Category Archives: Posthumanism

Emma Stern, Heather, 2020. Oil on canvas, 40 x 34 inches, 102 x 86 cm. Courtesy of the artist and The Hole.

Density Betrays Us

The Hole

June 29 through August 14, 2021

Curated by Melissa Ragona, Andrew Woolbright, and Angela Dufresne

By VITTORIA BENZINE, July 2021

On view at the Holes TriBeCa location this month is Density Betrays Us, a group show totaling over two dozen artists that asks where the human body lives in a world increasingly embodied by bits of information. Money is a number in an account rather than cold cash, meetings are transatlantic video chats, parallel lives are conducted through games and social media platforms. We know this. This effort of guest-curation by Melissa Ragona, Andrew Woolbright, and Angela Dufresne harmonizes a polychromatic conversation unfolding across the bounds of media to suss out the borders of the self in this burgeoning paradigm.

Density Betrays Us developed out of a 2020 article by Woolbright for Whitehot Magazine titled Phantom Body, which explores the flesh prisons historical role in dictating consensual reality through the lens of visual art. The resulting exhibition elaborates on the points Woolbright raises throughout this writing, with works culled from numerous artists existing practices.

This exhibition took shape over a year of conversations, debates, and studio visitsan accomplishment itself in terms of scale. Theres innovative pure painting from Emma Sterns minxy reclamation of depravity to shadowy portraits of an avatar from indigenous artist Duane Slicks lineage. Angela Dufresne subverts negative and positive space through a kismet-ic collection of color while Joiri Minaya reimagines the body as camouflage amongst indigenous plants from the Dominican Republic.

Peggy Ahwesh, Rip Van Winkle, 2020. 4k 360-degree video, color, sound, 3 minutes and 4 seconds.Courtesy of the artist and The Hole.

In a 2018 article on posthumanism, Diane Marie Keeling and Marguerite Nguyen Lehman write that, Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does not completely intend or control There is little consensus in posthumanist scholarship about the degree to which a conscious human subject can actively create change, but the human does participate in change.

Maybe once upon a time people were free agentsbefore the answering machine became novelty, before debit cards began tracking our every choice. We do not live like that anymore, and we will never go back. We are irrevocably connected.

Consider the futurists and the artist-engineers of the Russian avant-garde, their derisive disregard for the past and vigorous (albeit hyper-masculine) enthusiasm for the future. In the throes of the machine ages ascension, they saw the potential for paradise. However, the bold new world imagined by those artists has not come to fruition. The planet is burning. We need a new frontier, a new savior, and it may be a matter of perspective rather than tangible reality.

If there are echoes of the futurist sentiment across Density Betrays Us, its only through this eye towards the future. One afternoon after the incredibly hopping opening reception, Woolbright spoke of the exhibitions humble ambivalence, how he believes art is a place for horizontal, non-hierarchical communities. Each participating artist is a colleague working within the same culture. In the absence of competition that comes from this mutual understanding and focus, artists sometimes ask bolder questions, unafraid of ending at I dont know. As such, Density Betrays Us eschews statements for questions. Not only is this moment in history remarkable, its ours, and the physical forms to which were bound only last a minute. Best to seize.

Michael Jones McKean, 15 Families, 2015. Wood, paint, urethane, lighting, brass, stainless steel, fossils, meteorites, shells, elements, bristlecone pine, 74 in x 133 x 8 inches, 188 x 338 x 20 cm.Courtesy of the artist and The Hole.

In a 2014 TedTalk I encountered during the pandemic, MIT-based physicist and cosmologist Max Tegmark reasons that consciousness is a mathematical pattern. He posits that consciousness is not an innate property of the atomic pieces that comprise us, but the patterns that emerge from certain arrangements of such particlesconsciousness is the feeling of processing information. From a biological level, our bodies arent even really bodies, but organic printouts of instructions encoded in our DNA, an endless cycle of shedding and spawning new cells. There is a lot of neo-pagan spirituality surrounding the implications of mystified iterations of this, but I believe reality itself is magical. If the dice roll for the better, our moment in history could also be one where we begin relating to reality in a radically evolved fashion. It is, after all, the Age of Aquarius.

It matters, as well, to keep all this contemplation grounded in the real world. People materially experience the effects of our orientation towards reality. Nicole Millers body of work and contribution to Density Betrays Us tells arrestingly human storiesin one segment of her film installation for the show, a man recounts his experience being carjacked, a phantom limb reflecting in the mirror alongside his amputated arm. Sculptures ground the exhibition in the 3D realm, an interesting paradox to a show concerned with the dematerialized bodyworks by Carl DAlvia and Terrance James and Yasue Maetake, whose conglomerates of styrofoam and shine and ossified fibers enrapture entirely.

Didier William, Koupe tet, Boule Kay, 2021. Acrylic, oil, ink, wood carving on canvas, 70 x 52 inches, 178 x 132 cm. Courtesy of the artist and The Hole.

The night this show opened, one attendee approached me by Casja Von Zeipels 1.5x larger than life sculpture of a modern madonna, replete with neon lashes, snatched waist, and lip fillers. I dont find that sexy, he said. Standing by the same sculpture days later, Woolbright noted the body must escape beauty. A non-hierarchical approach to appearance begets an easier atmosphere of enjoyment rather than assessment. Eroticism must survive the transition, along with all the sensuous pleasures that make corporeal life worth living. Claudia Bitran and Caitlin Remiker Cherry both incorporate elements of interaction, the ways we regard each other. Bitrans painted animations exercise voyeurism, entering the private world of intoxication. Cherry crafts multi-angled, kaleidoscope portraits evocative of this hyper-saturated cultural moment, which simultaneously illustrates the distinct consumption of black women.

We are bodies with senses for now, dealing in objects for the time being. Shows like this arent just aesthetically thrilling, theyre necessary exercises in examining our evolution, asking questions and contributing to the cacophony with thought and heart and sensuousness. Catch Density Betrays Us on view through August 14th, and search for our new savior somewhere in the future.WM

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WM | whitehot magazine of contemporary art | Density Betrays Us at The Hole - whitehotmagazine.com

The tense dynamic between academic freedom and academic accountability will persist for publicly funded universities and questions will be asked of the utility of disciplines in an age of economic downturns and calls for instrumentalisation social usefulness of research. In this context, disciplinary distinctions will be exacerbated where funding agencies will examine utility above all else.

Here it is germane to note that the quantum and varieties of funding are starkly different across disciplines. Let us evaluate how many and in what quantum funding sources are available to the sciences (the various research agencies, DBT, DST etc) and those for humanities research (the ICHR, ICSSR, the UGC). (This helps the humanities researchers to become even more self-righteous than they already are, when they can declare that they dont research (solely) for money!) What is the library fund allocation of the humanities in comparison with that for the sciences (and we will not even talk of equipment costs)?

