Previous seminars from The Seminar of Aesthetics

2022

Allison Morehead on Edvard Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life

In this lecture, Allison Morehead (Queens University) will discuss an interdisciplinary curatorial project that presents the work of Edvard Munch in the light of medical history.

Time and place: Oct. 12, 2022 4:15 PM – 6:00 PM

Edvard Munch and Medicalization of Modern Life: Curating Interdisciplinarity In this lecture, Allison Morehead will present her interdisciplinary curatorial project, Edvard Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life. Combining the work of Edvard Munch with objects from the history of medicine, the exhibition explores Munch's privileged relationship to medical personnel, technologies, institutions, and therapies, arguing that the artist's work, at times, enables a critical perspective on medical modernity. Morehead will discuss the exhibition's concept, its theoretical foundation in critical medical humanities, its particular focus on gendered experiences of medicine, and its curatorial strategies.

Allison Morehead is Associate Professor of Art History at Queen's University, which is located on Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee territories in what is now called Canada. Morehead's work focuses on the historical relays between modern French and Scandinavian art, the   psy-sciences, and medicine. Publications include Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, published by Penn State University Press in 2017, and numerous articles and essays on the work of unnamed and named artists including psychiatric patients, mediums, and figures such as Munch, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, August Strindberg, and Hélène Smith/Élise-Catherine Müller. Morehead co-directs the event series, Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities, and serves in an editorial capacity for caa.reviews.

Organizer
Kunsthistorie og Visuelle Studier, IFIKK and Seminar of Aesthetics

---

FORART Lecture 2022: Julia Bryan-Wilson on Embellished Art Histories

In this lecture, Julia Bryan-Wilson (Columbia University) discusses how the question of embellishment and decor in recent art may change our conceptions of art history.

Time and place: Aug. 26, 2022 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM

Embellished Art Histories  Examining Filipinia artist Pacita Abad, Brazilian embroiderer Madalena Reinbolt, and African American quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins, Julia Bryan-Wilson considers how embellishment, particularly needlework, has served as a strategy for recent artists whose work frequently blurs the lines between function and décor. Though located in distinct geographies and rooted in different identifications, these three artists have much in common, and this talk takes seriously their decision to adorn the objects of domestic life. In doing so, Bryan-Wilson speculates about how their handcrafted practices open onto more expansive art histories.

Julia Bryan-Wilson is an award-winning author, critic, and curator whose 2017 book Fray: Art and Textile Politics received the ASAP Book Prize, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, and the Robert Motherwell Book Award.  She is also the author of Art Workers. Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2011) and Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, 2016). As an adjunct curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Bryan-Wilson co-curated the exhibit Women’s Histories: Artists before 1900; in 2020 she organized Histórias da Dança/Histories of Dance. Her show Louise Nevelson: Persistence, is an official collateral event of the 2022 Venice Biennale, and her monograph on Nevelson is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. She is Professor of LGBTQ+ Art History at Columbia University.  

---

Larisa Dryansky on Mel Bochner: Between Minimalism and the Rise of Computer Imagery

In this lecture, Larisa Dryansky (Sorbonne) discusses parallels between 1960s artistic investigations of the relation between image and object, materiality and illusion, and computer scientists’ simultaneous quest for building 3D images.

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2022 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

2D, 3D, 4D: Mel Bocher, Between Minimalism and the Rise of Computer Imagery Between 1966 and 1969, the American post-minimalist artist Mel Bochner produced an important body of photographic work in which he explored spatial ambiguity and virtual materiality or, in his words, “non-existent tactility.” Taking as its cue Bochner’s plans to make artworks with the help of computer technology as part of an artist-in-residence program organized in 1968 by Experiments in Art and Technology, my paper situates the artist’s approach at this time in dialogue with the contemporaneous emergence of 3D imagery. Bochner’s interest in the symbolic logic that is at the root of information theory is well-known and the echoes between his use of mathematical diagrams and coding processes have already been addressed. In a different way, this study focuses on the parallels between, on the one hand, Bochner’s repeated investigation of the relation between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, image and object, and, on the other, computer scientists’ quest for building an image in space. Although the artist’s engagement with technology was definitely not free from all reserve and he was more than skeptical about the first experiments of computer art also being developed in the 1960s, his fascination with the interplay of materiality and illusion overlapped with the generation of a new kind of spatiality in computer imagery. This connection appears less surprising when traced back to a common source of inspiration: theories of four-dimensional space. A space that is neither the projected space of perspective, nor the “real space” of three dimensions, as the minimalist Donald Judd famously put it, 4D space, I want to suggest, appeared at this juncture as a model to address anew the reality of images.

Larisa Dryansky is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at Sorbonne Université. Her research focuses on the intersections of art, science, and technology in postwar and contemporary art and on technological images (photography, film, video). Her current book project is an investigation of artists’ engagement with the concept of antimatter, a topic introduced in her essay “Another Matter: Antimatter and the Dematerialization of Art” (in C. Berger [ed.], Conceptualism and Materiality, 2019) and in a study of Jean Dubuffet and photography (“La Matérialité stéréoscopique de l’œuvre de Jean Dubuffet,” Plastik, n. 10, January 2022). Her previous book, Cartophotographies. Du Land Art à l’art conceptuel (2017), addressed the combined uses of photography and cartography in American art of the 1960s. She has co-edited several volumes, including recently Repenser le médium. Art contemporain et cinéma (2022). From 2014 to 2016, she was Senior Fellow in charge of contemporary art programs at the French National Art Institute (INHA).

---

Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen on How To Build Symphonies. Rhythmic Design in Bruckner’s and Schubert’s Large-scale Works.

In this lecture, Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen (U. of Zürich) discusses the significance of rhythm as a design feature in Bruckner's and Schubert's symphonies.

Time and place: Mar. 31, 2022 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

How To Build Symphonies. Rhythmic Design in Bruckner’s and Schubert’s Large-scale Works: Anton Bruckner’s mature symphonies (numbers 3 to 8) follow a design which can be described in terms of rhythm and proportion working on several levels. In a way these different levels are intertwined in a certain bottom-up manner: within the themes, between them, concerning a whole movement and, last of all, shaping the entire four-movement symphonic cycle. Although clearly Bruckner’s own and original invention, there is some evidence that this constructional design may have been inspired by some late works of Franz Schubert. The paper tries to show this by selected examples.

Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen is Professor of Musicology at the Universität Zürich (emeritus since February 2018). He studied German Studies and History at the Freie Universität Berlin (First and Second State Examinations 1980/82), then Musicology (PhD 1992: Untersuchungen zur Entwicklung der Sonatenform in der Instrumentalmusik Franz Schuberts; Habilitation 1998: Musikalische Interpretation: Hans von Bülow).

Hinrichsen is member of the Academia Europaea and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is also member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn and the Scientific Advisory Board of the State Institute for Music Research – Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin. He is Co-editor of the journal Archiv für Musikwissenschaft and of wagnerspectrum.

Recent book publications include: Franz Schubert, Munich 2011 (2014, 2019), also translated into Japanese and Korean; Beethoven: Die Klaviersonaten, Kassel 2013; Bruckner's Symphonies. Ein musikalischer Werkführer, Munich 2016, also translated into Japanese; Ludwig van Beethoven. Musik für eine neue Zeit, Berlin/Kassel 2019 (2020).

Organizer
Seminar of Aesthetics and RITMO Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion

---

2021

Benjamin Bratton On the Ethics of Being an Object

In this lecture, Benjamin Bratton (University of California, San Diego) will discuss the ethics of being an object and what the pandemic should tell us about the biological reality of society

Time and place: Oct. 15, 2021 7:00 PM–9:00 PM, ON ZOOM

THE ETHICS OF BEING AN OBJECT:  We may not yet be able to refer to the pandemic in the past tense. Perhaps the only thing more foolish than some of our ill-fated responses to the pandemic would be to refuse to learn any lessons from it. A source of confusion for many has been a necessary shift in the ethical imagination from a position that calibrates subjective moral will to one that recognizes one’s self and body as an object in a cause-and-effect relationship with the world. It is often presumed that agency and subjectivity (if not also identity) are interchangeable, but the consequentialist ethics of being an object (less a subject) works differently. Outcomes are not necessarily a mirror of an internal mental state. They are not directly dependent on public demonstration, performance, and ritual to affect physical change. The implications for other biopolitical and ecopolitical conditions, such as combating climate change, are decisive. In this talk, Bratton will consider an ethics of the object in relation to the epidemiological view of society made explicit by the pandemic and its implications for the politics of "surveillance", the medical gaze, and the conception of a viable positive biopolitics. 

Benjamin Bratton's work spans Philosophy, Architecture, Computer Science and Geopolitics. He is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. He is Program Director of The Terraforming program at the Strelka Institute. He is also a Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School and Visiting Professor at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture) and NYU Shanghai.
He is the author of several books, including The Revenge of The Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (Verso Press, 2021), The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016), Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution (e-flux/ Sternberg Press, 2015) and The New Normal programme book. Projects and Research (Strelka Press) from The New Normal, a speculative urbanism think-tank investigating alternative urban conditions and futurities (2016-19)

---

FORART LECTURE 2021: Liam Young on Planet City and the Return of Global Wilderness

In this combined lecture and film screening, architect and filmmaker Liam Young (Los Angeles) takes us on a science fiction safari through an imaginary city for the entire population of the earth.

Time and place: Sep. 15, 2021 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, ON ZOOM

Planet City and the Return of Global Wilderness Following centuries of colonization, globalization and never-ending economic extraction we have remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate. In the storytelling film performance Planet City we go on a science fiction safari through an imaginary city for the entire population of the earth, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the world to a global scaled wilderness and the return of stolen lands. Set against the consistent failure of nation states to act in any meaningful way against climate change, Planet City emerges from a global citizen consensus, a voluntary and multi-generational retreat from our vast network of cities and entangled supply chains into one hyper-dense metropolis. 

Liam Young is a speculative architect and director who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is co-founder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank, exploring the local and global implications of new technologies and Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels on expeditions to chronicle these emerging conditions as they occur on the ground. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, his visionary films and speculative worlds are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today. As a concept designer he visualizes the cities, spaces and props of our imaginary futures including work on the forthcoming features Swan Song, starring Mahershala Ali and Awkwafina for Apple TV and Folding City for Chinese Production company Wanda in addition to production designing an unannounced new sci fi series for eOne. With his own films he is a BAFTA nominated producer and has premiered with platforms ranging from Channel 4, SxSW, the New York Metropolitan Museum, The Royal Academy, the BBC and the Guardian. His work has been collected internationally by museums such as MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria and M Plus Hong Kong and has been acclaimed in both mainstream and design media including features with Wired, New Scientist, Arte, Canal+, Time magazine and many more. His fictional work is informed by his academic research and has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge and now runs the ground breaking Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI Arc in Los Angles. He has published several books including the recent Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City, a story of a fictional city for the entire population of the earth.

