DATE

THEME

QUESTIONS

REFERENCES

TEKNE

1

Crtical studies of media arts and sciences

What is art practice? What is performance?   Why do you practice what you do?

Sha (distributed before term)

Start notebooks, blogs, listserv, etc. Start Guattari

2

Production of subjectivity

Is there a difference between art | craft?  How can there be art "all the way down"? How do we form ourselves? What's the magma of experience?

Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, ch 1, 2, 6, 7

Representation

Meaning vs. information vs. semiotics. What's (not) a representation?   What's an object and predicate? What's alphabet, grammar, syntax; graph? algebraic

Artaud:Ch 7: Theater and Cruelty; Ch 9: The Theater of Cruelty, Second Manifesto. Derrida:"La parole soufflée" and "The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representaiton," Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations aphorisms 1-100.

Make a representaion that is not allegorical. Make something that is, rather than is about something else.

Phenomenology contra psychology.

How do we form ourselves? Make meaning?

Husserl's critique of Brentano; Gendlin

Optional technical tutorial 1

Phenomenology contra psychology

Material Topology

Continuity, open / closed, limit, topological spaces, homeomorphism.

Janich; Badiou; Petitot

(Student Presentations)

6

Process and Transformation

What is transformation, variation?

Is individual experiential process different from ontological and historical process?  Recipe, script, state, system

Maturana and Varela. Varela essay:"Autopoiesis and a Biology of Intentionality" (1991).

Heraclitis, Laozi (Tao) and Chuangzi;

Alternatives: Prigogine, Stengers.

Make something that does, rather than is.   Make a material thing or process that's the equivalent of turning a noun into a verb, an object into a transformation

Break

Plan to cook something.

7

Material Phenomenology

What's the virtual, actual, tangible, physical, real, impossible, imaginary?

consciousness, intentionality, the problem of intersubjectivity

Husserl Ideen §27-40 from the chapters on bracketing and epoche, and on intentional consciousness. Optional: Heidegger, What Is a Thing?

Make matter: make something tangible but imaginary; abstract and physical.  Make a monstrous thing, a monstrous material.

Material Phenomenology

Processes and systems. What's a cybernetic system, autopoiesis, open system?

Maturana and Varela on autopoeisis. Massumi ch 1 and 5 on the superiority of the analog. Laozi, and Zhuangzi, Taoism.

Student presentations / enactments.

Performance

Experimental performance vs. spectacle.  Art as vehicle.

Debord (ch 1), Artaud, Grotowski

Cook something.  Invent and write its recipe.  Follow each  another's recipe to make something you've never made or tasted.

Performance

Art as vehicle.  What's an everyday, unmarked vs marked gesture?

Sponge ECART; Poetics of performative space.

(Barbara Formis)

Present / enact.

9

Subjectification and art

What  makes something "live," or interactive, vs responsive? concurrent?

(Leibniz) Damiris, Wild, and Franchi; Guattari, last chapter

Make something live that never lived, using animal processes but not human, using live processes but not animal.   Make marvelous matter-events.

Subjectification and art

What is art research? Why [do, should] [you, we] make <things>?

Whitehead; Stengers Conversation, Sixth Day.

Present / enact.