Structural inequality of this kind is, let us concede, difficult to overcome. But let us also ask questions of policy making. We have a principal scientific adviser to the government. Is there a comparable position for a humanities scholar? In early 2021 we saw a Draft National Science, Technology and Innovation Policy. Is there one for the humanities? Does the term innovation apply solely to the STEM disciplines? In institutions across the country, how many humanities scholars and let us assume the best humanities scholars are equal to the best STEM scholars, just as the worst in one are the same as the worst in the other are on the now ubiquitous Innovation Councils? Is there not a possibility for innovation in the Humanities, as UK and numerous other nations have discovered and actively championed?

At the height of the pandemic in 2020, Germany thought it fit to have humanities scholars on the board for expert advice: the independent National Academy of Sciences (established 1652) called upon a specialist in the philosophy of law, besides historians and theologians. Germany obviously never thought that the battle over coronavirus was the province of virologists alone. What about other nations?

The humanities: impact or value?

Debates about the public good of the humanities have been around for some time, often in response to self-reflexive claim of a crisis in the humanities first enunciated by J.H. Plumb in 1964. This standard trope of the crisis has gone on for too long, and while scholars and public intellectuals like Martha Nussbaum have offered intensive defences of the humanities role, there is no reason to revisit the debate.

One aspect of the debate has, however, changed: from questions of impact to those about value. This is where the plot thickens and you see not just crisis but opportunity.

The emphasis placed on innovation in universities and research is really about impact and dates back, Paul Benneworth, Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn note, to the 1984 OECD reports on innovation. And this has been linked to not only an instrumental view of research but also a strong commercialisation approach. High tech firms, electronics research, biotech innovations are cast in this mould with innovation coded as commercially viable. The marketisation of intellectual work in labs is the great game, and this is both impact and innovation.

Arguing that the Humanities are differently useful, commentators responded to questions of value. A 2008 document from the Arts and Humanities Research Council stated:

[Humanities] contribute to a growing body of knowledge on human experience, agency, identity and expression, as constructed through language, literature, artefacts and performance.

Palpable in this account is a huge shift, from measuring impact to describing value. John Brewer in an extended essay on the new public social science distinguished between public impact and public value. Measuring impact is an attempt to explain the usefulness of research beyond its own domain. For Brewer, value is the development of understanding in the public through research going out into the public.

Humanities research is keener on demonstrating value than on measuring impact. More astutely yes, some humanities scholars are that the emphasis is on demonstrating and arguing for what a society must value. For example, the humanities insistence on values such as freedom, justice, equality are crucial in shaping what the public wants or aspires to. Likewise, the battle over normative paradigms, the resistance to homogenisation and a concomitant weightage to heterogeneity, the interrogation of unjust structures of power are signposts that Humanities puts up for a public to see and rectify in the society.

This emphasis on values and value creation is a new moment in the self-reflexive assessment of the Humanities. Sverker Sorlin in an 2018 essay on Humanities of Transformation argues that even the long-standing emphasis on innovation is changing. He writes:

the uncertain position of the humanities that is reflected in the literature can be ascribed to an ongoing shift in knowledge politics from a paradigm of innovation and economic growth to an emerging knowledge regime more sensitive to the complexity of todays societal challenges.

He insists that value creation is the value of the humanities. But Srlin admits, like everyone else reflecting on the Humanities (and Social Sciences), that accountability and a response to societys challenges are here to stay. No amount of tall, and abstract, claims about what humanities does can be an adequate response to the set of questions society asks. Craig Calhoun summarised these questions in a 2006 essay:

Where does its [the universitys] money come from? (2) who governs? (3) who benefits? and (4) how is knowledge produced and circulated?

Srlin proposes that humanities is moving forward as a response to these questions to directly address societal problems.

The integrative humanities

In Srlins view, we can see emerging the contours of an integrative Humanities, defined as:

interdisciplinary combinations of knowledge areas, integration of teaching with research, and a forceful and multifaceted integration of third mission/collaboration efforts into the everyday lives of university working departments, centres, or institutes.

Srlins example for the integrative humanities is the Environmental Humanities, and he points to initiatives such as the Environmental Arts and Humanities Program at UCLA by the environmental critic Ursula Heise. He adds bio-, techno-, medical-, geo-, digital-, public- humanities as other examples.

(Srlin assumes that people in humanities know at least these their own disciplines methodology, which is not always the case if we were to examine our colleagues published work. In order to be interdisciplinary surely one needs to know at least one discipline well, to start with? but that is a different debate.)

Elsewhere Wiebe Denecke in the May 2021 issue of the Journal of World Literature calls for a Global Humanities initiative which, like Srlins examples, would be a head-on response to the greatest challenges of our times: systemic racism, inequality, and fundamentalisms, which are rooted in the unresolved aftermath of wars, colonization, and violence, and use classical heritage for nationalist propaganda.

And just in case we assume this is all about the contemporary, Denecke adds, To create more equal societies in the present we need to create more equality for other pasts and learn from all they offer.

Srlin and Denecke are prescient observers and are pointing to the increasing role of social conditions like climate change, wars and their aftermath and biomedical cultures play in humanities research. Sceptics may well ask questions of expertise what do literary scholars who cannot get beyond the soporific prose of Samuel Richardson or the tungsten-cast poetry of Ezra Pound understand of medical imaging or carbon monoxide? in these initiatives. That is, of course, a legitimate question and making claims about intersectionality and the primacy of discourse does not offset the problem of being able to deal with, say, the science of climate change or the clear material crisis in commercial reproductive technologies.

That said, the focus that scholars from the humanities Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and from cognate fields like history/sociology/philosophy of science, medical anthropology Hannah Landecker, Nikolas Rose and the critiques of, say bioeconomy and the precarious lives they produce are not studies of discourses alone but of processes and practices that are material. Take Hannah Landeckers Culturing Life: How Cells became Technologies (2007), in which the focus is on how novel biotechnical objects such as endlessly proliferating cell lines affect concepts of individuality, immortality, and hybridity.

Essays in collections such as Kaushik Sunder Rajans Lively Capital and Mads Thomsen-Jacob Wambergs Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism or the work of Lesley Sharpe (Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self) bring to their analysis of discourses and representations, material practices and societal issues, whether this is the Anthropocene, posthuman technologies of reinventing the human or the globalisation of organs and tissues. Studying patent regimes, forms of knowledge production in laboratories and universities but with a clear focus on the unevenness of resources and dissemination, prejudices (such as eugenic utopias), commercialisation and potentially discriminatory ideologies of all these fields, the integrative humanities is not humanities alone (if humanities was ever alone).