Organizer

Seminar of Aesthetics and FORART Institute for Research within Contemporary Art

---

Tony D. Sampson: Experiencing Radical Aesthetic Ontology

In this lecture, Tony D. Sampson (University of East London) will focus on two trends in neuroculture that influence the production of radical aesthetic experiences.  

Time and place: June 18, 2021 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, ZOOM

Tony D. Sampson’s talk will focus on two trends in neuroculture influencing the production of radical aesthetic experiences.  

The first trend refers to disciplinary incursions by so-called neuro-rationalists into the work of artists through the development of neuroaesthetic programmes. Principally associated with cognitive and algorithmic neuroscience, it is argued that neuroaesthetics generally reduces aesthetic experience to conservative, locationist and ocularcentric regimes. 

The second trend relates to the new paradigm of affective neuroscience. On one hand, the turn to affect in brain science challenges rationalist models by prioritizing previously marginalized affects, sensations, and emotions in the production of concepts. On the other hand, though, as affective neuroscience enters the cultural circuits of capitalism, these productions introduce new pressures on what Fuller (2008) identifies as the capacity of radical art to bring ferocity and passion to the world.  Drawing on his dystopian media theory trilogy of books on affective politics, neuro-contagion and aesthetic ontology, Sampson concludes by discussing art methodologies intended to return ferocity and passion to re-radicalized aesthetic experiences.

Tony D. Sampson is an academic, author and editor. His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (Hampton Press, 2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, coedited with Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). His latest book – A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media – was published by Polity in 2020. Tony is the host and organiser of the Affect and Social Mediaconferences in east London and a co-founder of the public engagement initiative the Cultural Engine Research Group. He currently works as a reader in digital media cultures and communication at the University of East London in the UK where he also leads the MA Media and Communication Industries and supervises PhDs and Prof Docs in Fine Art.

---

Tom Holert on Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics. An Update

In this lecture, Tom Holert (Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin) will discuss contemporary art's peculiar role as a provider and processor of knowledge and research.

Time and place: Mar. 18, 2021 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, JOIN ON ZOOM

Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics. An Update  In the wake of an ongoing, often disruptive reassessment of received ideas about epistemology, truth and science, I want to use the occasion of this talk to work towards an understanding of contemporary art’s peculiar role as providing, processing, and promulgating “knowledge.”

Drawing on my book Knowledge Beside Itself. Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2020), I attend to the claims to knowledge and research that in the past decades have been increasingly made by artist-practitioners, curators, educators, art institutions, self-organized spaces, etc. Furthermore, I look into the symbolic and economic valorisations such claims supposedly imply and ask what the field of contemporary art is able to contribute to the multiplicity of epistemic crises that mark the current historical moment. Rendered in a somewhat different nomenclature, my talk speculates about the extent to which contemporary art informs the General Intellect of the present.         

Tom Holert is a Berlin-based cultural theorist, art historian, curator and occasional visual practitioner. In 2015 he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut, an archive, research and facilitating platform on visual politics, documentary, education and moving images in Berlin. Recent book publications include: Neolithic Childhood. Art in a False Present, c. 1930 (a catalog/reader supplementing the 2018 exhibition of the same title at HKW, Berlin. ed., with Anselm Franke, Diaphanes, 2018); Knowledge Beside Itself: Contemporary Art’s Epistemic Politics (Sternberg Press, 2020); Bildungsschock. Lernen, Politik und Architektur in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren (a reader accompanying the 2021 exhibition Education Shock. Learning, Politics, and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s at HKW, Berlin; ed., De Gruyter, 2020) and Politics of Learning, Politics of Space. Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s (De Gruyter, 2021); Harun Farocki, Unregelmäßig, nicht regellos. Texte 1986–2000 (Harun Farocki. Schriften, vol. 5) (ed., König, 2021, forthcoming). Currently, Holert is working on a book on the year 1972 (to be published with Spector Books, 2022).   

---

Shannon Mattern on How to Map Nothing: Geographies of Suspension

In this talk, Shannon Mattern (New School for Social Research, New York) will map out the urban infrastructural ecologies of pandemic retreat.

Time and place: Feb. 4, 2021 6:00 PM–7:00 PM

How to Map Nothing: Geographies of Suspension Two years ago – or, a century ago in phenomenological and political time – artist and writer Jenny Odell published to great acclaim a book about How to Do Nothing. She made the case for retreat or refusal as an act of resistance to capitalist productivity and laid out a plan of action for “holding open [a] place in the sun,” for attending to the world’s sensory richness. Not even a year after the book’s release, retreat was imposed on the world in the form of social distancing and lockdowns, and many people found themselves doing a whole lot of involuntary nothing. Maps and graphs showed stilled air traffic and transit systems, depressed economies, shuttered businesses, and sheltering communities. Yet underlying these geographies of suspension were urban and extra-urban networks in furious motion, ecologies of social welfare and surveillance that have historically functioned off the map, either in informal economies or via proprietary infrastructures. In this talk, we draw from feminist geography, critical race studies, and critical disability studies to consider how we might map the flip side of a COVID-19 dashboard: what urban ecologies make suspension possible for those who can afford to retreat?

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and The City Is Not a Computer, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. She contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal, and she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. More information about Shannon Mattern: wordsinspace.net

Organizer

Seminar of Aesthetics, Urban Ecologies Project at ROM for Art and Architecture and Media Aesthetic Work Group at UiO

2020

Erich Hörl: Where There is No World and No Epoch: Bernard Stiegler's Thinking of the Entropocene

In this lecture, Erich Hörl, University of Leuphana, Lüneburg,  discusses the timeliness of Bernard Stiegler's reflections on the time of suspension or "being-in-disruption" that define life in the Entropocene, understood as an un-time without world or epoch.

Time and place: Dec. 10, 2020 2:00 PM–3:30 PM, Join in Zoom

Where There is No World and No Epoch: Bernard Stiegler’s Thinking of the Entropocene.

The lecture outlines the thinking of suspension that characterizes the work of the Bernard Stiegler, who died earlier this year. On the one hand, it lays out the problem of the “objective epokhé [epokhé objective]” and of “epokhal doubling [redoublement épokhal]” Stiegler develops as part of a phenomenology of disorientation. On this basis, on the other hand, it presents Stiegler’s reflections on being-in-disruption that define our present, the Entropocene, as an un-time without world or epoch. The core thesis of the talk is that what is breaking through in Stiegler’s thinking of suspension is a new sense of sense, a trans-formative sense that, given the urgent new “Great Transformation” of which we have seen merely the beginning, may be of great philosophical and political relevance.

About Erich Hörl

Erich Hörl is a philosopher and a professor of media studies at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media of the University of Leuphana (Lüneburg, Germany). A student of Friedrich Kittler, he is specialist on Gilbert Simondon and the history of cybernetics. He works on the question of the “technological condition” of man, and on the development of a new ecological paradigm, challenging the conceptual, political and institutional consequences of contemporary media theory.
Recent publications include General Ecology. The New Ecological Paradigm (Bloomsbury, 2017), Sacred Channels. The Archaic Illusion of Communication (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). “Variations on Klee’s Cosmographic Method,” in Grain, Vapor, Ray. Textures of the Anthropocene, Vol. III, eds Katrin Klingan et. al. (MIT Press, 2015), “A Thousand Ecologies: The Process of Cyberneticization and General Ecology,” in The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside, eds. Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke (Sternberg Press, 2013), and “The Technological Condition,” in Parrhesia: Journal of Critical Philosophy (Issue 22, 2015). He is also the contributing editor of Die technologische Bedingung, (Suhrkamp, 2011).

The lecture is organized in collaboration with the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities and will take place on Zoom.

---

Erik Steinskog on Afrofuturism, Aesthetics and Technology

In this lecture, Erik Steinskog (University of Copenhagen) will discuss afrofuturism in music and the relation between technology, aesthetics and history.

Time and place: Feb. 11, 2020 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Aud 4, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern

The Sound of the Future: Afrofuturism, Aesthetics and Technologyi

Afrofuturism is often defined as a form of speculative fiction emerging through the encounter with new technologies, and afrofuturist art and aesthetics exist across art forms and genre. In this lecture, I will discuss African-American music and the idea of "the sound of the future" that has informed afrofuturist discourses for the past 25 years. The use of keyboards in the music of Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock and Bernie Worrell, as well as the guitar inventions of Jimi Hendrix, represent one type of sonic extension - another appear in hip-hop production, for instance in the work of Ras G and Flying Lotus. However, afrofuturism does not primarily support linear history: the sound of the future is also a combinatory art, drawing of musical and technical references from a variety of historical contexts - as seen in Eddie Harris’ use of the electric saxophone or the role of the record player in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. This is a future-oriented music emerging out of speculations on time and  history and questions of how technologies support the production of new types of sounds - a music that also constantly questions the historical inscription of the music itself. 

About Erik Steinskog

Erik Steinskog is associate professor in musicology at the Department of  Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. Recent publications include: Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come (2018). ”Electric Affinities: Jimi Hendrix, Richard Wagner, and the Thingness of Sound” (2019), ”Metropolis 2.0: Janelle Monáe’s recycling of Fritz Lang” (2019), ”On the Other Side of Time: Afrofuturism and the Sounds of the Future” (2019),
 
The lecture is free and open for all.

Language: Norwegian

---

2019

ForArt Lecture 2019: Whitney Davis on Pictorial Art and Global Psychological Modernity

In this lecture, Whitney Davis (Berkeley) will discuss the evolutionary modernity of picture-making in the human species.

Time and place: Sep. 13, 2019 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Amalie Skram-salen

Pictorial Art and Global Psychological Modernity will deal with new research on the evolutionary 'modernity' of picture making in the human species (from c. 40,000 BCE), the problem of pre-modern-human 'pictures' (before c. 40,000 BCE), and, most important, in what ways the making of pictures 'modernized' the 'modern human' perceptual and cognitive systems (in place by c. 200,000 BCE) and form of life - creating a new kind of world into which human beings were integrated. The lecture will combine approaches from art history, paleoanthropology, archaeology, cognitive evolution, and aesthetics.

About Whitney Davis

Whitney Davis is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of History of Art at the University of California at Berkeley. His teaching and research interests include prehistoric and archaic arts (especially prehistoric and predynastic arts of north eastern Africa); worldwide rock art; the Classical tradition and neoclassicism in Western art since the later Middle Ages, and especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain; the development of professional art history in interaction with archaeology, philosophical aesthetics, comparative anthropology, and other disciplines; art theory in visual-cultural studies, especially problems of pictorial representation and other kinds of visual notation; aspects of modern art history, especially its expression (or not) of nonnormative sexualities; the history and theory of sexuality, especially the history of psychoanalysis; queer theory; world art studies; and environmental, evolutionary, and cognitive approaches to the global history of visual culture.

