The year 2011 marked an explosion of radical mobilization, [...]]]> I am co-organizing the first Hemispheric Institute Convergence at Duke this fall on The Geo/Body Politics of Emancipation. The call for participation is now up!

Work Groups

Students must bring their work into discussion with the themes of the work groups.

1. On-line_off-line Performance

co-conveners: Ricardo Dominguez (USC), Diana Taylor (NYU), Zach Blas (Duke), Micha Cardenas (USC), and Jasmina Tumbas (Duke)

Description: Since the 1980’s groups, such as Critical Art Ensemble, have theorized and developed different forms of recombinant theater(s) that have sought to collided, trouble, expand, interrupt and invent modes of sustainable pulsing between data_bodies and real_bodies. Some 30 years later the event zone for what recombinant theater(s) can perform, create, connect and dislocate as on-line_off-line gestures have now become a stable social stage for its enactments and its institutionalization. What have we learned about this performative matrix? What have we lost? What is to be done now? What are the recombinant theater(s) to come? We invite you to write critical codes, to perform between the lines, to imagine the horizons on the other side, and risk going beyond the network and the street.

2. Protesting Politics: New Modes of Culture and Activism during the Collapse of Capitalism

co-conveners: Jack Halberstam (USC), Josh Kun (USC), Shauna Janssen (Concordia University, Montreal), Ana Paulina Lee (USC), Yvette Martinez-Vu (UCLA), China Medel (Duke), and Iván Smirnov (Universidad de Chile)

Description: In this work group, we will explore alternative ways of thinking, living, being and becoming. Tracking the idea of the alternative and the revolutionary, the subversive and the subaltern through multiple contexts, political struggle, artistic practice, cultural expression, social imaginaries, rebellion, transgression, utopian thinking — We will think about the relationship between the dominant and its contestation. We will articulate a theory of the alternative and also consider its locations and possibilities in popular culture, the subcultural and the recycled.

3. Emancipation, Liberation, Dewesternization, and Decoloniality

co-conveners: Macarena Gomez-Barris (USC), Walter Mignolo (Duke), Kaitlin McNally-Murphy (NYU), Seth Michelson (USC), and Amanda Suhey (Duke)

Description: This work group addresses the themes of emancipation, liberation, dewesternization and decoloniality from various transhistorical and global positions. We think about the body in relation to aesthetics, feminism, slavery, indigeneity, the archive, and queerness toward furthering discussion and analysis of dewesternization and decoloniality to tease out the ideas of emancipation and liberation. What are the possibilities of recent scholarship, art, and social movements toward these futures? And more importantly, how can this research support all of our efforts to promote and provoke dewesternization and decoloniality, as a different path of liberation?

4. The Politics of Fiction

co-conveners: Esther Gabara (Duke), Pedro Lasch (Duke), Lourdes Pérez Cesari (Universidad Veracruzana, México), Kency Cornejo (Duke), Jennifer Reynolds (USC), and Cristel Jusino (NYU)

Description: This work group invites artists, activists, and scholars to engage in the theory and practice of fiction-making as a political process. We hope to complement the tradition of political art grounded in documentary and testimonio. In fact, many of the works in this tradition engage fictional modes, though they have not generally been recognized as doing so. Likewise, as much as realism contributes to the force of the document, it has also been the backbone of everything from novelistic fictions since the 19th century to contemporary conceptual art. The practices and theories in this tradition reveal just how impossible it is to disentangle fiction and politics. The stakes of the knot tied between the two cannot be underestimated in a country that went to war over faked documents pointing to imaginary WMDs in Iraq. But not only the powerful have recourse to the power of fiction. We hope to learn about fictional strategies used across the American continent, social classes, ethnic groups and political struggles, and generate new ones. Fiction here includes but is not limited to the concept of storytelling and narrative. Other fictional modes might be: parodies, hoaxes, myths, games, simulations, situations staged in the flow of the everyday, faked photographs and documents, performances, installations, imagined and imaginary spaces (urban, theatrical, architectural, domestic, etc.), and altered aesthetics of relation (a la Glissant).

5. Urban Geopolitics: Reconfigurations from Art, Activism, and Research

co-conveners: Colectivo Situaciones (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Counter-Cartographies Collective (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Diane Nelson (Duke), Camila Maroja (Duke), Leticia Robles-Moreno (NYU), and Marcos Steuernagel (NYU)

Description: This work group will explore how dissentious thoughts and bodies intertwine in the reconfiguration of urban dynamics and/as spaces of conflict. Departing from the notion of “crisis,” we want to address the role of collective acts of emancipation/liberation/resistance within and against a pervasive rhetoric of progress: How individual and collective bodies function as surfaces that produce new meanings through the act of occupying spaces that disturb urban logic? What is the effect of the critical presence of bodies and voices in the cartography of the city? How is that artivism and research are articulated as ways of existence in contexts that transit from the urban to the digital? In sum, how do we currently think through and generate productive links between research, artistic practices, activism, and diverse lifestyles?

Hemi Graduate Student Initiative

Inspired by the Hemispheric Institute’s work developed throughout the Americas, the Hemi Graduate Student Initiative (Hemi GSI) aims to bring together dedicated people who are interested in working at the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression and politics. We work to promote embodied practices as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory and identity. Join us as we gather and blur our lines as teachers, students, artists and activists.