This is not to scare literary scholars off their Austens and their Adigas (It is not that there is no future for reading!). With an increasing call for accountability and value for publicly funded research, the relevance of language and literature to reading, say, bioeconomies and the ecocrisis will have to be spelt out. Examining how, for example, the language of science constructs notions of the individual or the discourse of altruistic organ transplantation constructs the family or community would reposition the literary-cultural scholar in a broader field where these languages and discourses operate to not always discern but often to discriminate. Sciences, like the law or medical technologies also require representation, language and symbolic structures and these are texts.

We see moves in this integrative direction, in emerging fields like Memory Studies or posthumanism. Trained to read for language of course, depends on how well trained they are, beyond the summary and the Wikipedia those who work within the integrative humanities are in fact well placed to respond to social conditions. This is a substantive gain, or so one would think. It also demonstrates the resilience of the humanities.

Humanities and its autopoiesis

Sciences do not have or not in the same quantity public-shaping influences on their research, as a Nature editorial pointed out as early as 2004. STEM researchers, the editorial implied, drew clear boundaries around their work, seeking and respecting only peer-responses to their research and even, on occasion, seeing public responses and engagement as detrimental to their work. As the Nature editorial put it:

The UK government ran a public debate on genetic modification last year and is widely believed to have ignored the results something only a little less offensive than talking about babbling hags.

In sharp contrast, it could be argued that society, the public and the world at large influence humanities research and the work of public intellectuals in philosophy, political science, literary studies feed off the concerns, problems and social issues. While not strictly an autopoietic system, the absence of rigid disciplinary boundaries or an excessive reliance on peer-review/response alone ensures that, for example, inequality or climate change debates in the public domain shape the discourses in humanities research. humanities work is far more recursive and responsive for this reason.

The integrative humanities calls for those trained in reading texts of all kinds to expand their very notions of texts. It studiously examines humanities practices as a means of addressing material social issues. It refuses to separate the human from practices that enable the humanness or discourses that construct concepts of identity and these can be medical, climatological, demographic, economic or technological. It takes the problems and concerns of society and transforms them into practices and pedagogies of reading. In this sense, the humanities has always been both social and public: from them it draws its energy.

The integrative humanities is a form of value creation because it shows how contemporary rewritings of the past damage the present and the future, or how practices of citizenship laws, technology, governance or the market have begun to determine what it means to be human. Through all this, it teaches us what we ought to value.

Pramod K. Nayarteaches at the University of Hyderabad.

Excerpt from:

Questions of the Humanities and its 'Value' - The Wire

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The second installment of the Centricide! '"Meet the Extremists!" introduces us to our four main protagonists, the Extremists.

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The 3rd installment of the Centricide! 'Now the Centricide starts to get in motion...

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Identity - Centricide 6 The Beginning of the End; The Anti-Centrist and Radical Centrist finally have to face each other. Meanwhile Nazi is building his personal, international, nationalist Empire.

Anarchist Infighting Centricide 6.5

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Digital Bodies by Megan Archer

New materialism is a term coined in the 1990s to describe a theoretical turn away from the persistent dualisms in modern and humanist traditions whose influences are present in much of cultural theory.[1] The discourses catalogued under new materialism(s) share an agenda with posthumanism in that they seek a repositioning of the human among nonhuman actants, they question the stability of an individuated, liberal subject, and they advocate a critical materialist attention to the global, distributed influences of late capitalism and climate change. The turn to matter as a necessary critical engagement comes from a collective discontent with the linguistic turn and social constructionism to adequately address material realities for humans and nonhumans alike. While new materialists recognise social constructionisms insistence on political relationalities of power and the effect of these dynamics on subject formation, some nevertheless maintain that the idea of discursive construction perpetuates Western, liberal subjectivities and holds on to stubborn humanist binaries. The new materialist turn might indeed be considered a return to matter in the context of historical materialisms concern for embodied circumstance and subject formation. However, as Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman point out in their anthology, Material Feminisms, material theorists do not simply abandon the work of the linguistic turn, but rather build on its foundation, underscoring the co-constitution of material and discursive productions of reality.[2] Feminist new materialisms, for instance, do not discount social constructions of gender and their intersections with class and race. They do, however, also consider how material bodies, spaces, and conditions contribute to the formation of subjectivity.

Theory marked as new materialism collectively works against inert, extra-discursive, and non-generative conceptions of matter, but the plurality of methodological approaches within the field is generous. With thinkers like Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, and Jane Bennett as several of the fields leading scholars, the new materialisms draw on combinations of feminist theory, science studies, environmental studies, queer theory, philosophy, cultural theory, biopolitics, critical race theory, and other approaches.

When the field was nascent, Judith Butlers seminal feminist work on sex and gender was a foundational influence on early new materialist conversations. Butlers argument against a biologically material referent of gender completely erased the nature/culture divide between sex and gender.[3] Feminist science and new materialist reactions to this kind of radical constructivism emphasised that physical bodies moving through the world, and the differences in those bodies, also inform experience. Feminist theorists began to emphasise the material of the body, considering differences among bodies, and to think through the intersections of material and social constructions. Therefore, a discursive analysis of gender required a non-essentialising approach to the matter of the body, itself. Scholars responding to and synthesising the nature/culture question included Elizabeth Wilson, Rosi Braidotti, and Anne Fausto-Sterling.[4] Fausto-Sterlings Sexing the Body takes on the literal co-construction of bodies and social environments, arguing that bodily differences are evident beneath the flesh as human cells react to the signals of their environments.[5] Identity and difference are therefore products of complex interactions between matters inside and outside of bodies, and between the social and environmental conditions in which bodies exist.

The variety of new materialist approaches continues to proliferate as the field develops, but Diana Coole and Samantha Frost suggest grouping the major trends in new materialist scholarship into three identifiable camps in their 2010 edited collection, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics.[6] The essays are organised into the categories Ontology/Agency, Bioethics/Biopolitics, and Critical Materialism. Feminist new materialists Rosi Braidotti and Karen Barad would both fit into Coole and Frosts Ontology/Agency category, since both theorists examine how matter is agential in its emergence. Braidotti draws on and productively revises ideas from her background in post-structuralist theory. Rather than Giorgio Agambens bare life (zoe), her re-reading of Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari leads her to formulate a zoe that is the potentiality of all matter to form transversal connections or networks with all other matter.[7] In Homo Sacer (1995), Agamben argues that the Western biopolitical distinction between political and nonpolitical life (what he calls bios and zoe, respectively) can be traced to antiquity. It is the connection of sovereign power to biopower that distinguishes for Agamben a crucial cut between beings with no legal status, humans included, and beings with the privilege of legal rights.[8] Braidotti revises critical vitalism and biopolitics alike to argue that posthuman subjectivity is a zoe with an immanent potential for self-assembly along transversals, or the tendency of all living matter to form associations with other material systems. Posthuman subjectivity therefore raises important ethical questions, since it is neither bound to the individual subject, nor singularly human.

