing’, we will look through some key passages in the work of Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings (introduction & chapter 4: ‘irritation').
Readings:
- Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (introduction & chapter 4)
5.00–7.00pm Visual Cultures Public Programme
Location: Professor Stuart Hall Building, LG02
Visual Cultures Public Programme Spring 2018 - A Fearless Look at the Unspeakable
Deconstructing Rationality
Lydia Schumacher
For generations, and with increasing intensity, the question has been debated whether it is rational to believe in God. Based upon a two-volume work, this paper will seek to overturn the debate by challenging the standard of rationality that has created problems for faith and proposing to describe faith as the ‘rationale for rationality’ thus affirming it, ultimately, as intrinsically rational.
Lydia Schumacher is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Philosophy and Theology at King’s College, London. She works across the fields of philosophical theology and medieval studies. Her books include Rationality as Virtue (2015), and Divine Illumination (2011).
Friday 27 October 11am-5.30pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
11am – 1.30pm Morning session
Mapping anomalies
For a theory of the internet of beings
Elisa Rusca
Internet-related technologies could empower self-organisation and freedom of expressions, as it was proven by the crucial role twitter and facebook had during the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Arab springs arises, or in Ukraine. However, those same technologies can be turned against their same users, becoming instrument of monitoring, censorship and control.
Considered “anomalies”, divergent, dangerous agencies within the system, not only hackers and online trolls are despised in mainstream media discourses, but also they are and have been persecuted by state laws – and often punished harshly. However, according to online values like engagement and anonymity, trolls and hackers show us online behaviours such as open access sharing, cryptography and cryptocurrency use, which might be useful resources and help us imagine an internet of beings instead of an internet of things: changing the perspective of an over-all interconnected network invading and monetising our lives from pizza delivery to birth control methods, from health insurances to bank accounts, into the thought of a network in which our freedoms and rights are valued and preserved.
Is then the “anomaly” ever to be condemned? What kind of vocabulary can we develop to define the internet's space(s) and those who access it? Is the term “user” ultimately appropriated? How can we design the internet of beings?
Readings:
- George Conguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological – chapter III: A new concept in pathology: Error (pp. 275-287 of the pdf)
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man – chapter 33: Automation. Learning and Living (pp.346-359 of the book, 370-382 in the pdf)
1.30 – 2.30pm Lunch
2.30 – 5.30pm Afternoon session (Stefan)
This session will be dedicated mainly to Brian Massumi’s text ‘The Autonomy of Affect’. Breathing offers an exemplary instance of the ‘autonomy’ in question, as it is one of the key processes regulated by the autonomic nervous system which does not rely on the conscious acts of an ‘autonomous subject’, yet is still linked with various kinds of interaction between the body and its milieu (see the brief excerpt on the respiratory function from D. Anzieu’s book The Skin-Ego). I would like to take this as a starting point to discuss Massumi’s claim ‘that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late-capitalist culture’.
Readings:
- Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’
- Didier Anzieu, ‘On the Confusion of Fullness and Emptiness in the Respiratory System’
8pm – Dinner together
Saturday 28 October 12-4pm
Location: Richard Hoggart Building, room 325
Ofri Cannani
We will be reading 'She Unnames Them', a short story by Ursula K. LeGuin who passed away this week. The piece was originally published in the New Yorker in 1985. The text was published 16 years after 'The Left Hand of Darkness' (1969), where LeGuin first explored a planet where individuals are "ambisexual", with no fixed sex.
We will ask 'What is a name?' and look into the powerful nature of naming and the possibility of claiming a name or refusing to do so and remaining unnamed. Within the context of recent production and circulation of genderless or gender-variable language, I hope to discuss the meaning of writing (and reading) while letting go of the power of naming or relinquishing parts of our names.
In addition, I'm attaching an optional (but highly recommended) reading from Jack Halberstam's new book Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Halberstam's first chapter 'What is a Name?' discusses the history and politics of naming (and unnaming) gender fluidity.
Readings:
- Ursula K. LeGuin, 'She Unnames Them’
- Jack Halberstam, 'What is a Name?'