He is the author of:

• The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

• Masking the Blow: The Scene of Representation in Late Prehistoric Egyptian Art (University of California Press, 1992)

• Pacing the World: Construction in the Sculpture of David Rabinowitch (Harvard University Art Museums, 1996)

• Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud's "Wolf Man" Case (Indiana University Press, 1996)

• Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996)

• Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (Columbia University Press, 2010)

• A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2011), which received the 2012 Monograph Prize of the American Society for Aesthetics and the Susanne K. Langer Award of the Media Ecology Association.

He is currently working on three book projects: Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Ancient Egypt to New Media (a companion volume to A General Theory of Visual Culture); Space, Time, and Depiction; and Inquiry in Art History (a study of the interaction of idiographic and nomological traditions of explanation in art history since the late 19th century).

---

Luciana Parisi on Machine Philosophy: Instrumentality and Critique

In this lecture, Luciana Parisi (Goldsmiths University) will present a critique of technology that, originating from within computational media, makes it possible to discover forms of machine thinking that cannot simply be conflated with machine functions. 

Time and place: May 10, 2019 4:00 PM–6:00 PM, Aud 4, Eilert Sundts Hus

Machine Philosophy: Instrumentality and Critique

My attempt at theorizing machine philosophy is to re-open the political dimension of instrumentality and expand the critique of technology to include an experimental logic by which machines think beyond what they do. My talk today takes inspiration from Kittler’s claim that philosophy has neglected the means used for its production. Kittler’s argument for media ontology will be compared to the post-Kantian project of re-inventing philosophy through the medium of thought (in particular Deleuze’s Spiritual Automaton). I will discuss these views in the context of the automation of logical thinking where procedures, tasks, and functions are part of the instrumental processing of new ends evolving a new mode of reasoning. By following John Dewey’s argument for instrumentality, it will be argued that the task of thinking today needs to re-invent a logic of techne away from the teleological view of ends or the crisis of finality. If the post-Kantian preoccupations about the task of thinking already announced that the medium of thought could offer possibilities for a non-human philosophy (or a philosophy beyond truth), my discussion today aims to theorize a machine philosophy originating from within computational media.

About Luciana Parisi

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research draws on continental philosophy to investigate  ontological and epistemological transformations driven by the function of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. Her writing aims to develop a naturalistic approach to thinking and technology. She is interested in cybernetics, information theory and computation, complexity and evolutionary theories. Her writing addresses the technocapitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology. She has written extensively within the field of Media Philosophy and Computational Design. In 2004, she published 'Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire' (Continuum Press). In 2013, she published 'Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space' (MIT Press). She is currently researching the history of automation and the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.

---

Symposium: Space Colonization in the Age of the Anthropocene

Time and place: May 3, 2019 10:00 AM–6:00 PM, Henie Onstad Art Center

"Space Colonization in the Age of the Anthropocene" is a one-day symposium organized in connection with the exhibition "The Moon. From Inner Worlds to Outer Space" at the Henie Onstad Art Center (15.02-19.05.2019). 50 years after the first manned moon landing, the exhibition brings together art, cinema, music, architecture, cultural history, design and natural history. The symposium addresses the advent of a new space age from a variety of perspectives.

Speakers: Peter Adey, Lorenz Engell, Jill Stuart, Cath le Couteur and Stefano Catucci

Information about enrollment

The symposium is open to all interested, but requires registration.

The participation fee of NOK 150,- covers the symposium, lunch and refreshments, the entrance to the exhibition and the reception afterwards.

About the Symposium

This symposium is organized in connection to the exhibition "The Moon. From Inner Worlds to Outer Space" shown at Henie Onstad Art Center (15.02-19.05.2019). In celebration of the 50th year anniversary for the first manned moon landing in 1969, the exhibition brings together art, cinema, music, architecture, cultural history, design and natural history.

Space colonization, the topic for the symposium, is one of the six key themes in the exhibition, along with Selenography, Moon light, Myths of the Moon, Moon landing and Deep time. In 1959, two years after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit around Earth, UN established The Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, with the specific aim to prevent placement of nuclear weapons on the moon and in space. In 1967, the committee established a space treatise which lays down the framework for legislation on space, stating that outer space is open to peaceful exploration for all nations, but that “outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means”. The moon was thus defined as common property, as part of the global commons on par with the sea bed and the atmosphere.

In the last decades, however, we have witnessed the advent of a new space age, driven by nation states as well as private, commercial agents. In this new space age, the moon is not predominantly a goal in itself, but a launching pad for missions further out in the universe. A host of different agents currently explore the possibilities for permanent moon bases and mining in outer space, in ways that radically challenge the principle of the moon as part of “the global commons”. In a larger, cosmic perspective, the moon is increasingly conceived as a suburb to Earth, and outer space becomes an arena for geopolitical tensions and militaristic agendas where super powers like USA, China and Russia are central actors. The symposium directs attention to this ongoing colonialization of space, as this is explored by artists and scholars with a particular investment in the interrelation between media technologies, imaging and imagining of space for its conquest.

An underlying theme in the symposium – and the exhibition – is the notion of the Anthropocene. The notion was popularized throughout the 2000s by atmosphere chemist Paul J. Crutzen and is increasingly employed to indicate that Earth has entered a new geological age, wherein humans impact Earth on a planetary level – for example by moving more mass than other factors such as wind conditions, erosion, and plate tectonics. In his book Facing Gaia (2017), Bruno Latour describes this as a radically new situation, where the romantic opposition between the eternity of nature and the transience of humanity no longer makes sense. Cosmos itself is changing: glaciers are melting, the sea level is rising and species extinct at a higher speed than the political and cultural processes prescribed to prevent this development. Today, writes Latour, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. From this perspective, outer space bears a promise for new settlements as well as new economical investments.

Program

• 10:00 - 10:15 Welcome: Tone Hansen and Susanne Østby Sæther
• 10:15 - 11:15 Jill Stuart ( London School of Economics and Political Science): Who Owns the Moon
• 11:15 - 11:30 Break
• 11:30 - 12:30 Peter Adey (Royal Holloway, University of London): Evacuate Earth
• 12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break and exhibition visit
• 14:00 - 15:00 Lorenz Engell (IKKM, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar): The „Anthropic  Principle“: Planet Earth Between Cosmos, Humans, and Media.
• 15:00 - 15:15 Break
• 15:15 - 16:15 Cath Le Couteur: PROJECT ADRIFT - The Hidden World of Space Junk.
• 15:00 - 15:15 Break
• 16.30 - 17:00 Stefano Catucci: Learning from the Moon
• 17:00 - 17:15 Stefano Catucci: Responses to previous talks
• 17:15 - 17:30 Final discussion/farewell

Abstracts 

Jill Stuart: Who Owns the Moon

Peter Adey: Evacuate Earth

Perhaps we have always wished to leave the planet, but how and why would we do so? What efforts have we gone to in order to predict, anticipate, plan for and potentially practice planetary evacuation? From religious belief in the rapture to Hollywood disaster movies and science fiction, from popular culture and the so-called climate future imaginations of ‘cli-fi’, societies have frequently postured apocalyptic and catastrophic scenarios, many of them in the later half of the 20^th century. These have commonly featured a fragile, warmed, cooled, maybe depleted world – and sometimes the reverse in an excess of rubbish, dust, debris. The planet is rendered uninhabitable. Within this trope, humanity’s only future is an off-planet exodus, colonisation, or even a temporary vacation.

A post-human Earth is left in a state of barbarism, perhaps tended by drones. The advanced mechanisms to leave so swiftly, and on mass, may betray the conceit of the apparent inability of society to save the world in the first place. The world is often held in a sublime state of emptiness. The evacuation usually comes from the emergency of an intensified present of threat, even if the causes have been long in the making. Attempts at the evacuation of the earth can be inverted. As the Biosphere 2 project has folded in on at least some of its original ideas of how we might live extra-planetarily, the ‘greenhouse spaceship’ become an experiment with which to think and rethink Biosphere 1 and how we live on it. The evacuation becomes a vehicle with which to engage politically, scientifically and ethically with the world we know.

Lorenz Engell: The "Anthropic Principle": Planet Earth Between Cosmos, Humans, and Media.

The paper starts with a presentation of the "Anthropic Principle", a cosmological theory about the (im)probability of human existence in space. According to the „Anthropic Principle“ of cosmology, all descriptions, depictions, calculations, measurements, models and representations of the universe must necessarily include a scene or habitat in which one specific and particularly intelligent being can occur and exist who figures as the author and hence as the condition of all these descriptions, depictions and calculations.  In general, "the human being" is placed in this position as a condition for the cosmos to come to existence, thus assuming a central function for the mere being of the universe. - Analyzing television pictures of Planet Earth taken from outer space, however, the paper shows that the cosmological habitat (the Earth), is a media product form early on. The habitat must hence always include not (just) the (human) authors, but the media of representation, depiction and measurement of the universe, such as television and others. The assumed anthropic scene as a condition of possibility of the cosmos is therefore necessarily a non-centered med-anthropic, e.g. televisual habitat in which media and humans have always already intertwined. Slightly altering a quotation from philosopher Günter Anders, the televised (or otherwise mediatized) globe  is the eyeball through which, according to the „Med-Anthropic Principle“, cosmos looks at itself and hence generates itself.

Cath Le Couteur: Project adrift - The Hidden World of Space Junk

---

Daniel Heller-Roazen on The Image of the Absentee

In this lecture, Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University) discusses questions raised by the image of missing persons in literature ranging from the classical and medieval to the modern age.

Time and place: Apr. 11, 2019 2:00 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts Hus

Abstract

A missing person can be someone whose vanishing goes unrecorded, but it can also be someone who has been represented, for one of many reasons, as being absent. Law and literature contain the archives of these persons. Sometimes they are abstract legal types, such as the absentees of ancient and modern civil codes, who are considered alive, if only for a while, and as the subjects of some civil rights, but not all. Missing persons are also characters of literary invention: examples include Helen of Troy, who haunts Sparta after her departure, Hawthorne's Wakefield, who mysteriously "dissevers himself" for years from his wife, and Karl Rossmann, who wanders through the land of absentees that Kafka called Amerika. Certain missing persons are conjured up in depictions of infamy: this is the case of the elusive medieval Italian criminals who, eluding trial, were punished in effigy. Moving among various classical, medieval and modern examples, this lecture will explore some of the questions raised by the image of the absentee.

Daniel Heller-Roazen's books include Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (2005), The Inner Touch: Archeology of a Sensation (2007), The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (2011) and, most recently, No One's Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (2017). He is currently working on a book on missing persons, to which his April 11 lecture will be closely related. He is the Arthur W. Marks '19 Professor of Comparative Literature and the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.

---

2018

Spyros Papapetros on Magic Architecture

In this lecture, Spyros Papapetros (Princeton) will discuss how a ritual practice such as magic can inform the history as well as present-day techniques of art and architecture.

