Stories for honey

There was an open invitation to attend a honey shop opening the day after the foraging and cooking. This is a project developed by Christina Stadtlbauer, of FoAM, and seeks to exchange stories for honey. More specifically, stories  about bees! And for every minute of story, you receive a small amount of honey (c. 6 grams). Christina is an urban bee-keeper, among other things, and is absolutely fascinated by bees. Her website is full of information. As the shop had only just opened, there had not yet been many people drop by to tell stories. It was also perhaps quite intimidating, as although there were drinks on offer, there was also a video camera pointing at one of the seats.

This project is supported by another lab in Brussels, who have close ties with FoAM, called Nadine. They have a specific page on the project, or honey-shop-residence. What was really interesting was that there is an explicit naming of the space as a laboratory, and that there is a working definition:

Arts laboratories are places where innovative – and thus, daring – work is supported. As forerunners for the major culture houses, they are an indispensable part of the contemporary artistic landscape. Arts laboratories support the work of artists whose artistic quality they believe in. The laboratories support the production of new work by providing a place for artists to research, create, develop and present their work.

Furthermore, the term art laboratory (or kunstenwekplaats, or lab-art, depending on the language of choice) is a rubric with its own website:

An artlab is a type of organisation that is focused on providing a framework for the artist’s creative process. The unifying theme of the artlabs covers a huge diversity, comprising various types of activity: experimental laboratories, artist collectives and alternative management offices.

Experimental laboratories and artist collectives provide opportunities for artistic investigations, experimenting and creative achievements. Rather than being confined to acting as a workplace, this forum may also cover a content-based/artistic input, support for the production process and business advice,… tailored to the artist’s profile. These fertile grounds offer facilities for artists to develop their artistic ideas, take risks and work according to a process-oriented approach rather than focusing on results. The presentation is of secondary importance but it has to be factored in, because the relationship with the (future) public is a key ingredient of the artistic process.

Acknowledged as other types of artlabs, the alternative management offices lend support to artists in terms of financial management, distribution and the promotion of their works.

The Arts-lab.be portal site keeps artists and the general public informed about the variety of services the artlabs provide. In its role as a platform, Arts-lab.be is responsible for organising creative thinking sessions, exchanges of experience and knowledge, while adopting positions in the light of these initiatives. Promoting artistic, production and organisational cooperation, the platform acts as a consultation body concerning the various types of activity the network represents.

Laboratory life: a reflection, TML

Last week was really busy and I didn’t find time to post about it. So this is a chance for me to recount some of the things I’ve been hearing-saying-thinking-feeling… On Tuesday evening I attended a lecture/workshop organised by a variety of departments at McGill University and the SenseLab:

Ecosophy: Rethinking the Culture Concept with Félix Guattari
Nov. 10, 2009 – 5:30 PM to 6:45 PM
Arts Building, Arts 160 , 853 Sherbrooke Street West

Please join us for a lecture and workshop:
Janell Watson is an Associate Professor of French in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Virginia Tech University, and incoming editor of The Minnesota Review.  Professor Watson’s new book, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze, is a much needed guide to the individual writings of Felix Guattari.  Guattari’s own work (such as The Three Ecologies, Molecular Revolution and Chaosmosis), as well as his famous collaborations with Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?), are becoming increasingly influential particularly in relation to the study of media ecologies and what Guattari termed the ethico-aesthetical paradigm of contemporary art and critical thought.  Professor Watson will present a short talk, which will be immediately followed by a workshop for faculty and students around selections from Guattari’s books Chaosmosis (chapter 1,5 and 7)  and The Three Ecologies (entire text), as well as chapter 3 from Watson’s book entitled “An Energetics of Existence”.

Although it got off to a bad start – it felt like ecosophy was being used as a substitute for culture, and there was a long ‘question’ from the audience (about the abstract versus the concrete) – it picked up steam and there were some  stimulating interventions by Erin Manning and Chris Salter.

The evening finished in giggles as we heard from Brian Massumi about translating A Thousand Plateaus; when he wrote a letter to them to query parts of the text:

Deleuze would say ‘I have no idea, ask Félix’. And he would say ‘Whatever you think!’

After the talk I chatted with Erin and she invited me to attend a few classes that she was taking (normally taught by Brian), both over at l’Université de Montreal (UdM). Although longer classes than I am used to (around three hours or so), they were incredibly interesting, as well as inspiring. In the first class, on Wednesday, Erin wanted to to bring Guattari to life (“remettre en vie Guattari”), to show what an extraordinary thinker he was. Not only was it conceptually rich, but the examples she deployed and the diagrams she would scribble on the board really made me think differently.

The second class, on the Thursday, was a close reading of a few chapters from Whitehead’s (1933) Adventures of Ideas, where he seeks to define many of the concepts that he uses throughout his work. Although his writing is not seductive, Erin argued, it is incredibly precise. It was very useful to read the text together and work through some of the ideas, and we were reminded that we need to put these concepts to work (“il faut faire travailler ces concepts”). The classes were both in ‘Franglais’: predominantly in French (it’s a French-speaking university, after all) but with plenty of switching between the two languages.