Just as Braidottis neo-vitalist theory of matter requires that we revise our existing ethical framework, Karen Barads agential realism suggests that the physical laws underpinning the reality we experience are, themselves, an ethical matter. Barads theoretical upending of the object/subject divide, or that all entities literally do not precede their intra-actions, comes from her robust background in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Conditions for Barad are always already material-discursive; that is, discourse and matter come into being together, and the apparatus that delimits being is only a condition of possibility. Barad contests a human-centred concept of agency. She instead argues that intra-actions entail the complex co-productions of human and nonhuman matter, time, spaces, and their signification. Therefore, the human does not act on matter, but rather humans and nonhumans are agential actors in the world as it continuously comes into being.[9]

Though the Ontology/Agency grouping of new materialist theory makes meaningful political and ethical interventions, Coole and Frost argue that it is the Bioethics/Biopolitics category that centres on more specific questions of nonhuman social justice and geopolitical sovereign control. Elizabeth Grosz, for example, re-reads Charles Darwin to discuss the biological processes that prepare bodies for social and cultural inscription based on difference.[10]

Lastly, Critical Materialism both emerges from a tradition of Marxist historical materialism and responds to the constructivism and deconstructionist criticism of classical Marxist approaches. The new critical materialism engages the effects of global capitalism in an era of climate crisis and rejects the view that discursive rewriting of subjectivity can radically disrupt the material conditions facing the globalized subject under neoliberal capital. Jason Edwards argues that we will need to remember the materialism of historical materialism in the requisite sense if we are to understand how these problems are the systemic product of the reproduction of modern capitalist societies and the international system of states.[11] Jason Moores Capitalism in the Web of Life has also contributed to recent critical materialist approaches by re-examining capitalism as a global ecological force, extracting surplus value from nature.[12] The critical materialist approach is thus not a revitalisation of classical Marxism, but rather a rereading of its critique of capital in an era of global complexity.

Regardless of discipline, all new materialisms embrace the vitality of matter, particularly as it encompasses the nonhuman as well as the human. Rejection of anthropocentrism aligns new materialisms with posthumanism, but also with speculative realism, a branch of philosophy that in recent years has posited whether questions of vitality, agency, and generative capability are appropriate for human and nonhuman matter alike. Although speculative realism and new materialisms align in their arguments for the dissolution of a human centre, they philosophically diverge in their positions on how we can understand a true ontology, and on matters agential and vital capabilities. The approaches of new materialisms extend the capacities of agential and vital qualities to the nonhuman and the material, while the speculative realist approach questions whether an ontology of matter can realistically consider these concepts in the first place.

While new materialists question the position of human-centred ontology, they often do so with the biopolitical bent of also questioning power structures that mark material bodies as subjects of power. In this way they continue to engage with the projects and political concerns of post-structuralism while extending the reach of these discourses into matters beyond the human and into material conditions beyond the linguistically constructed. Somewhat differently, object-oriented ontology is a speculative realist approach which considers the thing at centre, arguing that no entity has privileged ontological status over another, but rather that all things exist equally. Ian Bogosts Alien Phenomenology argues for thing-centred being, cautioning that positioning our centre around human concern precludes all things perception of the world.[13] Bogost and other object-oriented ontologists encourage us to consider perceiving objects as things, rather than filtering our perception of things through human experience.

Jane Bennett, one of the new materialisms leading thinkers, argues that nonhuman (and particularly nonbiological) matter is imbued with a liveliness that can exhibit distributed agency by forming assemblages of human and nonhuman actors. Bennetts 2010 book Vibrant Matter argues that agency is only distributed and is never the effect of intentionality. Bennetts thing-power exemplifies the ability of objects to manifest a lively kind of agency. She explains in her preface: Thing-power gestures toward the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence of aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience.[14] Vibrant Matter also brings to the foreground an extant but more latent history of vibrant or lively matter in Western philosophy. Bennett builds on the ideas of early twentieth-century critical vitalists, as well as the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, to bring together materiality, affect, and vitalism.

New materialist transgressions of humanist subject/object dualism, ideas of distributed agency, and reconsiderations of traditional notions of life and death are not universally convincing, of course. Slavoj ieks 2014 book, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, offers a critique of this new theoretical turn, arguing that in their attempt to dismantle traditional modern thinking, new materialisms re-inscribe humanist values by merely extending agency, vitality, and social phenomena to nonhuman material.[15] Nevertheless, the variety of interdisciplinary methodologies that form the new materialisms allow them to approach similar ontological questions in different ways, a move which seems promising for a theory placing a high value on increasing contact between disciplines in institutional knowledge production, and the entanglement of matter and ideological constructions.

University of California, Riverside, April 2018

[1] Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, Interview with Karen Barad, in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, ed. By Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), pp. 48-70 (p. 48).

[2] Material Feminisms, ed. by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 1-19.

[3] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).

[4] For an overview see Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2008) and Manuela Rossini, To the Dogs: Companion Speciesism and the New Feminist Materialism, Kritikos 3 (Sept 2006).

[5] Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

[6] New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1-43.

[7] Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

[8] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

[9] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

[10] Elizabeth Grosz, In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).

[11] Jason Edwards, The Materialism of Historical Materialism, in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 281-298 (p. 282).

[12] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015).

[13] Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What Its Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2012).

[14] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).

[15] Slavoj iek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2014).

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The practices of a number of Eastern European artists posit complex counternarratives to dominant Western patriarchal epistemology.

Zuza Golinska Eye Drop Cinema, 2019, by Marcel Kaczmarek

The counternarrative to the binary, Western-capitalist value system has taken a prominent position in contemporary art discourse within recent years. To nurture alternative vocabularies and fluid epistemologies vis-a-vis the dominant structures, knowledge and history of Western, anthropocentric capitalism is a crucial form of resistance within creative communities and beyond. Eastern Europe occupies a curious in-between terrain within the context of the dominant/marginal perspective and narrative, often labelled as the periphery, with a peculiar heritage of post-communism, recent authoritarian and nationalist political waves, and a particular relationship to retro-nostalgia. A number of Eastern European artists posit such complex counternarratives as perceiving intimacies and networks of knowledge, creating complex and precarious bodies and ecosystems that speculate about alternative forms of living and dying.

Polish multidisciplinary artist Zuza Goliskas work investigates the often-invisible politics between the human body and consciousness, and its architecture. Working primarily with sculpture and installation, her speculative environments prompt their participants to reconsider and compare their physical and psychological relationship to the public spaces and environments around them, whether through hostile structures like her Piercers (2018) or attempts to institute leisure and care within public architecture such as the lounge she created for her project Eye Drop (2019). Part of her investigation is how the physical and ideological reality of the Eastern Bloc influenced her identity and material language.

