Note: A seminar ranges over an arc of themes over several sessions, with time for reflections, readings or writings in between sessions. A studio offers guided time to practice some design tactics or maker methods, incubating them over several sessions for subsequent practice in more public settings. A workshop version of seminar or studio addresses a compact set of themes or tactics over a brief period – one day or one session.
Organisms and Organizations (SHA)How do collectives maintain their identities as they incorporate and produce individuals? How can a collective entity structurally couple with its ambient environment? How do collectives make memory, make sense in, grow into, shape and re-shape their worlds? We look to examples ranging from microbiomes in multi-cellular organisms and forests, to ateliers, coops, large corporations and cities. With an eye to forming their own experimental organizations, students will perform case studies of collectives.
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SEMINAR | WORKSHOP: THE FINANCIAL ART OF (NON)KNOWLEDGE (BORDELEAU)“Knowledge is not made for understanding, it is made for cutting”: Foucault’s famous remark seems more relevant than ever today. Markets have been increasingly conceived of as computing devices for communicating information (i.e. price), tasked with the epistemic challenge of serving as the primary mechanism for the validation of truth. The market knows best, as the fable of self-regulation goes. They make the cut.
If the economy is a matter of knowledge and other information asymmetries, what does it mean to know by means of financial derivatives? Derivatives operate at the limits of what is economically known(able). They have come to play an increasing role in contemporary market’s risk management strategies and value discovery processes. As Elie Ayache, an ex-financial trader turned philosopher of the market puts it, “derivatives are the un-knowledge of the future, made market.” Taking Randy Martin’s seminal work Knowledge LTD (2015) as a starting point, this workshop aims to engage with and reveal otherwise the effervescent sociality embedded in the operations of finance and the social logic of the derivative, assuming non-knowledge as a productive, prospective, affective force. References
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Emergence, Ontogenesis, Individuation (Sha)If asked what the world is made of, we can say it’s made of objects, or we can say it’s made of stuff. This seminar takes the point of view of stuff, the stuff of which objects are made. But instead of asking what stuff the world is made of, we ask how the stuff changes, how things and relations emerge and transform. Repurposing Galileo’s legendary observation – Eppur si muove – we will read and discuss theories of dynamic, historicity, process, and temporality. Participants will bring, create and write about examples from their own practices and studies.
Theme 1: Transformation, Process, Continuity and Field Working vocabulary: We will workshop some of the most salient terms so that they may provide some conceptual grips for subsequent sessions References 1
Theme: Substrate, invariants, symmetry-breaking, and sense-making References 2:
Theme: Textural care and emergence of sense, sense-making References
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Measure and Value (Sha, Muindi) |
PROTOTYPING SOCIAL FORMS (SHA, CAROTTI-SHA) |
Many consider problems of measurement to be about the "resolving power" of our instruments of measurement. They believe that problems of measurement can be solved by fashioning instruments that make more and more precise measurements, enabling theories and models to make more accurate predictions based on precise data and, concomitantly, empowering us to use theories and models to intervene in the world so as to ensure favorable outcomes.
But what if the problem of measurement is less about the "resolving power" of our measuring instruments and more about the "indeterminacy" of that which is measured. How does choosing when to measure, what to measure, and how precisely to go about measuring become an art of constituting entities and of enabling socio-environmental processes to gain traction and play in the world? Countering those who consider problems of measurement to be primarily about the resolving power of our instruments of measurement, this seminar is about learning to take indeterminacy seriously, both in theory and practice, by investigating different approaches to indeterminacy in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the (post)humanities. The approaches to indeterminacy that this seminar will investigate propose that, to solve problems of measurement, one must consider when one measures, what one measures, and how precisely one goes about measuring so as to neither prematurely nor belatedly resolve outcomes in unfavorable ways. Theme: Measure and Intent Reference
Theme: Metric → Measuring, Ontology → Ontogeny How to treat performativity, event, occasion, process, … emergence of sense? How to move from a metaphysical concern with knowing predicates on things to the processual and pragmatic concern with chorusing | layering | refracting | blending of sense-making | value-producing processes? References
Theme: The problem of value Alternatives to valuation via performatives, dynamics, cosmopolitical processes… References
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A studio for imagining alternate worlds and navigating indeterminacy beyond the reach of statistical methods, machine learning, and data science. We furnish and adapt techniques for imagining situations other than what is the case, for articulating alternative scenarios or conditions, and for prototyping some of those scenarios, and making sense of the lived experience of those alternatives in ways that can be shared with those who were not present. Students will create proposals around social forms with which they are concerned. Techniques can include: responsive environments, real-time simulations, non-narrative transmedia games, and experiential experiment: role-playing, body-storming, non-narrative movement, as well as historical, anthropological, and quantum discourse. We adapt and combine techniques for prototyping social forms, scenario exercises.
Theme: Social forms
INfrastructuresThe sociotechnical systems sustaining our lives, such as finance, the energy grid, informatics, and network media have evolved into an invisibilized infrastructure to our everyday lives. Operating as a pervasive sociotechnical and environmental substrate to life, normally and by design infrastructures lie beyond reach and attention of most of us whose lives depend on them. Only in exceptional breakdown or under specialized technical, critical focus do they come into view. Un-mooring from some narratives of infrastructures in science and technology studies, or technocultural studies, how can we understand infrastructures differently, as topological flow, quantum operator algebra, acoustics, or atmosphere? How can we articulate infrastructures differently, with attention to multi-scale, polyvalent intention, power and value, history and indeterminacy?
Students will speculatively redesign infrastructures in tandem across ecological, economic, ethico-aesthetic strata. Where possible, we will formulate multi-modal articulations or enactive simulations for experiment. |
Vegetal LifeWhat can we learn by an orientation from forms of life that are not framed like animals as the category of less-than-human or as proxies for the human? In life’s middle between micro-organisms and animals — plants have always been categorized as food, medicine, shelter, ornament, or weed. But what might we learn when we approach vegetal life as if on its own terms? How does such life grow, sense, inter-twine, and proliferate its milieux? Supplemented by biology, this is a philosophical and artistic inquiry. Students will prepare somatic and sensory exercises, conduct field and garden studies, and create multi-modal reflections and scores for subsequent enactments.
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Movement as ThoughT (SHA, tba)Motivated by.Deleuze and Guattari’s propositional play with conceptual personae, we explore skilled movement as thought, as a mode of philosophy distinct from thinking about movement, which is a scientific inquiry. We consider techniques of performing music, movement, dance, and theater as tools for creating and working with concepts in ways that are distinct from thinking in words or images. We consider the role of experimental technique in the creation of fresh forms of thought, as enacting or articulating rather than representing thought.
Students create action scripts, scores for movement / performance that enact conceptual propositions or inquiries. Students with expertise are welcome to bring techniques from computational media, experimental choreography, or experimental music, to co-create methods of movement as thought References:
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