Time and place: Oct. 31, 2018 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts Hus

How can a ritual practice such as magic inform the history as well as present-day techniques of art and architecture? This talk will analyze the unpublished book project Magic Architecture by the U.S.-Austrian “surrealist” architect Frederick Kiesler written around the end of World-War-II. The incomplete manuscript records Kiesler’s interdisciplinary research in the fields of paleo-archaeology, cultural anthropology, human and animal psychology, biology, natural history, and the history of aesthetic practices. Surveying caves, tree nests, termite mounds, and the first human ornaments and tools, Magic Architecture aims to sketch a world history of design from the dawn of humankind and the habitations of animals to the "slums" of twentieth-century urban subjects. Haunted by the ghost of recent nuclear catastrophe and the imminent threat of a new one, Kiesler portrays human housing as a “defense mechanism” countering “the fear of the unseen” triggered by aerial assault. Ultimately magic is not simply another name for prehistoric or modern technology, but also a repertory of techniques for reconfiguring the psychological, epistemological, and aesthetic parameters of modern design.

About Spyros Papapetros

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, where he co-directs the Program in Media and Modernity. His work focuses on the historiography of art and architecture, the intersections between architecture and the visual arts, as well as, the relationship between evolutionary biology, morphology and aesthetics. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (The University of Chicago Press, 2012) and the editor of Space as Membrane by Siegfried Ebeling (London: AA Publications, 2010).

---

George Lewis and Rolf-Erik Nystrøm on Contemporary Music and Diversity

Composers and musicians George Lewis and Rolf-Erik Nystrøm present the results from the two-day Ultima Festical workshop exploring how contemporary music can promote aesthetic diversity.

Time and place: Sep. 17, 2018 3:00 PM–4:00 PM, Salen, ZEB-bygget

In a rare visit to Norway, the distinguished US composer, improvising trombonist and teacher George Lewis, plus Norwegian saxophonist Rolf-Erik Nystrøm, will bring together Oslo based musicians to investigate how an art form such as contemporary music – so deeply rooted in post-war central European aesthetics – can engage with notions of diversity.

Modern music’s core values include a constant search for the unknown, and a voyage of artistic discovery involving research and experimentation. How can those values be channeled into creating diversity? Lewis and Nystrøm will attempt to answer some of these questions in collaboration with their invited participants. A open-form piece by George Lewis will form the basis of the workshops’ musical and discursive work, and the sessions will conclude with a presentation.

Ultima Context is supported by Norsk Komponistforening, Fritt Ord and Bergesenstiftelsen.

---

ForArt lecture 2018: McKenzie Wark on Molecular Red

In this lecture, McKenzie Wark (New School of Social Research, New York), revisits economist and philosopher Alexander Bogdanov's early 20th century theories on climate change in order to rethink labor with nature in the age of the anthropocene. The Friday lecture is followed by a Saturday seminar on the art and politics of The Situationist Times.

Time and place: Aug. 31, 2018 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Amalie Skram-salen

Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene

Reorienting thinking for the Anthropocene may be a more profound problem than we like to admit. There is no historical memory of having to revise worldviews to meet a change in geological time. And since the problems the Anthropocene presents such as climate change and ocean acidification are pressing, there is not time to embark on a long research program. However it may be of some use to take a step back into the archive, to find useful intellectual resources, in order to take two steps forward. In Molecular Red, I start with Alexander Bogdanov. He was Lenin's rival for the leadership of the Bolsheviks, before Lenin had him expelled from the faction. He was an organiser, theorist, scientist and the author of science fiction. He got the principles of climate change more or less right, twice. From Bogdanov, Molecular Red takes us on a journey through the archive, finding unlikely sources who took seriously the problem of organizing our labors in and against nature for long term survival.

About McKenzie (Ken) Wark

McKenzie (Ken) Wark is Professor of Culture and Media in Liberal Studies at The New School for Social Research. His research interests are media theory, new media, critical theory, cinema, music, and visual art. His publications include Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994, A Hacker Manifesto, Harvard University Press, 2004,  Gamer Theory, Harvard University Press, 2007, 50 Years of Recuperation: The Situationist International 1957-2007, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, London: Verso, 2011. The Spectacle of Disintegration: Situationist Passages out of the Twentieth Century, London: Verso, 2013. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, London: Verso, 2015, and General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty First Century, London: Verso, 2017.

He has also published the Molecular Red Reader, a companion volume to Molecular Red (London: Verso, 2015), and has co-written  Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation with Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker (University of Chicago Press, 2013). His correspondence with Kathy Acker, I'm Very Into You. Correspondence 1995–1996, was published by Semiotexte in 2015.

These are Situationist Times
Saturday September 1, 1 PM, Torpedo, Rostockgata 28

In this roundtable session, McKenzie Wark, will be joined by Ellef Prestsæter and other participants to discuss the legacy and relevance of the magazine The Situationist Times, a magazine edited and published by the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong in the years 1962–1967. In its multilingual, trans-disciplinary and cross-cultural exuberance, The Situationist Times became one of the most exciting and playful magazines of the 1960s. Throughout its six remarkably diverse issues, it challenged not only the notion of what it means to be a situationist, but also traditional understandings of culture more broadly and of the way culture is created, formatted and shared. All reproduction, deformation, modification, derivation and transformation of The Situationist Times is permitted.

About Ellef Prestsæter

Ellef Prestsæter is a PhD fellow in art history at the University of Oslo and of the curators of The Situationist Times: Same Player Shoots Again, which is on view at Torpedo until September 2, 2018.

---

Patrick Jagoda on Experimental Games and the Videogame Sensorium

In this lecture, Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago) will discuss "gamification" - the impact of game-mechanics on a variety of social and cultural practices - by focusing on the experimental nature of videogames.

Time and place: Aug. 24, 2018 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern

Experimental Games and the Videogame Sensorium

Gamification, a term that derives from behavioral economics and design culture, is the use of game mechanics in traditionally non-game activities. This buzzword emerged only in the twenty-first century but the idea of game-based behavior modification already appears as early as the 1940s in writing on business, marketing, psychology, and warfare. Numerous adopters of gamification across different fields regularly proclaim it to be an unparalleled organizational technique. Arguably, gamification is not merely a generalizable game design strategy that can be applied to areas such as education but also as a form that economic, social, and cultural life takes in the world of the early twenty-first century. This talk approaches the worldview of gamification through the experimental nature of videogames. Instead of pursuing a merely taxonomic account of experimental games as a marketing category, subgenre, or loose formal orientation, the talk takes seriously the fundamental question: What exactly does it mean for games to be designated as operationally “experimental”? Drawing from the history of gamification and videogame aesthetics, I argue that games in the early twenty-first century should be conceived not merely objects, forms, or activities, but as nothing less than a unique mode of experimental thought and learning.

About Patrick Jagoda

Patrick Jagoda is Associate Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is also a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and co-founder of both the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and the Transmedia Story Lab. He is the author of Network Aesthetics (2016) and co-author with Michael Maizels of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016). He is currently working on his next book, Experimental Games. Patrick has published over thirty essays in both humanistic and scientific journals. For more on this projects and writing, please visit: http://patrickjagoda.com/.

---

The History of Love: Three Perspectives

The symposium will explore differing conceptions of love in the Western cultural context. Speakers are Simon May (Kings College, London) as well as Unn Falkeid and Christian Refsum (University of Oslo)

Time and place: May 31, 2018 2:15 PM–5:00 PM, Aud 4 Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern

This symposium will address love from three different perspectives. Simon May (King’s College London) will first summarize six major ways of conceiving love that have existed in the West since ancient Greek thought and Hebrew Scripture, and then outline his own theory of love as a “promise of ontological rootedness”. Unn falkeid will discuss how the language of one of the greatest poets and musicians of the Italian Renaissance, Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554), can be interpreted within a broader context of Renaissance Neo-Platonism. Finally Christian Refsum will discuss the role of love in Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle (2009-2011).

Abstracts

Simon May on “What is Love?”

I briefly trace the origin of our prevailing Western conceptions of love and argue that they constitute the last genuinely universal religion in the contemporary West.  I identify six distinct conceptions of the nature of love since Plato and the Bible before suggesting that none of them does justice to love’s primary ground, which is not possessing beauty or goodness, or achieving reciprocal goodwill between people of similar virtue, or finding sexual satisfaction, or procreating, or unconditional and selfless giving.  Rather love is the rapture we feel for, and the consequent desire to care for, those who inspire in us a powerful “promise of ontological rootedness" – that is, the feeling that our life is indestructibly anchored in a reality whose value we take to be both supreme and stable.

Unn Falkeid: “Gaspara Stampa and the Renaissance Language of Love”

Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554) has been recognized as one of the greatest and most creative poets and musicians of the Italian Renaissance. She gave a voice to female love and ambition within an emerging lyric tradition characterized by the strict Petrarchan paradigm that figured women as silent, chaste objects of male desire. In my paper I will discuss how Stampa’s language of love can be interpreted within a broader context of Renaissance Neo-Platonism in which bodily passions are considered crucial for the salvation of man. By retrieving classical, as well as medieval, notions of sublimity, Stampa’s stylistic simplicity dramatizes the infusion of sacredness into human reality. In this way Stampa’s Rime becomes an important contribution to Renaissance aesthetics and to the contemporary revaluation of the physical life in all its aspects.

Christian Refsum: The Love Theme in Knausgård’s My Struggle 

In "My Struggle" Karl Ove Knausgård struggles to combine finding time to write, and being a loving husband and father. These ambitions are often in conflict. I argue, however, that the dynamic tension between love, creativity, and care for the trivialities of every day life is a precondition for the writing of My struggle. I examine the love theme in My struggle by taking four biblical words as my point of departure: eros (sensuous love), agape (unselfish love), philia (friend love) and storgē (family love). I argue that family love - the wish to establish and nurture ”a herd” (”en flokk”) - is a particularly strong and uncontested value in the work. Knausgård’s commitment to family leads him to a critical re-evaluation of positive and negative aspects of patriarchal power. And it influences his project of writing. Knausgård draws (implicitly) on feminist politics and aesthetics to reinvent a patriarchal role as a father and a literary style incorporating concerns for the trivial and sentimental.