Zuza Golinska SUNS by Marcel Kaczmarek

Goliskas practice is rooted in a variety of visual references from a kind of raw, brutalist post-industrial materiality to dystopian science fiction and pre-modernism. Inspired by the radical Arte Povera movement of the 1970s, her materials are often chosen as symbolic elements of gendered socio-political narrative around labor and industry, such as recycled steel from a shipyard in her hometown of Gdansk. Her Suns (2019) sculptures and her recent installation Red Giant (2021) at Wroclaw Contemporary projects such narratives into a cosmic perspective, fused with post-apocalyptic speculation. Her tall, totemic figures are inspired by Slavic pagan religions that worshipped the goddess Solntse (the Sun), mapping out an alternative future in light of the ongoing climate crisis. Inherently participatory in their nature, Goliskas spatial interventions manifest both as robust, large-scale structures and as subtle challenges to the hierarchical politics of public architecture and space.

Moving from the industrial to the organic, Polish artist Agnieszka Brzeaska interjects various aspects of our anthropocentric, techno-capitalist cosmology through a holistic practice spanning over painting, ceramics, sculpture, sound and installation. Brzeaska who is also a practicing herbalist is interested in breaking down systemic ontological binaries and constructing new visual and sensorial paradigms to understand our relationship to other humans and non-humans. In this she draws on alternative knowledges from parapsychology, magical thinking, vernacular histories, Slavic mythology and matriarchal traditions, all of which have been marginalized by dominant Western patriarchal epistemology.

Agnieszka Brzezanska, so remember the liquid ground, installation view at eastcontemporary. Courtesy of eastcontemporary and the artist, milan 2021

Her evocative paintings fuse geometric shapes with organic and anthropomorphic motifs, reminiscent of the abstract conceptual works of Hilma af Klimt, Emma Kunz and Georgia OKeeffe. Her recent exhibition So remember the liquid ground (2020) at eastcontemporary in Milan takes water as its framework and the source of life and knowledge. This body of work maps how both real and fictional mythologies around aquatic ecosystems and liquidity impact our relationship to communicating with and relating to our environment and each other, as well as how we structure collective and individual memory, knowledge and information. In her installation for The World National Park (2019-2020) at the Museum of Sculpture in Warsaw she reestablishes the entire planet as an intermingled, utopian realm of kinship, mutual responsibility and matriarchal community.

Agnieszka Brzeaska, World National Park 26.10.2019-2.3.2020 Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, Installation view , Warsaw photo. Szymon Rogiski

A similar multispecies sensibility permeates the video and installation works of Romanian artist Nona Inescus practice, which is concerned with the channels through which we perceive, experience and relate to our ever-changing environment and ecosystem, from the immediate and bodily to the mediated and technological. Thinking through paradigms of non-anthropocentrism, ecological and feminist theory, local mythologies and posthumanism, she explores alternative networks and relations through video, photography and sculptural installation with a refined sensitivity towards her choice textures. Casting or embedding organic forms in artificial, sleek or polished materials, she creates a particular corporeal tension that reflects the vital friction of interspecies encounters.

Nona Inescu, Afloat (Victoria amazonica) I and II, 2021 (Photo by Camilla Maria Santini) chrome-plated pressed steel, glass lens, 100 x 15 cm

Her previous bodies of work such as Lithosomes (2017) at EXILE in Berlin contextualized rocks as complex bodies and conduits for new avenues of ontological understanding, connecting prehistoric narratives to the now by constructing radical, overarching intimacies. Exploring the concept of vital materiality, Inescu engages the viewer with a broader possible relational understanding of inanimate objects and plant life. A more recent show Waterlily Jaguar (2019) at SpazioA manifests eco-feminist modes of survival unfolding through the waterlily species and their complex web of mythologies that present a site of speculative resistance network, exploring ways of living and dying in the face of hegemonic systems and the impending climate catastrophe through a hydro-feminist framework.

Nona Inescu, Waterlily Jaguar, exhibition view, 2021, SpazioA, Pistoia (Photo by Camilla Maria Santini)

Also drawing inspiration from hybrid mythologies, Czech artist Anna Hulaov grew up in a Czech village with a family of small farmers and carpenters. Referring to herself as a retro-fetishist, her sculptural figures borrow tropes from Socialist-realism and Soviet brutalist architecture, merging humanoid features with animals, plants, machines and mythical characters from Greek to Slavic folklore. This complex, decidedly non-hierarchical hybridity also emerges within the material dimension of Hulaovs work, fusing industrial media such as cement and wood with more organic, bodily textures like honeycomb, manifesting intricate ecological networks.

Anna Hulacova, Society, 2016, Jindrich Chalupecky award, wood, honey combs

Hulaov'spractice steers the vocabulary of post-communist nostalgia into the territory of the future and into utopian/dystopian speculation. Labor is another important dimension to her work, particularly interested in how 1950s agricultural collectivization policies affected rural microcosms. Her work Cosmonauts (2018) is a cement relief depicting two beekeepers with their hands in the air like astronauts on a Soviet poster, contrasting naive Space Age optimism with the dystopian ecological prospects of the present. In her recent exhibition at Pedro Cera, The Next Shift (2021), her sculptures are feminine bodies performing rituals of care and domestic labor, their cemented bodies merging with sewing machines, whisks and houseplants.

Anna Hulaov, The Next Shift at Pedro Cera, Lisbon, 2021, Exhibition view, Photo Bruno Lopes, Courtesy of the artist and Pedro Cera, Lisbon

The exploration of an intermingled vocabulary of form weaves through all four practices as a common thread. Seeking to blur boundaries between species, as well as rigid systems of fact/fiction and classifications, the complex bodies, membranes and ecosystems brought to life in the works present precarious, radical sites of intimacy and resistance through the framework of speculation rooted in a peripheral perspective.

For more onauctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit ourMagazine Page

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From the Periphery: Alternative Futures and Speculative Storytelling - MutualArt.com

This gorgeous microcosmic mech game just about survives its more frustrating moments.

High up where the branches get icy, a snowstorm set in. The world was suddenly a thing of whiteness. Plodding on quite lost, I found a stranger in furs who offered to show me the way forward. We walked together, him giving occasional directions that I followed, the wind tugging at us as we went. For a few minutes the storm gave us space: there was nothing to do but find the path through this rolling blankness.

Flight School are good at moments like this. Moments that serve to remind me that this small team makes games that are quietly like no other. Creature in the Well blended end-of-the-world posthumanism with pinball and sparking electricity and, um, a creature in the well. It was stark and memorable. Stonefly is sort of sumo and sort of a collectathon and upgradeathon, but really it's something far more special. It's a mech game on the microcosmic scale. The mechs you pilot and steadily upgrade are insects, all bent legs and hidden wings, and these insects are exploring a world of twigs and bracken and falling leaves. The word horde on offer says it all: canopy, bramble, maple, nightlight.