After the class I made my way over to the CCA, for the second IRHA public forum:

IRHA Public Forum #2, Novemeber 12, 2009
Maison Shaughnessy
6:00PM

Interactivity: The City as Performative Space

Alessandra Ponte, University of Montréal
Patrick Harrop, University of Manitoba/Concordia University

New digital technologies increasingly are being deployed by architects, artists and designers in order to transform dead public spaces into new urban zones of performance and play. In effect, the city has become a responsive environment set in motion by pedestrians and new technologies.The second IHRA forum will investigate how concepts of interaction brought on from digital technologies meet concepts of social interaction. At the center of the forum will be artistic and design projects that also suggest new possibilities of interacting in public space.

Patrick Harrop, who collaborates with the lab, presented a paper which explored Gilbert Simondon’s enagement with architecture, through Le Corbusier, whilst Alessandra Ponte turned to a rather different philosopher: Peter Slotterdijk. On the Friday, at the third graduate colloquium of the semester, Patrick was able to discuss the same paper in more detail, with greater lucidity! I’m rather intrigued by Simondon, having not really encountered his work before coming to Concordia, who was trained by both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Canguilhem and links are increasingly being made between his work, and that of Deleuze.

So the title for this post – Laboratory life – is supposed to be ironic, as I haven’t spent that much time in the TML!

Hexagram-Concordia, Montreal

It’s been a busy day and I’m exhausted. There have been a lot of new names, projects and funding bodies to process and make sense of. I spent the afternoon in Engineering and Visual Arts (EV) building at Concordia and the top few floors are part of the Hexagram.

Hexagram-Concordia is a centre for research and creation located within Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Its state-of-the-art labs and equipment provide a collaborative environment for faculty and graduate work in interdisciplinary domains relating to arts, media and technology.

I attended the inaugural Hexagram Graduate Colloquium (13:00-15:00) which was very interesting; Harry presented some of his work-in-progress and talked about the resonances between the (relatively) uncelebrated work of Adelbert Ames Jr. and that of Deleuze & Guattari. Ames’ demonstrations – as experimental apparatus – bring to the fore processes at work, illustrating at the same time our resistance to change (see here, for an example). I’ve included the abstract of the talk at the bottom of the post.

Later on, I sat in on the Ozone meeting in the TML (16:00-18:00).We went round the table introducing ourselves and what our research interests were. I tried my best to explain what my work was about and why I was spending time at the TML. Due to Xin Wei currently being on sabbatical, the meeting had a certain urgency to it. The discussion was a tangle of grant proposals, themes for the lab over the next five years or so (which included material science, gesture, memory and acrobatics!) and involved plenty of talk about programming languages.

A commitment to building events with the public, outside of the lab, seemed strong and the Ozone team often came back to what a project’s ‘deliverables’ (which seemed to equate to output or application) might be. One suggestion was that the lab’s aim should be to sketch out ideas (without worrying about the fine details), leave them to one side, then come back to them with newer technology. This iterative method sounds intriguing, but does it leave room for new projects or concerns?

TITLE: The Architecture that happens.

KEYWORDS: event selection; neo-transactionalism; radical empiricism; performance and architecture

ABSTRACT: Looking to an older vocabulary in the psychological-philosophical literature of perception, the “transactional” view holds that living is an evolving process which includes space, time, environment, and organism in one durable whole.  A segment in time of this process may be labeled a “transaction” (Dewey) or an “occasion” (Whitehead) in which all aspects of the process are contained, including purposes, past experiences in the form of orientations, and the future in the form of expectancies.  We modify this formulation in a neo-transactional, or interactional (from physics) manner to construe the past and the future as operative fields functioning in two directions simultaneously in an evolving, living present of an extended duration.

By way of something of a historical detour, I’d like to revisit the radical empirical work of the American “transactionalists” conducted in the early half of the last century  by Adelbert Ames, Jr., and his research collaborators during the course of their research in visual and social perception at the Dartmouth Eye Institute (DEI), and, later, at the Institute For Associated Research based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Two problems I am framing for further explication in my dissertation research and practice, here tentatively considered and refracted through a re-consideration of the Ames Demonstrations in perception, are:

- Some physiological stimulus is probably necessary to experience, but by itself it is not sufficient. There must be, in addition, some basis for an entity’s “choosing” one from among the (practically speaking) infinity of external conditions to which an impinging pattern might be related. The discovery of the factors involved in this “choosing” activity becomes the key problem. If we label the cultural nexus of actual occasions (Whitehead) an “event”, then this operative process of selecting from the “possibilities of fact” (Deleuze, after Wittgenstein, in FB, p83) can be termed an “event selection.”

- If the perceptual field reflects or is extensive to an organism’s individuated experience, then sensation— the physical feeling or affect resulting from something that happens to or comes into contact with a body— constitutes an impersonal and pre-individual domain antecedent and adjacent to it. This field can not be determined alone as that of a consciousness (Deleuze). The key problem, then, becomes the determination of the architectural (rather than the biological, more properly the domain of physiology) conditions for the composition of temporal experience, a precursor to understanding an event— the Architecture that happens— especially a selection of artistic interest.