Biographies

• Simon May is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, University of London. His books include Love: A History (Yale University Press, 2011); a collection of his own aphorisms entitled Thinking Aloud (Alma Books, 2009), which was a Financial Times ‘Book of the Year’; Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’ (Oxford University Press, 2002); and two edited volumes on Nietzsche’s philosophy (OUP, 2009 and CUP, 2011).  His work has been, or is being, translated into eleven languages.
• Unn Falkeid is Professor in History of Ideas at the University of Oslo. She has published broadly on medieval and early modern literature, and among her recent publications are the monograph The Avignon Papacy Contested. An Intellectual History from Dante to Catherine of Siena (Harvard University Press, 2017), and the two co-edited volumes The Cambridge Companion to Petrarch (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry (Ashgate, 2015). Falkeid is currently the project manager of the international research project The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden. Women, Politics, and Reform in Renaissance Italy, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2018–2021)
• Christian Refsum is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. He has published broadly on the lyric and on symbolist and modernist literature and film. His latest books are Kjærlighet som religion. Lidenskap og lengsel i film og litteratur på 2000-tallet (Universitetsforlaget, 2016) (Love as Religion: Passion and Longing in the Film and Literature of the 2000s) and Living Together: Roland Barthes, the Individual and the Community (co-edited with Knut Stene-Johansen and Johan Schimanski). Forthcoming at Transcript Verlag, 2018. Refsum is also a published author of a collection of short stories, two novels and two poetry collections.

---

Aron Vinegar on Barthes' Tendencies

In this lecture, Aron Vinegar, professor at the Dept. of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, will explore the question of "holding forth" that emerged in Roland Barthes' late lecture courses at the Collège de France (1977-80)

Time and place: Feb. 2, 2018 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, Aud 5, Eilert Sundt's Hus

Abstract

In this talk, I want to explore the nature of holding forth in Roland Barthes late works. An attentive reading of his three lecture courses and seminars held at the Collège de France between 1977 and his death in1980, as well as other cognate works from around this time, show an obsessive interest in French verbs and nouns derived from the Latin stem “ten” such as tenir, tendant vers, ténacité, ténuité, exténuer, étendre, maintenir. These are the figures—the stances, postures, and bearings—that sustain the force of his late work and embody its ethos. These tenuous yet tenacious gestures are crucial for the way Barthes opens up a way of inhabiting nuance that is neither a hermeneutics, nor a phenomenology, or even a semiology, but rather an intractable and intransitive aesthetics of indifference. I will put these thoughts through their paces by focusing on a section in Barthes’ lecture course The Neutral, where he engages with the grisaille outer panels from Hieronymous Bosch’s winged triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490-1500).

About Aron Vinegar

Aron Vinegar is Professor of Art History in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo, Norway. His main areas of interest and publication include: modern architecture, design, and the built environment; the intersections of art history, visual studies, theory, and aesthetics; and philosophical approaches to art and architecture. These domains of inquiry are driven by two intersecting constellations of concern: habit and the ‘unthought’, and issues of suspended judgment and ontological indifference. Vinegar is the author of  (among other)  I AM A MONUMENT: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate Press, 2014, with Amanda Boetzkes) and Relearning from Las Vegas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, with Michael Golec)

---

Michael Marder on The Art of the Plants (Themselves)

In this lecture, Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, will discuss the art and aesthetics of plant life. The lecture is open for everyone, and will be followed by an informal reception.

Time and place: Jan. 19, 2018 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Auditorium 2, Eilert Sundts hus

Abstract

How would art mutate—metamorphose, grow, but also decay—if it became the art of the plants themselves? I begin this lecture with painting a portrait of plants as artists, emphasising the different ways in which they participate in the aesthetic process. Further, I offer an interpretation of vegetal aesthetics based on the Greek notion of aesthesis. I conclude with a series of fragmentary afterthoughts on my collaboration with French artist Anaïs Tondeur on Chernobyl Herbarium as a singular-universal paradigm for the traumatic, or post-traumatic, art of the damaged plants themselves.  

About Michael Marder

Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Professor-at-Large in The Humanities Institute at Diego Portales University, Santiago, Chile. His work spans the fields of phenomenology, environmental philosophy, and political thought. He is the author of numerous books, among them Energy Dreams (Of Actuality) (2017), Grafts. Writings on Plants (2016), Through Vegetal Being. Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016) (co-authored with Luce Irigaray), The Chernobyl Herbarium. Fragments of an Exploded Conscioiusness (2016) and Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013).

---

2017

Kristin Gjesdal on "Shakespeare and the Development of Modern Aesthetics"

In this lecture, Kristin Gjesdal, Associate Professor at Temple University and Professor II at IFIKK, will discuss the changing reception of Shakespeare's work in 18th and 19th Century philosophy. The lecture is open for everyone, and will be followed by an informal reception.

Time and place: Dec. 7, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 152, Georg Morgenstjernes Hus

Abstract

In eighteenth-century European culture, Shakespeare’s work was translated, staged, and discussed with a passion that has remained unrivaled. Philosophy was no exception to this trend. Lessing, Herder, the Schlegel brothers, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others turned to Shakespeare’s work and used it as an anchoring point for reflection on theater and dramatic poetry. The changing attitudes toward Shakespeare reflect, in turn, a changing attitude toward literature and art. In my presentation, I focus on the reception of Shakespeare in the period before and around Kant’s third Critique and trace the way the reception of Shakespeare went hand in hand with a reception of empiricist philosophy of taste.

About Kristin Gjesdal

Kristin Gjesdal holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Oslo. She has been a visiting scholar at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, and Columbia University, a post-doctoral Fulbright Fellow at the University of Chicago, and had a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. In 2014, she was appointed a Professorial Fellow (Professor II) of philosophy at the University of Oslo. She has been awarded the The Eleanor Hofkin Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Alumni Board at the College of Liberal Arts at Temple (2014). In her work, Kristin Gjesdal covers the areas of phenomenology and hermeneutics, enlightenment, romanticism, idealism, and aesthetics. She also writes on tragedy and philosophy of theater and has published a number of articles on Sophocles, Shakespeare, Ibsen, and modern literature.

---

The ForArt lecture 2017: Darby English on Social Experiments with Abstract Art

For the 2017 ForArt lecture, Darby English (University of Chicago) will present topics related to 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (2016). In this highly original book, English discusses how black American artists in the early 70's experimented with modernist art and color theory in order to articulate cultural interaction and instability and gain freedom from overt racial representation.

Time and place: Sep. 7, 2017 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Kunstnernes Hus

About Darby English

Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, and  associate faculty in the Department of Visual Arts and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. His research probes art’s interaction—at the levels of its production, description, interpretation, and analysis—with instituted forms of historical subjectivity and experience. Recent research has focused on artistic and other cultural manifestations of optimism, discomposure, and interculture. More theoretical formulations of English’s work examine the difficulty of studying the foregoing themes at once as historical objects in themselves and negotiating their implications as sources of anxiety about historical change. For this work, English has been the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Clark Art Institute, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Creative Capital Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the College Art Association.
 
English is the author of 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (University of Chicago Press, 2016), and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2007). He is co-editor of Art History and Emergency (Yale UP, 2016) and Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (MIT Press, 2002 and Rizzoli, 2007). A new monograph, To Describe a Life: Essays at the Intersection of Art and Race Terror will be published by Yale University Press in 2018.

---

Robert Pippin on The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness

In this lecture, Robert Pippin (University of Chicago) will discuss the philosophical implications of unknowingness in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), and its relevance for understanding late modern societies. The lecture is followed by a screening of Vertigo.

Time and place: Sep. 6, 2017 7:00 PM–10:00 PM, Cinemateket, Oslo

Abstract

In almost all of Hitchcock's films, people have a great deal of trouble understanding each other. The human condition, as he seems to understand it, is one where self-knowledge and reliable understanding of others seem extremely difficult because of the distortions caused by desire, deceit, self-deceit, wishful thinking, and simple ignorance. The most famous manifestations of this are the many films in which the wrong person is blamed for or suspected of something. The central problem at issue could be called the struggle for mutual interpretability. In his masterpiece, Vertigo, this situation of general unknowingness is extreme, and the consequences more catastrophic than in any of his other films. I explore here the philosophical presuppositions and implications of this depiction, showing several scenes as a way of exploring why he seems to think we are in such a situation and why he thinks it becomes ever more difficult in late modern, advanced societies.

About Robert B. Pippin

Robert B. Pippin is Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, known for his influential contributions to the field of post-Kantian philosophy, philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of film. His many publications include Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (2012) and After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (2013). His has recently published The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness (2017).

Entrance fee for the lecture and screening is NOK 80,-  (NOK 50,- for Cinemateket members).

---

Marina Warner on Sanctuary: The Portable Shelter of Words

In this lecture, author and cultural historian Marina Warner (Birkbeck College) will discuss the medieval concept of sanctuary and how words helped define the character of a place and, with it, the rights of fugitives and other dislocated individuals.

Time and place: Sep. 6, 2017 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Aud 2, Sophus Bugges Hus, Blindern

Abstract

The early medieval concept of sanctuary granted a safe haven to fugitives from justice regardless of their innocence or otherwise. It was instituted by social consensus, not by force; violations were looked upon as serious crimes against the law. It lasted nearly a thousand years in the archipelago of Britain. As an example of performative utterance, the law of sanctuary reveals how words can establish the character of a place and its boundaries. Marina Warner will look at the interactions between cultural acts - writing, reciting, making -  and sites of arrival in the experience of dislocated individuals. Can literature in different media help refugees in the convulsed conditions of today?

About Marina Warner

Marina Warner writes fiction and cultural history. Her books include "From the Beast to the Blonde" (1994) and "Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights" (2011). She has curated exhibitions, including "The Inner Eye" (1996), "Metamorphing" (2002-3), and "Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing" (2005). Her essays on art will be collected in "Art & Enchantment" (forthcoming Thames & Hudson). She is currently writing a book inspired by her childhood in Cairo after World War II, and is involved in a project, Stories in Transit, for encouraging creative activities in refugee communities. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Fellow of the British Academy and President of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities.

---

Tom Gunning and Paul Kaiser on Framing, Re-framing and Un-Framing

Tom Gunning (University of Chicago) and filmmaker Paul Kaiser will discuss moving images that shift  from the frame of classical cinema to the immersive framelessness and interactivity of virtual reality. The program includes the premiere of the Norwegian 3D film UIysses in the Subway (2016)

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2017 2:30 PM–5:30 PM, Cinemateket, Oslo

We are pleased to welcome you to an afternoon with legendary film history professor Tom Gunning and acclaimed filmmaker Paul Kaiser of OpenEndedGroup.

Professor Gunning and Paul Kaiser /The OpenEndedGroup have sought to study and intervene in the current redefinition of the moving image as it shifts from the frame of classical cinema to the immersive framelessness and interactivity of virtual reality. They recently completed an Andrew Mellon Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship program at the Grey Center for Arts and Inquiry, designed to foster intensive and experimental collaborations between artists and scholars.

The program will feature a lecture by Tom Gunning before the Norwegian premiere of the 3D film Ulysses in the Subway, (2016) a 3D film that was created in collaboration with renowned experimental filmmakers Ken and Flo Jacobs. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Gunning and Kaiser. Please find more information about the lecture, film and speakers biographies below.

