Enchantment, Matter, and Topological Media Syllabus

Prof. Sha Xin Wei ¥ http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei

http://www.topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes/fofa/CART454/

Provisional Syllabus

1 What is experimental practice?
¥ What is performance event?ÊÊ Why and how do we make events?
¥ Sha (distributed before term)
¥ Start notebooks, blogs, listserv, etc


2 Production of subjectivity
¥ Is there a difference between art | craft?Ê How can there be art "all the way down"? How do we form ourselves? What's the magma of experience?
¥ Show and tell: personal work

¥ Akeel Bilgrami, "Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment," Critical Inquiry, 32.3, 2005
¥ Guattari, Chaosmosis, chapters 1-2.


3 Representation
¥ Meaning vs. information vs. semiotics. What's (not) a representation?ÊÊ What's an object and predicate? What's alphabet, grammar, syntax; graph? algebraic
¥ Make a representation that is not allegorical. Make something that is, rather than is about something else.
¥ Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, Third Edition. New York: MacMillan, 1958. Aphorisms 1-100. ; PI_192-212.pdf (aphorisms 192-212); pi_94-138_239-309.html (aphorisms 94-138, 239-309)

4 Performance
¥ What's performance, performative, event?
¥ Peter Brook: Empty Room (ch 4, Holy Theatre)
¥ Jerzy Grotowski and Physical Action, Poor Theater, "Preface by Peter Brook," "He Wasn't Entirely Himself," " Statement of Principles ."

5 Life, livingness, autopoiesis
¥ What's living, conscious, intentional, reflective? WhatÊ makes an event or an object, scripted, interactive, autonomous, live, responsive? Why-objects vs. How-objects.
¥ Intention and telos
¥ Maturana and Varela, Autopoeisis and Cognition, chapters 1-2, 5. Varela essay:"Autopoiesis and a Biology of Intentionality" (1991).

6 Performance Revisited
¥ Experimental performance vs. spectacle.Ê Presentation vs enactment. Art as vehicle. Art as vehicle.Ê What's an everyday, unmarked vs marked gesture, or event?
¥ Debord (ch 1), Society of Spectacle
¥ Artaud:Ch 7: Theater and Cruelty; Ch 9: The Theater of Cruelty, Second Manifesto.
¥ Derrida:"La parole soufflŽe" and "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representaiton,"
¥ Sponge ECART; Poetics of performative space.

7 Subjectification and ethico-aesthetics
¥ Why [do, should] [you, we] make <things>? Experimental practices.
¥ Bilgrami, Weber, Enchantment
¥ Guattari, Chaosmosis, ch 1, 2, 6, 7
¥ Damiris, Wild, and Franchi, On Passivity
¥ Whitehead; Stengers Conversation, Sixth Day.