spacesof[aesthetic]experimentation » reading

Where do experiments end?

Thomas — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 23:12:17 +0000

Notes on a draft

Gail Davies has an editorial in the current issue of Geoforum called ‘Where do experiments end?‘ It’s a very interesting paper, exploring the changing nature and scope of experimentation with reference to the Office of Experiments’ (OoE) ‘Dark Places‘ project. Check it out.

Davies, G. (2010) Where do experiments end? Geoforum, 41(5): 667-670

Journal list

Thomas — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:05:07 +0000

Bookmarks

Format: A – Z

Type: Journals

Number: 50

Notes: Add suggestions in the comments below

—

Emotion, Space and Society

Environment and Planning A

Environment and Planning D: Society and space

European Journal of Social Theory

Progress in Human Geography

Radical Philosophy

Social & Cultural geography

The Senses and Society

The Year’s Work in Critical & Cultural Theory

Theory & Event

Theory, Culture & Society

Third Text

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

field / desk

Thomas — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:40:56 +0000

Fieldlife, TML

I’ve been back from Montreal for a few weeks now and it all seems very far away at times. I have met up with my supervisors to let them know a bit about how things went and I’m now trying to work on an account of my time there. It’s not going to be some coherent piece, let alone a chapter, but perhaps some strands of thought will emerge as I write. Or at least I hope so! At the same time I’m also trying to outline the structure and chapters of my thesis. It’s certainly an iterative process but I think it might be useful to explore how some of the constraints of a PhD might prove to be enabling or generative.

Expect some more posts in the new year, have a merry Christmas,

Laboratory life

Thomas — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:59:43 +0000

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!

SenseLab reading group

Thomas — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:06:14 +0000

My notes for the reading group with shadow of camera (Sony DSC T-700)

Last week I attended the monthly SenseLab reading group, where we were reading Guattari’s The Three Ecologies. As my copy of the book was still in transit (I fear it’s been lost in the post), I read a .pdf version from my computer screen which wasn’t ideal. There was just a small group of people, ten or so, and we all introduced ourselves as the composition is ever-changing. Erin asked us to try to do it in a way which we might not normally do, which made for an amusing opening to the session. It was interesting to see how the group would switch between French and English for discussion, and for the versions of the book read (plenty of time was spent trying to compare page numbers).

Erin had noticed an interesting parallel with Guattari’s idea of the individual as a terminal, and William James’ notion of the ‘terminus’: not as an end, but a force that activates a beginning. Here is the particular section of the text that we were looking at – it’s a really wonderful passage:

Rather than speak of the ‘subject’, we should perhaps speak of components of subiectfication, each working more or less on its own. This would lead us, necessarily, to re-examine the relation between concepts of the individual and subjectivity, and, above all, to make a clear distinction between the two. Vectors of subjectification do not necessarily pass through the individual, which in reality appears to be something like a ‘terminal’ (TE: 36)

Guattari’s use of another term, gentleness, stood out for me (and others) and I remember circling the word when he used it in both Chaosmosis and The Three Ecologies because it contrasts with his rather heroic style of writing:

It seems to me essential to organize new micropolitical and microsocial practices, new solidarities, a new gentleness, together with new aesthetic and new analytic practices (TE: 51)

It was suggested that gentleness might relate to questions of value (rather than evaluation) and with the techniques of creating an alternate political articulation. One way that the SenseLab is thinking about this is in terms of generosity and Erin explained that they try to produce generous events. Other issues that we tried to talk/think through included the ‘habitable’, potential (as something which is not necessarily positive), phantasms and react-ability… Plenty to mull over.

Table-top theatre

Thomas — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:05:53 +0000

Table-top Theatre, TML

‘Experimental Phenomenology: Memory, Identity and Place’ is the name of a collaborative project between Xin Wei and the philsopher David Morris (whose hand you can see in the photo above, pointing his finger). The aim of the work is get a sense of the connections between memory, identity and place by developing experiments.

The development of these experiments involves two axes of exploration: a substantive one, concerned with place, memory, identity, especially in relation to the body, movement and things; a methodological one, concerned with how to go about doing phenomenological experiments. Here we might note two things about phenomenological experiments: first, they would be more focused on enabling precise descriptions of experiences, from a first person point of view and tracking the dynamics of the individual experience, rather than quantifying over populations according to variables already specified by the experimenter; second, they would be more focused on arriving at the conceptual framework proper to the experience generated in the experiment, vs. constructing an experiment to fit an already given conceptual framework—or at least they would keep open this arrival.

To prepare for these explorations there are a series of orienting seminars, or reading groups. The set readings provided introductions to phenomenology (which focuses on the experiencing subject) and looked to facilitate discussion about how to engage with these ideas in a tangible manner. Experiments, David argued, disrupt the usual in order to describe differently. So here, the aim is to set up situations that complicate our usual relations. It was fascinating to see how the group (including students from both Concordia and McGill) went from the texts to something which could be done in practice. In fact, before we started talking about the readings, one of the students demonstrated an experiment-in-progress: the table-top theatre.

Above a simple white oval table was a camera, linked to a computer and a program which could modify and project on to the floor, just to the side of the table, what was happening on the table. Using a combination of time-delays and other alterations there were some really surprising effects. Everybody crowded round the table, eager to see themselves projected onto the floor. What was interesting was the remarkable difference between watching others do it, and trying yourself. I was a little bit self-conscious but I moved a pen around and watched my hand appear in two different parts of the table on the projection: the program had been changed yet again and was displaying a different time-delay for each half of the table!

I had to leave before the end of the meeting as I wanted to attend the talk that Chris Salter (whom I had met at the colloquium) had invited me along to a to: ‘Architecture, Urbanity and the Temporary’, the first public forum of a project called ‘The Ephemeral City‘.

IRHA Public Forum #1, October 8, 2009
Maison Shaughnessy
6:00PM

Architecture, Urbanity and the Temporary

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, McGill University
Chris Salter, Concordia University
Cecile Martin, Independent Artist, Architect and Curator

The 21st century city that was formerly dictated and constructed chiefly by architecture and planning models is increasingly being shaped anew daily by temporal forces: the dynamics of unstable financial markets and fluctuating economic patterns of consumption and leisure, the rise of ecological processes and practices, the transformation of public space by the methods of branding and multi-sensory design and last, but certainly not least, the dissemination of new ubiquitous technologies of surveillance and monitoring.

The first IRHA forum will investigate the ethical, political and ecological stakes in this new urban theater of temporariness, instability and transformation.

Chris and Alberto Pérez-Gómez talked about Frederick Kiesler (a really interesting figure, not least for his laboratory at Columbia University) and how we might conceive of architecture as potential new ways on inhabiting the world. Cecile Martin’s talk was equally fascinating: she discussed the work of champ libre, a nomadic organisation interested in ephemeral works. I spoke with her at the end of the evening and although she’s no longer involved with the group encouraged me to make contact with group… watch this space!