Program

• 14:30-14:35 Welcome
• 14:35-15:35 Tom Gunning
• 15:35-15:45 Pause
• 15:45-16:45 Ulysses in the Subway
• 16:45-17:30 Tom Gunning and Paul Kaiser in Conversation

Abstracts

Tom Gunning: TBA

The OpenEndedGroup: Ulysses in the Subway, (2016.) USA, 59 min, 3D

A picturing of sound in 3D: We hear a recording of Ken’s subway ride up to 42nd Street, his wanderings in the Times Square station, his ride downtown on the “A train,” and his return to street-level on Chambers Street. Finally, his climb to the 5th floor loft where Flo (Penelope) awaits him. Sound-as-image turns fleeting presences (voices, footsteps, a steel-drum performance) into epic visual events. A still image may linger, allowing our gaze to wander through the complex particularities of a moment of ordinary noise. This richness of imagery reflects the fact that for every 1/24th of a second, there are 2000 audio samples recorded. Each frame, then, is built from these 2000 sources; constructed, that is, in 3D from more than 21 different ways of algorithmically analyzing and visualizing sound. So while the sound is always pictured accurately, the way it’s pictured can change dramatically.
Past intrudes on present as Edison’s 1905 film of this very path through the NY subway appears, also rendered in 3D. Long-gone passengers on the Grand Central platform connect to sounds of passengers today. Near the end, Betty Boop also puts in an appearance.

About the speakers

Tom Gunning

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute), and most recently co-authored the picture book The Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema with the Eye Museum in Amsterdam. He has published over one hundred and fifty articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and the relation between cinema and modernism. With Andre Gaudreault he originated the influential theory of the “Cinema of Attractions.” In 2009, he was the first film scholar to receive an Andrew A. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, and in 2010, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently working on a book on the invention of the moving and projected image, as well as a theater project at California Institute of the Arts based on Fantômas, the phantom bandit of turn of the century French popular culture

Paul Kaiser and Marc Downie

Paul Kaiser and Marc Downie comprise OpenEndedGroup. Their pioneering approach to digital art frequently combines three signature elements: non-photorealistic 3D rendering; the incorporation of body movement by motion-capture and other means; and the autonomy of artworks directed or assisted by artificial intelligence. They have worked across a range of disciplines and venues, having created experimental 3D films shown at the New York Film Festival, Sundance, and MoMA (which recently acquired eight of their 3D films for its permanent collection); and site specific installations commissioned in the US by Lincoln Center, Barclay Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Museum of the Moving Image, and in the UK by the Hayward Gallery, Sadler’s Wells, the Wellcome Trust, and the York Minster. They are also well-known for their collaborations in the field of dance, working most closely with Merce Cunningham, but also with Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, and Wayne McGregor.

As artists they are unusual in the breadth and depth of the research they conduct for their artworks: spanning science, engineering, arts and the humanities, drawing upon their backgrounds in physics, artificial intelligence, film, and education. They conduct much of their research and create nearly all of their artistic creation in their own software environment Field, which they make freely available to the broader research and art community as an open source project. They have pursued their practice in numerous university and museum residencies at institutions including Stanford, MIT, Lincoln Center, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, IRCAM, the University of Chicago, Le Fresnoy, and EMPAC. Over the last eight years Kaiser and Downie have focused most of their creative efforts on exploring the farther reaches of 3D image creation.

---

Cinema and the Arts in China and Taiwan

In this double lecture session, Professor Grace Cheng (School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University) and Professor Louis Lo (Department of English, National Taipei University of Technology) will discuss the construction of Chinese art history and image/media theory.

Time and place: Apr. 26, 2017 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 6 Eilert Sundt's Hus

Grace Cheng: What is Chinese Art History? A Critical Summary of Discourse on Chinese Paintings

The "Western" understanding of Chinese aesthetics has undergone drastic changes since the arrival of Chinese objects in Europe. Since the twentieth century, critics have been grappling with the somewhat enigmatic representations of nature, people and objects by the Chinese. In this seminar, I will present several significant discursive counterpoints in the area of Chinese art history, drawing from writer such as Wen Fong, James Elkins, Walter Benjamin and Hubert Damisch. Is it possible to write a Chinese art history? How does discourse interact with its objects? At what point do artistic objects reject discourse?

Grace Cheng is a visiting lecturer at School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her Master of Philosophy thesis (Department of Fine Arts, University of Hong Kong) is on the paintings of the Le Nain brothers in seventeenth-century France. She received her BA in Fine Arts at HKU, MSc at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and BSc at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her most recent publication, “Henrietta Maria as a Mediatrix of French Court Culture: A Reconsideration of the Decorations in the Queen’s House” is collected in Perceiving Power in Early Modern Europe (Springer/Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Ms Cheng is the researcher and docent for the Botticelli Turin Venus Exhibition at the University of Hong Kong Museum of Arts, and co-curator of an exhibition about Klimt and Schiele organized by the Austrian Consulate and HKU. She was awarded The University of Hong Kong Museum Society Chinese Material Culture Prize. Her research interests include art and critical theory, Renaissance and Baroque art, and Song and Yuan art.

Louis Lo: Taiwanese Cinematic Images

Taiwanese art-house cinema is marked by such minimalist cinematic devices as sustained stationary long-take, extensive use of long shot, and an insistence on in-situ lighting. These common features are instanced in Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day and Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Puppetmaster. Through a comparison of their films with South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and Jia Zhang-he, the representative director of the fifth generation Chinese director, this seminar discusses the extent to which these filmic poetics contribute to community-specific (Taiwanese, Asian, or Chinese) cinemas, and attempts to formulate an image theory about cinema in the post-media age.

Louis Lo is Associate Professor at the Department of English, National Taipei University of Technology. He obtained his PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include the history of ideas, the representation of cities in literature and films, and Asian cinema. He is the author of Male Jealousy: Literature and Film (Continuum, 2008), and co-author and photographer (with Jeremy Tambling) of Walking Macao, Reading the Baroque (Hong Kong University Press, 2009). His contributed chapters on literature and the city appear in Dickens and Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), with black-and-white original photography, in Macau: Cultural Interaction and Literary Representation (Routledge, 2014), and Palgrave Handbook of Literature and the City (2017, forthcoming). He publishes journal articles in Textual Practice and Philosophy Study, and contributes critical book reviews in Modern Language Review. A collection of his London black-and-white photographs can also be found in Jeremy Tambling, Going Astray: Dickens and London (Longman, 2009). He is the director and screenplay writer of two shorts about the city, Taipei Astray (2014) and Two Women (2016).

The lectures will be introduced by Eivind Røssaak, former Visiting Professor to the National Taipei University of Technology.

---

Technologies of Space: Verticality, Volume, Infrastructure

The one-day symposium «Technologies of Space: Verticality, Volume, Infrastructure» interrogates recent calls across spatial disciplines to expand space and its mapping from horizontal, plane surface to vertical dimensionality and volume. Lectures by Mark Dorrian, Stuart Elden and Lisa Parks.

Time and place: Mar. 3, 2017 10:00 AM–5:00 PM, Aud. 3 Helga Engs Hus

The symposium is open to all interested, but requires registration. For questions and registration, please contact a.s.johnson@media.uio.no  Participation fee of NOK 100,- covers lunch and refreshments.

Our conception of space is presently undergoing significant changes. While issues concerning the constant redrawing of territories and security measurements caused by increased mobility, organized terror and prolonged colonization continue to gain precedence, we also face an ever intensified and unhinged financial capitalism propelling increased differences along spatial divisions such as gated communities, gentrification of neighborhoods, privatization of public and air space and neoliberal property speculation. This is again linked to the more than human rights concerns of resource deficiency, global warming and climate change and the geological epoch of the Anthropocene. While these changes are simultaneously propelled and remediated by an exponential proliferation of digital and networked technologies, scholarly work often fail to inquire the technological assemblages that produce them.

In geography especially, territory, sovereignty and human experience have long been flattened by a paradoxical reliance on flat maps – and, more recently, aerial and satellite images – projected or imaged from the disembodied bird’s or God’s eye view from high above (Stephen Graham, 2016). This symposium therefore directs particular attention to recent calls across spatial disciplines to expand space and its mapping from horizontal, plane surface to vertical dimensionality and volume. The one-day symposium «Technologies of Space: Verticality, Volume, Infrastructure» interrogates this entwinement by foregrounding its material infrastructures, be it of code or cables, and their experiential, territorial and geopolitical repercussions. In what ways do space and media technologies intersect today to produce new real and imaginative geographies and (thus) new configurations of power? And how could specific issues related to the contemporary productions of space best be approached? How could the different research perspectives and approaches inherent within the major spatial sciences of architecture, geography and infrastructure combine efforts to address such complex issues?

Program

• 09.45: Coffee and registration
• 10:00: Welcome
• 10:15 – 11.50: Chair: Susanne Ø. Sæther
• 10:20: Stuart Elden (University of Warwick): "Terrains Volume"
• 11.20: Q&A
• 11:50: Lunch
• 13:00-14.35: Chair: Eivind Røssaak
• 13:05: Lisa Parks (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Orbital Platforms and Vertical Mediation"
• 14:05: Q&A
• 14:35: Coffee Break
• 15:00-16:35 Chair: Timotheus Vermeulen
• 15:05: Mark Dorrian (University of Edinburgh): "Archaeologies of the Future: On Crypts, Capsules and Catastrophe"
• 16.05: Q&A

The symposium will end before 17:00.

Abstracts

Stuart Elden "Terrains Volume"

If we think about territory’s relation to volume, it is essential to fully account for its materiality. This lecture suggests that terrain is a useful concept to think about the materiality of territory in three dimensions. Terrain combines geophysical issues alongside strategic ones, and shows how we need to go beyond narrow understandings of territory. All attempts at fixing territorial boundaries and shaping territories, and the legal regimes in, above and beyond them are complicated by dynamic features of the Earth. These would include such physical features as rivers, oceans, polar-regions, glaciers, airspace and the sub-surface – both the sub-soil and the sub-marine. Terrain encompasses the built infrastructure, the physical landscape and their interrelation. Terrain makes possible, or constrains, various political, military and strategic projects. It is where the geopolitical and the geophysical meet. How should political-legal understandings of territory and its volume better account for the complexities of the geophysical?

Lisa Parks “Orbital Platforms and Vertical Mediation”

During the 1960s, US leaders celebrated the satellite as a global communication technology that would unify people and countries across the planet and accelerate modernization. By the 1970s, leaders from non-aligned countries perceived these twin dreams of unification and modernization as specious because they had been largely excluded from orbital projects and had yet to reap the benefits of satellite technology. Orbit had become yet another domain of haves and have-nots. Within the historical conjuncture of the war on terror, the politics of orbital control have shifted again. In this talk, I explore US efforts to reassert vertical hegemony after the 9/11 attacks—attacks that spectacularly ruptured US control of aerial, spectral, and orbital domains. Drawing on US military and satellite industry documents, launch records, and international press reports, I discuss a series of high-powered satellites by the National Reconnaissance Office, the refinement and expansion of global positioning satellite systems, and military-corporate partnerships in the satellite sector. I demonstrate that US expansion of orbital platforms has been an integral yet often neglected dimension of the war on terror, which has enabled a new logistics of surveillance defined as vertical mediation.