The world you pilot your way through is truly beautiful. Stonefly tells the story of a young inventor on the trail of her father's mech, which she allowed to be stolen through a moment's carelessness. To get her father's rig back she sets off in a junker mech that will need regular improvements, and into a world of crackling bracken and lumpen moss where deeper mysteries await. Things are transformed from the perspective. Tree stumps are huge plateaus here, while mushrooms provide natural staircases. Catch a thermal upwards and you can move from one splindly branch of a tree to another, as if changing lanes on a highway, or you can leap between coils of creeper, dodging thorns. It's nature, but it also looks like handicraft, employing a sort of mid-century children's book aesthetic of textured paper and natural shades. Someone used a glue pot on this game! The thing Stonefly can do with browns and greens and then the occasional flaming burst of orange or yellow? It's pretty much glorious.

Stonefly's landscapes can be tricky to navigate at first, although restarts when you hop yourself off a branch into the abyss are fairly quick, and there's the option to conjure a bunch of glittering little insects that will point the way to your next objective. The faff is worth the effort, though, because movement and navigation is ultimately a fairly pure thrill here. These worlds feel spindly and delicate, one layer stacked upon another. They're brilliant to explore, because they're all nook and all cranny. And they get the best from your mech, another thing that can take a bit of getting used to, slow on the ground but speedy when you hop back into the air. It's a spin on The Floor is Lava - spend as much time as you can in the ether where you can move swiftly, but be aware of the fact that when you're up there, unless you're riding a current, you'll slowly be coming back down to earth the whole while. Time your hops to get air when you want it. Spread your mech's wings and make the most of your mobility.

The game has two main focuses. The first is combat, which is typically inventive. The game's bucolic world is filled with bugs large and small, and you defeat them by flipping them onto their backs and then pushing them off the landscape into the depths. It's a two-stage maneuver even before you factor in the differing bugs' abilities - ram attacks, sudden spurts of toxic goop, nasty pincers, a weird sort of spiky inflatable thing - and the various techniques at your disposal as you upgrade. Basically, it's no good flipping a bug if you're nowhere near a drop to gust them over. You need to prioritise targets, but you also need to factor in the landscape around you.

Your mech's growing arsenal of abilities give you options. You can dance above bugs, pelting them to remove their armour. You can pound the ground or slow them or gust while dashing or drop funny little wind bombs. New options evolve over time in the form of new modules for your mech. They each require resources to build, however, and here's where we come to the second of the game's main focuses.

Resource collection is not Stonefly at its most successful, I think. It's nice to see the resources poking out of the ground in little glittering seams, and since your battles are generally centred on bugs who want to get at the same resources you do, there's yet another thing to think about while fighting. But the game uses a range of resources to pad things out and hold back progress. Missions - particularly towards the middle of the game - increasingly send you out to search for huge hoards of resources to build critical components for the mech. This means grinding back over landscapes you've already visited, or tracking down the Alpha Aphids, huge insects who have resources erupting from their backs - moveable feasts you must first locate and then scavenge, battling around on them until your timer runs out, at which point you have to track them down again and repeat everything.

It's not ideal, but for me it wasn't enjoyment-shattering. I like the battling, particularly when you get a few key upgrades like a portable wind dome that allows you to sit within it and harvest resources while keeping everyone else out. I like the steady increase of different enemies. And in truth, I don't need much of an excuse to revisit such beautiful, intricate levels, bird's nests and bonfire stacks of possibility, each one. This is the work of a small team, and if resource-hunting is the best way to build out a game of such glittering moments and ideas, so be it.

"The inventor you play as is inspired by the world around her, which means every so often, once a background objective has been achieved, a new idea will suddenly come to her."

Besides, while the mech upgrades are fine, what I really love is the way they're introduced. The inventor you play as is inspired by the world around her, which means every so often, once a background objective has been achieved, a new idea will suddenly come to her - a stronger shell, a bigger jump, something new to do with gusting wind attacks. I played the first act twice and her upgrade ideas came at me in a slightly different order the second time around. It felt very organic, like I was travelling with someone whose mind was sharp and curious, but easily distracted.

This fits beautifully into a game in which you follow the main character through her bug-battling days and then through her nights back at the camp with allies she can trade with and learn from. She goes to sleep and you sift through her uneasy dreams, as she deals with guilt and hope and puts the story she is living through into some kind of shape. Stonefly, like Creature in the Well, is a wonderfully odd game, even if it's made from recognisable elements. It frustrated me from time to time with its grinding, but ultimately I sort of loved it.

Read this article:

Stonefly review - a bug's life with all its grind and glory - Eurogamer.net

Rajesh Sharma

Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguros ninth work of fiction (including a collection of short stories) and the first after he won the Nobel Prize in 2017. It is a genre-bending work, navigating between dystopia and utopia, sci-fi and social realism, and humanism and posthumanism. Imagine Jane Austen and George Eliot fusing with Friedrich Nietzsche and William Gibson in a genetically edited post-self.

Born in Nagasaki in 1954 and living in England since the age of five, Ishiguro is master of control, with a classicists adherence to economy and clarity. He can evoke intricate ideas and complex emotions in a language that is beguilingly simple. The choice of the narrative point of view in the novel bears this out. The narrator is Klara, an Artificial Friend (a robot) tasked to provide company to Josie, a teenage girl, and to gather intimate data on her to produce her robotic impersonation in case the need arises. Josie was lifted, that is genetically edited, to ease her passage into the elite posthuman social class, but the procedure led to a mishap. The result is she is sick and may soon die.

In choosing such a narrator, Ishiguro takes a huge risk. The AFs language is no more than a code, lacking any human dimension. The robotic sensorium, driven by algorithms, registers basic visual patterns but cannot smell nor knows appetite or sleep or desire. Yet Ishiguro manages remarkably to write a novel of tender aesthetic experience and of gentle, overwhelming emotion. In the process, he makes us rethink our humanness.

The theme affords Ishiguro ample opportunities to ponder aloud on age-old existential questions. But he never relinquishes his signature subtlety. Even when dealing with issues like climate change, cloning and barricaded communities, he does not overstep the storytellers domain and preach to the reader.

As some human beings in the novel embrace a rational view of everything, Klara the AF clings to her artificial empathy, turns to hope and prayer against reason and even chooses to sacrifice her well-being for the sake of Josie. Ironically, it is Josie, the human being with enhanced capabilities, who is found wanting in reciprocal empathy and gratitude. Indeed, it is the human characters who fumble and flounder and fail in relationships, who cannot make the right choices, and so regret and are heartbroken. But that may well be Ishiguros point: to turn the lights on the fascinating enigma we humans are, often spinning tragedy out of ourselves (as Rilke says of Hamlet). Paul, Josies father, says we are probably like labyrinthine houses with rooms within rooms, ad infinitum. In words way less pedestrian, one may call it the innate human mysteriousness.