The article, “Of Sex, Cylons, and Worms: A Critical Code Study of Heteronormativity” is in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac Volume [...]]]> The wonderful Mark Marino has just published a critical study of creative work done by Julie Levin Russo and myself, using transCoder, the queer programming anti-language I developed.

The article, “Of Sex, Cylons, and Worms: A Critical Code Study of Heteronormativity” is in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac Volume 17 Issue 2 as a free pdf!

Untitled Picture (“Subtext”), Julie Levin Russo, April 2008, digital image.

LEA Volume 17 Issue 2
Senior Editors for this volume: Lanfranco Aceti and Simon Penny

ISBN: 978-906897-16-1
ISSN: 1071-4391

Of Sex, Cylons, and Worms: A Critical Code Study of Heteronormativity
by Mark Marino

When their Slash Goggles algorithm is functioning, Cylons can perceive the homoerotic sexual subtext all around them. Cylons are cybernetic organisms from the television program “Battlestar Galactica” and the “Slash Goggles” algorithm is a creative codework by Julie Levin Russo written in Zach Blas’ fictional anti-language transCoder. These are code artworks commenting on popular culture and seeking to disrupt what Blas calls the heteronormativity of computer source code. In order to seek out the heteronormativity of source code, I don these lenses for examining another piece of sexually charged code, the AnnaKournikova worm.

Full article is available for download as a pdf here.

Vol 17 Issue 2 of Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published on line as a free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets.

The Transreal Book Party at ONE Archives

Thanks to Rhizome.org for [...]]]> On March 9th, Micha Cárdenas, Pinar Yoldas, and myself will give artist talks on the Queer Viral Practices in New Media Art and Theory panel at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, TX. Please come join us if you’ll be around!

Thanks to Rhizome.org for recommending our panel!

Queer Viral Practices in New Media Art and Theory

“Anything can happen for some weird reason; yet also, [...]]]> The Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium book has been published! Go here to purchase a print copy or download a free pdf! My essay, “Queerness, Openness,” focuses on the queer undercurrents in Cyclonopedia and what this cylconic queerness poses to the futures of queer theory.

“Anything can happen for some weird reason; yet also, without any reason, nothing at all can happen.”
— Reza Negarestani,Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

 

Edited by Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro & Eugene Thacker

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place on 11 March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book’s own theory of creativity – “a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – original inauthenticity” – this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.

CONTENTS: Robin Mackay, “A Brief History of Geotrauma” – McKenzie Wark, “An Inhuman Fiction of Forces” – Benjamin H. Bratton, “Root the Earth: On Peak Oil Apophenia” – Alisa Andrasek, “Dustism” – Zach Blas, “Queerness, Openness” – Melanie Doherty, “Non-Oedipal Networks and the Inorganic Unconscious” – Anthony Sciscione, “Symptomatic Horror: Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’” – Kate Marshall, “Cyclonopedia as Novel (a meditation on complicity as inauthenticity)” – Alexander R. Galloway, “What is a Hermeneutic Light?” – Eugene Thacker, “Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans” – Nicola Masciandaro, “Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness” – Dan Mellamphy & Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, “Phileas Fog^g, or the Cyclonic Passepartout: On the Alchemical Elements of War” – Ben Woodard, “The Untimely (and Unshapely) Decomposition of Onto-Epistemological Solidity: Negarestani’sCyclonopedia as Metaphysics” – Ed Keller, “. . .Or, Speaking with the Alien, a Refrain. . .” – Lionel Maunz, “Receipt of Malice” – Öykü Tekten, “Symposium Photographs” – Reza Negarestani, “Notes on the Figure of the Cyclone”

Leper Creativity Symposium Videos: vimeo.com/groups/86415

Ed Keller is a transdisciplinary designer, writer, and musician. He is Associate Dean of Distributed Learning and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design, and Associate Professor in Parsons’ School of Design Strategies. Prior to joining Parsons, he taught at the Columbia GSAPP [1998-2010] and SCIArc [2004-09]. With Carla Leitao, Ed co-founded AUM Studio [2003-present], an architecture and new media firm that has produced residential projects in Europe, award winning competitions, expanded cinema and locative media projects. AUM Studio’s work has been exhibited and published internationally. He has spoken at conferences, including Humanity+@Parsons [2011], Cyclonopedia [The New School 2011], Design and Existential Risk [Parsons 2010], Research Practice [Cal Poly Pomona 2009], Temporalism [Cornell 2007], Ineffable [CCNY 2007],  Action Cut Micro Cut [Columbia GSAPP 2007], and Becoming Architect: XXI Century [La Sapienza, Rome 2005].  Ed has been an avid rock climber for over 30 years.

Nicola Masciandaro teaches at Brooklyn College, is the author of The Voice of the Hammer: The Meaning of Work in Middle English Literature (Notre Dame, 2006), and is also founder and co-editor of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary. He has published widely on medieval philosophy, mysticism, individuation, geophilosophy, beheading, sorrow, spontaneity, and metal music, among other subjects.

Eugene Thacker is the author of After Life (University of Chicago Press, 2010) and Horror of Philosophy(Zero Books, 2011). Thacker teaches at The New School in New York.

Cover Art: Perry Hall, Sound Drawing 07-04, 2007.

Published: 2012-02-22