Mark Dorrian "Archaeologies of the Future: On Crypts, Capsules and Catastrophe"

My talk will examine a specific kind of 'technology of verticality' – that of the time capsule. More particularly, it will focus on the capsules that were buried alongside one another in Flushing Meadows, Queens, where the two mid-century New York World's Fairs were held. Interred respectively in 1939 and 1964, the time capsule idea was developed and promoted by the science-fiction author, rocketeer and publicist G. Edward Pendray, who was employed by the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. Taking his cue from contemporary thanatological projects, most notably Thornwell Jacobs's 'Crypt of Civilisation' at Oglethorpe University, Pendray swept away their dusty necrological associations and in effect reconstituted them for the rocket age in the form of a sleek and shining missile launched through time. In his study of the 19th and early-20th c. 'Century Chests', Nick Yablon has suggested that the 'microscosmic' time capsule emerges within a cultural horizon of catastrophe, and I will explore this theme in relation to the World's Fair capsules. Symptomatically, the contemporary accounts and ceremonies associated with the Westinghouse capsules oscillate between celebrations of endurance and intimations of mortality and collapse. In this regard, the time capsules look like a form of Derridean 'survivance', whereby a civilisation mourns itself in advance – symbolically buries itself through its cultural artifacts – while at the same time laying a claim upon the world-to-come by projecting itself toward a far-future target date.

Biographies

• Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the art, architecture and urbanism atelier Metis. His work spans topics in architecture and urbanism, art history and theory, and media studies. Recent books include Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation and Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture
• Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of seven books, including works on territory, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Henri Lefebvre. He is currently working on aspects of territory in Shakespeare’s plays; on the concept of terrain; on Lefebvre’s writings on rural issues; and the very early Foucault.
• Lisa Parks is Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at MIT. Her research is focused on three areas: satellite technologies and media cultures; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization and surveillance. Before joining the CMS faculty at MIT, Parks was Professor and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she also served as Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke UP, 2005), Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, forthcoming), and Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies (in progress). She is co-editor of: Life in the Age of Drones (Duke UP, forthcoming 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU, 2003).

---

These are Situationist Times: A Symposium on Topology, Culture and Politics

The symposium inaugurates a research, exhibition, digitization and publication project devoted to The Situationist Times (1962-1967), a cultural magazine which experimented with topological approaches to contemporary and historical image cultures. Lectures by Tiziana Terranova, Eric de Bruyn, Mattew Fuller and Jacqueline de Jong, editor of the Situationist Times.

Time and place: Jan. 28, 2017 11:00 AM–5:00 PM, Kunsthall Oslo

The Situationist Times (1962–1967) was one of the more exciting and explorative magazines to come out of the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s. Edited and published by the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (with the pataphysician Noël Arnaud as her co-editor on the first two issues), The Situationist Times was a strange and heretical creation: the international, multilingual journal of a movement from which de Jong had already been expelled.

This symposium inaugurates a research, exhibition, digitization and publication project devoted to The Situationist Times (ST), focusing in particular on the magazine’s engagement with the mathematical field of topology. De Jong’s partner, the Danish artist Asger Jorn, had introduced topological notions in issue #5 of the Internationale Situationniste (the organ of the Situationist International) in 1960, but a situationist topology was never fully developed there. For The Situationist Times de Jong assembled and collated hundreds of found images: labyrinths, rings, weavings, chains. Topological models were, at least in part, the impetus for this endeavor and de Jong and Arnaud also invited the pataphysician and mathematician Max Bucaille to contribute a series of playful and introductory texts on the subject. These experiments come across as particularly pertinent today when, according to some commentators, we are witnessing a “topological turn” in society.

A peculiar notion of constancy through change and deformation is key here. If mathematical topology traditionally is concerned with those properties of space that are preserved under continuous deformation (such as stretching and bending, but not tearing or gluing), the anti-copyright stance of The Situationist Times may be seen as part of a “topological” approach to the transformative dissemination of cultural forms: “All reproduction, deformation, modification, derivation and transformation of the Situationist Times is permitted”.

The symposium takes a dual point of departure: the particularities of the “cultural topologies” of the ST, and the hypothesis, recently put forward by Tiziana Terranova and others, that today culture itself is becoming topological.*

What does it mean for a culture to become topological? Can we trace genealogies of contemporary network culture back to the situationists? Or take the ST as a point of departure for outlining a political topology of contemporary art? How do the topologies of the ST relate to the ubiquitous data structures of our contemporary digital reality?

The symposium requires no background in mathematical topology, but an interest in the mixing of practices and fields of knowledge and creation could be useful.

Speakers will include art historian Eric de Bruyn (Leiden University), media scholar Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths University), artist Axel Heil (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe), sociologist and cultural theorist Tiziana Terranova (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’), and artist Jacqueline de Jong, editor and publisher of the Situationist Times.

Programme

• 10:30-11:00 Coffee and registration
• 11:00-11:30 Ellef Prestsæter: Topology for Dummies
• 11:30-12:15 Eric de Bruyn: On Rat Mazes, Dynamic Labyrinths and Network Diagrams
• 12:30-13:15 Tiziana Terranova: The Becoming Topological of Culture
• 13:15-14:15 Lunch at Kunsthall Oslo
• 14:15-15:00 Mathew Fuller: Vulgar Data Structures: Diagrams, Programs, and Infinity at Your Finger Tips
• 15:00-15:45 Axel Heil: Acting Things Out: Jacqueline de Jong. From Détournement to Sabotage. From Mutant to Topologies
• 16:00-17:00 Jacqueline de Jong in conversation with Ellef Prestsæter
• 17:00-18:30 Reception at Kunsthall Oslo

Speakers

• Eric C. H. de Bruyn is chair of the graduate program of Film and Photographic Studies at the University of Leiden. He is an editor of Grey Room and is currently writing the book Mazes, Loops, Folds: A Political Topology of Contemporary Art. His writings on contemporary art and media have appeared, among other places, in Artforum, Art Journal, Grey Room and Texte zur Kunst. https://ericdebruyn.wordpress.com
• Matthew Fuller is the author of the forthcoming, How to Sleep, in art, biology and culture, (Bloomsbury, Autumn 2017) and How to be a Geek, essays on the culture of software (Polity, Spring 2017).  Other titles include Media Ecologies, materialist energies in art and technoculture (MIT) and, with Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (MIT). He is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.  He is co-editor of the journal Computational Culture  and is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software.
• Axel Heil is an artist, writer and curator. He has studied painting in Karlsruhe, Paris and The Hague, and ethnology in Heidelberg and Berlin. Since 2001 he is professor for “Experimental Transfers” at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe. In 2016 he curated together with Roberto Ohrt the exhibitions Asger Jorn – the Open Hide (Petzel, New York) and Aby Warburg – Mnemosyne Bilderatlas at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, which will be presented at the Warburg Institute, London, in 2017.
• Jacqueline de Jong is an artist living and working in Holland and France. She has exhibited widely since the 1960s, most recently at UMCA in Amherst (Human Animals), at ChateauShatto (Los Angeles and Paris International), and Blum & Poe (Los Angeles, New York, as well as Frieze masters: Monsters of the World, Unite!). Her recent artist’s books include The Case of The Ascetic Satyr, with Asger Jorn (JdJ/DAP, 2015), and Potato Blues: A Psycho-Geography of Potatoes (Onestar Press, 2016).
• Ellef Prestsæter is a founding member of the art and research group the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism and a PhD fellow in art history at the University of Oslo.
• Tiziana Terranova is associate professor of cultural theory and new media studies at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. Together with Celia Lury and Luciana Parisi she edited a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society on “Topologies of Culture” in 2012. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004); and the forthcoming Hypersocial: Digital Networks between the Market and the Common.

---

2016

Trond Lundemo on Early Film Theory as Archive Theory

Trond Lundemo (Stockholm University) will discuss early film theory as archive theory; or - more precisely - the uses and abuses of film theory for thinking the digital.

Time and place: Nov. 25, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 3 Eilert Sundts Hus

Early film theory was often engaged in identifying cinema through comparisons with other arts and media. This comparative aesthetics aimed at locating cinema within an already established as well as emerging media-technological framework of its time, charting differences and continuities with literature, music, painting and theatre, the printing press, gramophone and still photography. By charting the media framework of cinema, early film theory also theorized the analogue archive. Today, moving images exist within a different media network with another connectivity, which asks to be theorized anew. Can early film ’archive theory’ also help us think the reconfigured media networks of digital technologies?

Aout Trond Lundemo

Trond Lundemo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University since 1996. In the same year, he received his PhD for his dissertation entitled “Bildets oppløsning; Filmens bevegelse i historisk og teoretisk perspektiv” (which translates as: “Resolution of Images; Film Movement from a historical and theoretical perspective”). He has been a visiting professor and visiting scholar at the Seijo University of Tokyo on five occasions between 2002 and 2011. In 2012, he was also a visiting professor at Kobe College in Japan. From 2005 to 2008, he worked on the topic of “Image Intersections”, funded by the Swedish Research Council. In 2011, he started another research project, “The Archive in Motion”, funded by the Research Council of Norway. Since 2006, he is co-directing the Stockholm University Graduate School of Aesthetic Sciences. In 2010, he began his work as co-editor of the book series "Film Theory in Media History” at Amsterdam University Press, together with Swiss and German media scholars Vinzenz Hediger and Oliver Fahle. Professor Lundemo is a Steering Committee member of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS). Furthermore, he participates in the research project ”Time, Memory and Representation” at Södertörns University College, Sweden, since 2011.

---

Philosophy of Sculpture: Historical Problems and Contemporary Approaches

A two-day open public workshop on the philosophy of sculpture in its past and present forms. With Sherri Irvin, Andrei Pop, Jason Gaiger, Julia Peters, Fred Rush, Jonathan Gilmore, Robert Hopkins, Ingvild Torsen and Kristin Gjesdal.

Time and place: Oct. 14, 2016 10:00 AM–Oct. 15, 2016 3:30 PM, University of Oslo, Blindern

Philosophy of Sculpture: Historical Problems and Contemporary Approaches

Organized by Ingvild Torsen and Kristin Gjesdal

Sculpture plays a central role in pre-Kantian aesthetics and in the establishment of art history as an academic discipline. As artistic medium, sculpture has been crucial for investigations of materiality, embodiment and touch in art. Further, debates about historicity and modernity have been channeled through the aesthetics of sculpture. Yet, sculpture has received surprisingly little attention in post-Kantian aesthetics, with its tendency to focus on the visual and formal features of art. Throughout lectures and discussions, this workshop seeks to revisit, actualize, and celebrate philosophy of sculpture in its past and present forms.