Passing through love, loneliness, grief, nave hope and prayers failed or fulfilled (maybe accidentally), the novel draws to a luminous though melancholy conclusion. Klara, nearly immobile, is slowly fading out in the Yard, an intimation of human dying mirrored in the robots obsolescence touched with memories of a purposefully lived life. As her manager, the woman from whose store she was long ago sold, chances upon her, they get into a wonderful short conversation. It is to Klara that Ishiguro grants the final insight into what it means to be human. That our mystery and worth inhere in our being subjects, not objects. We are our inwardness. And that is irreducible to data.

While artificial production of affects of the kind Klara experiences is conceivable, as research in cognitive sciences suggests, imagination is a faculty that may be a truly human one. That is what Ishiguro, significantly, does not grant to Klara. Only the human characters in the novel possess it, such as Josie and Rick. Rick has not been lifted, yet he can envisage a future properly his own because it is cast in his own terms. He can project himself, as the existentialist philosophers put it fondly. He is human, and complexly so, as is the reader of the novel. Surely, the archetypal character of the Sun looks to a human reader to be redeemed as an archetype. Androids, after all, do not dream of archetypes.

Read more from the original source:

Between dystopia and utopia, Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Klara and the Sun' is about being human - The Tribune

What Phoebe Beasley does with other peoples discards can be called collage, but thats like describing the Taj Mahal as a building or KafkasThe Metamorphosisas a book. Yes, its accurate, but those words are just the reductive start of a much bigger conversation about history and complexity and characters whose lives veer off in unpredictable and unintended directions.

Beasleys exhibit at Rena Bransten Gallery, MIGRATIONS in Our Minds Eye, isa visualnarrative of the African-American exodus that, from 1916 to 1970, prompted six million Black people to leave the American South for the Northeast, Midwest and West. In Beasleys art aresnapshots of people who are dreaming of their escape or are on their way as inAnother Fireside Chat, where a gray-haired woman practically embracesan old-fashioned radio for the news of the day.

The radio is an actual wooden device from the 1930s that found its way into Beasleys possession, while the woman is composed of different materials including colorful fabric for a dress that resembles a field of new flowers; lined, yellowing paper that is her wrinkled skin; and a brownish stocking that crawls halfway up her left knee but is bunched in a way that would be unbecoming in public. This is a view both flattering and unflattering of a woman alone in the early 20th century with a then-new media device, which brought the world directly into her home. For the woman depicted in that scene, there was no need to migrate anywhere else but the green chair on which shes seated. Beasley says hercollages are almost like stop-action stories.

Radio was the media our grandparents or our great-grandparents,Beasley tellsSF Weeklyby phone from her Los Angeles home. It must have been so fascinating and exciting to have radio in your home especially for seniors, to have someone suddenly give you the news.You had fireside chats with [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt.Your radio was your new best friend.

MIGRATIONS in Our Minds Eye also navigates issues related to migrations in general, as in Beasleys work calledClimates Climax, which hints at the environmental damage that has uprooted people from previously fertile land. But its the Great Migration from the American South, which Beasleys grandparents participated in, thats at the root of her new exhibit.

Beasley, whois now celebrated for her decades-long career in art and arts education (shes a former member of the Los Angeles Arts Commission and the California Arts Council),has gone through her own challenging migrations and obstacles, many of them rooted in racism.In high school, when she aspired to study art in college, her counselor laughed dismissively and told her that African-Americans couldnt become artists. You have to understand:Theres no such thing as a Black artist, Beasley remembers her saying.And after Beasley moved from Ohio to Los Angeles in 1969,she frequently encountered gallerists who told her, Oh, we have one Black person already and our clients dont buy Black art.

In the late 1970s Beasley was at an artistic crossroads: She worked a day job doing sales for two Los Angeles radio stations while doing art at night and weekends, when the poet Maya Angelou by then a good friendhelped convince Beasley to be even more creative to get her art noticed. A car trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco became a tipping point for Beasley. Maya said, Were going to take a car trip, and I want you to meet everyone whos still alive who Ive written about in my books, Beasley says. By the time we went to San Francisco, she asked me what I was working on. And I started to hem and haw. I was doing shows in hospital lobbies or community centers. And she said, You must do this! You must do this! Ive bought your work. I care about your work. Ive told other people about your work. You must do it. If you dont, youll lose it.'

Fast forward to the present: Two American presidents, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, acknowledged Beasleys art with official presidential seals, and Oprah Winfrey, Samuel L. Jackson, and other celebrities regularly collect Beasleys work. (As part of her new exhibit, Beasley is participating in an online talk with artist Nashormeh Lindo, moderated by UC Irvine associate professor Bridget Cooks, on April 9 at 5 pm. Free with registration on theRena Bransten website.)

Beasley will never want for material to work with, especially for collage, which Beasley was first inspired to do by the work of the great African-American collage artist Romare Bearden, and by her days as a high-school art teacher, when she had limited paint supplies and turned to material that was available. My friends, she jokes now, all have a freebie box at their front door, because everyone I know is old enough to be deaccessioning. The only houseaccessioning is mine. So I have everyones discards or their junk.

Phoebe Beasley: MIGRATIONS in Our Minds Eye. Through April 24 atRena Bransten Gallery, 1275 Minnesota, S.F. Free with appointment.

Future Faithful: Islamic Experiments in Space Exploration and Posthumanism. Through April 10 atBass & Reiner, 1275 Minnesota, S.F. Free.

The bulls that appear in the collaged, fabric sculptures of Zulfikar Ali Bhuttos latest exhibit are, lets put this matter of factly, weird looking. Two of them have milky eyes that are ghostly. And one of them is really a half-bull, half-human thats dressed in shiny jewelry and a red, flowing skirt that falls halfway to the floor. It helps to know that Bhutto is referencing the bulls that are in Islams holy book. And that hes also celebrating real and imagined queer Muslim fighters. Based in both San Francisco and Karachi, Pakistan, where he was raised, Bhutto has made a name for himself withvisually provocative art thataddresses queerness and Islam. Bhuttos video animation,Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth, is a tour-de-force work that takes Islams oldest extant building of significance, Jerusalems Dome of the Rock, and flies it into a kind of outer space, where it meets a Hindu deity, and the earth circles aroundas sacred Islamic chanting erupts in the background, along with voices and other sounds. When the YBCA exhibited Bhuttos video earlier this year as a window display, you could watch it at night amid the stars and outside elements. That was a perfect spot. At Bass & Reiner,Tomorrow We Inherit the Earthis on a relatively small screen, but taking it in amid the fabric sculptures adds a dynamic that was missing at YBCA.

Solange Roberdeau: Beyond Latitude. Through April 10 atMunicipal Bonds,1275 Minnesota, S.F. Free with appointment.

In her work calledContinuity: Movement To Moments (Diptych),Solange Roberdeau does something both quite simple and complex: She bleeds ink across the two white pages, creating patterns of black density that morph into waves of semi-opaqueness (the complex part); and she adds two stripes of black and gold (the simple part) that cut through the density and giveContinuity: Movement To Moments (Diptych)a small visual anchor that balance the density and give it a visceral yin-and-yang feeling. And so it goes throughout Beyond Latitude, where almost every piece is a world of anchored abstraction, where darkness and lightness connect through permutations that are frozen for a moment in time.

Go here to see the original:

Artist Phoebe Beasley Reflects on Life and MIGRATIONS - SF Weekly

April 9, 2021

The following is a press release:

The Art Academy of Latvia announces POST, a new interdisciplinary specialization of masters degree programme in art, based on art in context. The programme seeks to explore and examine how it is possible to study art today, while being simultaneously in Eastern Europe and Northern Europe, a region with different borders, characterised by a changing environment and a rich experience regarding the forced use of global ideologies and their collapse. Taking into account the cultural, historical and geopolitical contexts and the artistic processes attached to them, we are in an environment of unique experiences. MA POST can be perceived as an open study space for various ideas and experiments, moving along in the zigzagged relief of theory and practice. The structure of this degree programme consists of three interacting blocks: Practice, Theory and Context.

The key objective of the Practice Block is to shape and reconstruct individual artistic practice. The programme offers time, space and support for the analysis and development of practice, expecting the student to be involved in motivated, self-organised activity in the studio or outside it. The teaching methodology aims to provide each student with the support of two practical study tutors and the discomfort that promotes creativity. International experience of the lecturers and personal practice that covers various art media provide a comprehensive and multifaceted critical contribution to the study process. The course brings into focus individual thinking, analysis and self-reflection, while applying skills, knowledge and a critical view.

Great emphasis is put on the experiments and interpretation in the search for the form of expression, regardless of whether the form is material or immaterial, three-dimensional or two-dimensional, digital or performative, puritanical or hedonistic, etc. The new degree speciality is aimed at capturing ideas that could be viewed or experienced in the form of an exhibition at the end of each study year, in exhibition projects outside the academy as well as in the final exhibition after two years of study.

Theory block consists of three parts: Critical Theory & Art, Creative and Uncreative Writing as well as Academic and Practice Writing.

The Critical Theory and Art course offers a range of theoretical perspectives that shape the discourses of art and visual culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, exploring the intersection of artistic practice and theoretical and political ideas. The course is based on trauma and memory studies, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, posthumanism, ecocriticism and new historicism. An equally important role in the course is given to regional research, which critically evaluates what is happening in the Baltic, Eastern European and Northern European regions. The Creative and Uncreative Writing course takes a look at the diversity of text and visuality relationships in contemporary culture, referring to contemporary art and literature. It involves reading both creative and critical texts as well as working on creative tasks.

The Context Block aims to explore random or deliberately selected, interconnected fragments of circumstances, events, facts and experiences that may prove fundamentally necessary or, on the contrary, superfluous, in order to approach the possibility of comprehending the meaning of the aggregate or causal relationships in art. The Context Block offers a closer look at various aspects that can influence the work of art or an artist culturally, politically, socially, economically, geographically, institutionally and in other ways. This section of the course takes the students on a journey to three enigmatic planets: the artists planet, the work of arts planet and the viewers planet. How free are we or can we be in this space?

The block consists of four parts: practical involvement in the creation of exhibitions and exhibiting in an environment outside the academy are covered in the Exitus section; supplementing the experience through educational excursions and group visits to museums and exhibitions are part of the Excursions section; a platform for generating unexpected creative lines, delivering new and unpredictable impulses in creative activity is discussed in the Out of Context section; creative activity in connection with career development and commercial understanding of the field is viewed in the Creative Industries section.

The syllabus of the POST degree programme is provided by tutors whose backgrounds cover the fields of poetry, philosophy, graphic design, painting, sculpture, music and other areas of art and theory Kristaps Ancans, Ieva Astahovska, Atis Jakobsons, Artis Ostups, Janis Ozolin, Glebs Pantelejevs, Karlis Verdin, Armands Zelcs and Amanda Ziemele. Every two years, students from Latvia and abroad who have completed their bachelors degree and have a wide range of interests, skills, beliefs and an unfocused view of the purpose of life are invited to apply for the programme. Students who lack a portrait in a landscape, sound in still life and movement on a pedestal.

Students application for admission to the POST masters degree programme for 2021/2023 will be open from 20 April 2021 to 15 June 2021. More information about the admission rules and process as well as the programme is available here.

The information was prepared by

Laura Ozola

Art Academy of Latvia

Communication and public relations specialist

Kalpaka boulevard 13, Riga, LV-1050, Latvia

E-mail: laura.ozola@lma.lv

Mob. tel .: +371 29995067

Website: http://www.lma.lv

Read more from the original source:

The Art Academy of Latvia is opening the application process for POST a new specialization of master's programme in art | Press Releases - leta.lv

The idea of tech companies as an important power in the creation of what Gilles Deleuze called societies of control is explored, building on which contemporary posthumanism is looked at as human existence represented and replicated as non-human entities. The practice of digital eugenics by tech companies, confining their users in mass produced, rigid identities, without their consent is explained. Building on the recent actions taken by Australia to make Google and Facebook accountable, the measures that may be taken by the state and by the citizens to put a curb on the temerarious actions of big tech are analysed.

The recent suspension of Twitter accounts of Antifa groups once again raised the issue of whether Twitter is a platform or an editorialising portal (Eustachewich 2021). People who had cheered on the news of ex-President Donald Trumps Twitter account suspension are eerily quiet on the recent exploits of Twitter. While Twitter is on a suspension spree, its fellow exploiter Facebook (and WhatsApp) has been on a looting spree. Going back on its own 2014 policy, WhatsApp has been sharing user data with Facebook for close to five years now. Those who joined WhatsApp after August 2016 have no opt-out option, as far as sharing data with Facebook is concerned (Sircar 2021). Through these clandestine methods, WhatsApp andFacebook give their users the illusion of choice, while continuing to coerce the users to follow their policies. Capitalising on this illusion of choice, Apple, Google, and Amazon Web Services have deplatformed several apps, one of the most notorious examples being that of Parler (Ziobro 2021).

Continued here:

Posthumanist Confinement : Big Tech's 'Societies of Control' | Economic and Political Weekly - Economic and Political Weekly