Friday’s sessions take place in Georg Morgenstiernes Hus, room 452

Saturday’s sessions take place in Georg Sverdrups Hus (the University Library), group room 1 (3rd floor)

Program

Friday October 14, 2016

• Session I: Ingvild Torsen (Chair)
  • 10:00-11:15: Sherri Irvin Inclusion Content in Sculpture
  • 11:30-12:45: Andrei Pop Cubic Form: Carl Einstein's Logicist Definition of Sculpture in 1915
  • 12:45 -14:00 Lunch
• Session II: Kristin Gjesdal (Chair)
  • 14:00-15:15: Jason Gaiger  Ampliative Imagining: Lessing’s Laokoon and Recent Sculptural Practice
  • 15:30-16:45: Julia Peters Hegel on Winckelmann, Classical Sculpture and the Human Figure

Saturday October 15, 2016

• Session III: Kristin Gjesdal (Chair)
  • 10:00-11:15 Fred Rush: Sculpture on the Verge of Architecture: Reflections on Gordon Matta-Clark
  • 11:30-12:45 Jonathan Gilmore: Affect and Artifact: Distinguishing Between Imagination and Inflection in our Feelings for Sculpture
  • 12:45-14:00 Lunch
• Session IV: Ingvild Torsen (Chair)
  • 14:00-15:15 Robert Hopkins: The Visual Presence of the Sculpted Object

Abstracts

Sherri Irvin: Inclusion Content in Sculpture

It is a familiar fact in contemporary sculpture that the objects and materials of which the work is constructed may contribute to the range of meanings appropriate to it: the facts that Willie Cole’s sculpture Shine (2007) is made of shoes, that Kara Walker’s monumental A Subtlety (2014) was made of sugar and molasses, and that El Anatsui’s wall-hung sculpture Dusasa II (2007) is made from liquor bottle tops are frequently appealed to in critical appreciations of these works.

However, philosophical discussions of sculptural content have tended to focus on three-dimensional analogs of pictorial representation, with emphasis on form rather than on the nature of the materials. Here, I develop an analysis of inclusion content, which is content a sculptural work possesses by virtue of the specific materials or objects it includes and, in some instances, the histories of these materials or objects.

Andrei Pop: Cubic Form: Carl Einstein's Logicist Definition of Sculpture in 1915

Philosophical accounts of single arts may aim at a logical definition (the classic analytical approach) or at an account of the typical experience elicited by it (the classic phenomenological approach). But what if the former is trivial and the latter incompatible with the essence of the object type? I will give a logicist reading of Carl Einstein's Negerplastik, emphasizing its rejection of psychological or reception-oriented perspectives in its concept of cubic form and what we can learn more broadly from it about philosophical definition in the arts.

Jason Gaiger: Ampliative Imagining: Lessing’s Laokoon and Recent Sculptural Practice

This paper takes the 250th anniversary of the publication of Lessing's Laokoon (1766) as an opportunity to consider the contemporary relevance of Lessing's ideas. Drawing on Anthony Savile’s distinction between ‘ampliative’ and ‘projective’ imagining, I argue that Lessing’s account of imaginative engagement is not restricted to representational art forms, but that it can also be used to cast light on some relevant examples of non-figurative or object-based three-dimensional work.

Julia Peters: Hegel on Winckelmann, Classical Sculpture and the Human Figure

Hegel claims that the central content and form of sculpture in general – and of ancient Greek sculpture in particular – is the human figure. In this talk I look at the assumptions and arguments in Hegel which support this claim, paying particular attention to Hegel’s reading of Winckelmann. This sheds novel light on central tenets of Hegel’s aesthetics, including his understanding of artistic form and content, and of the relation between (human) nature and art.

Fred Rush: Sculpture on the Verge of Architecture: Reflections on Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts from the mid- to late-1970s provide concrete examples of art that seeks to challenge basic standard artistic categories.  The categories in question are perhaps as basic as they come, i.e. ones having to do with art modalities, here architecture and sculpture.  Matta-Clark meant the building cuts to instantiate principles of ontology that are recognizably sculptural in their inception but that verge on architecture and that, in so doing, offer criticism of both the purported limits of sculpture and of architecture.  In particular, his conception of the relation of negative and positive space and an allied rethinking of the relation of foreground to background were meant to unseat standard ways of thinking of sculpture and architecture as separate.  This paper investigates this ontological framework and Matta-Clark’s claims that his work ushers in new dimensions in experiencing art, by looking in some depth at three main works: Splitting, Conical Section, and Circus or the Caribbean Orange.

Jonathan Gilmore: Affect and Artifact: Distinguishing Between Imagination and Inflection in our Feelings for Sculpture

I address the relation between two sources of our affective experience in engaging with a work of sculpture. One of these is the content of the imagining that the work elicits: e.g., in encountering Bernini’s Rape of Persephone, our anguish follows from imagining what is represented before us to be in some sense actual.  By contrast, the second source of our response is the material or medium of the artifact itself: e.g., the way the translucency of marble leads us to hold certain things to be true of what it is employed to represent that another sort of material, such as bronze, would not.  To appeal to sources of the first kind in grounding our emotions is to adopt an internal perspective on the work—to describe it as if from within the imagined state of affairs it represents.  To appeal to sources of the second kind is to adopt an external perspective on the work—to describe how, as an artifact before us, it elicits certain feelings.  I ask how these two putatively distinct dimensions of a work can generate a unitary emotional response.

Robert Hopkins: The Visual Presence of the Sculpted Object

To see a representational sculpture with understanding is, one might think, to be in some way visually presented with what it represents, its object. But in what way? The question is about the kind of presence sculpted objects have, not the means by which they are made present. While answers might be found in certain accounts of sculptural representation, I pursue the question at a more basic level: what kind of presence ought such an account aim to capture? In particular, I ask how the visual presence of objects represented sculpturally relates to the visual presence of objects represented in pictures. Is there one phenomenon here, achieved by different means? Or is the mode in which sculpted objects are present significantly different from that of depicted scenes?

About the participants

• Jason Gaiger is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, UK. His main research interests are in aesthetics and art theory from the mid-seventeenth century through to the present day with a special emphasis on theories of depiction and visual meaning.
• Jonathan Gilmore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York.  His current research interests are in the philosophy of art, the emotions, and the nature of the imagination.  His art criticism appears in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, and other monographs and periodicals.
• Kristin Gjesdal is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Temple University, USA, and Professorial Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research is on various aspects on modern German philosophy, and especially the development of German aesthetics from early 18th Century, with an emphasis on hermeneutics and the philosophy of dramatic arts.
• Robert Hopkins is Professor of Philosophy at New York University, USA. His research interests are in aesthetics and philosophy of mind. As well in general questions concerning the status and epistemology of aesthetic judgement, he has worked on pictorial representation and picture perception; the aesthetics of sculpture, photography, painting and film; and on other mental states that relate in interesting ways to our perception of pictures.
• Sherri Irvin is Presidential Research Professor of Philosophy and Women's and Gender Studies, at the University of Oklahoma, USA. Her main research interests in the philosophy of art concern questions about contemporary art and its ontology, everyday aesthetics and the body. She also works in philosophy of race and social justice.
• Julia Peters is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the university of Tübingen, Germany. Her research is in ethics and aesthetics, and her main interests in the latter are the aesthetic theories Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy, especially the role of beauty in Hegel’s philosophy of art.        
• Andrei Pop is Associate Professor at the Committee of Social Thought, University of Chicago, USA. He is an art historian with research interests in the intersection between art theory and history, and has written on and translated various eighteenth and nineteenth-century figures.
• Fred Rush is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, USA. His main research interests are in aesthetics, social and political philosophy, and the history of Continental Philosophy, and include work on architecture, German idealism and romanticism, and critical theory.
• Ingvild Torsen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research interests in aesthetics are in the development of late modern theories of art, especially Heidegger’s philosophy of art, and the role of the body in modern art and theory.

---

Multilingual Poetics: with Yoko Tawada, Juliette Taylor-Batty and Finn Fordham

Symposium in cooperation with the research group Traveling Texts, University of Oslo

Time and place: Oct. 13, 2016 1:00 PM–4:00 PM, Aud 6, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern

Many literary authors live and work in several languages. This has allowed some authors to stretch the limits imposed on them by one of their languages, exploring the other language through self-translation or multilingual text production. Multilingualism has even allowed authors to enter the field of world literature; some of the most famous cases are Beckett’s and Strindberg’s self-translations into and writings in French, and James Joyce’s multilingual work Finnegans Wake.

The symposium will explore thematic and aesthetic aspects of literary works by authors who change and/or work simultaneously in more than one language. What could the interpretive consequences be of experiments with multilingualism in contemporary literature? And furthermore, how can multilingual works be interpreted in light of the contemporary globalized media situation?

Program

• 13.00 Christian Janss and Christian Refsum introduces the symposium
• 13.15 Yōko Tawada (Berlin): Readability of the Foreign
• 14:00 Coffee Break
• 14.15–16
  • Juliette Taylor-Batty (Leeds Trinity University): Modernism/Translation/Plagiarism
  • Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway, London): A ‘tour of bibel’:  Finnegans Wake as a multilingual exemplar

About Yōko Tawada

Yōko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published about 20 books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, and her novel of Catherine Deneuve obsession, The Naked Eye. (Swedish translation available)

About Juliette Taylor-Batty

Juliette Taylor-Batty is Associate Principle Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University. She is the author of Multilingualism in Modernist Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and of a range of articles and chapters on James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie and Eugene Jolas. She is co-author (with Mark Taylor-Batty) of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (Continuum, 2009). Her current book project examines the relationship between modernist writers’ work as translators and their ‘original’ writing, with specific focus on the explicit use of translation for compositional purposes, unacknowledged use of sources (including purported cases of plagiarism), and deliberately appropriative forms of translation.

About Finn Fordham

Finn Fordham received a first in English from Trinity College, Cambridge, and, funded by the British Academy, went on to write a doctoral thesis at Birkbeck College with Steven Connor. The publication of his thesis (in part about Lucia Joyce) was blocked by the James Joyce Estate. After a year teaching at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, he became a research fellow at University College Northampton, and then secured a Special Research Fellowship with the Leverhulme Trust to carry out research into Textual Genetics and Modernism. He became lecturer in 20th Century Literature at Nottingham in 2003 where he secured funding from the AHRC leave scheme.  In January 2008 he moved to Royal Holloway where he became a Reader from April 2010, and a Professor in 2015.  He has been invited to present on his work at Universities in Oxford, Dublin, Prague, Trieste, Belgrade, Beijing, Bergen, St Andrews, Aberystwyth, Geneva, Curitiba, and the School of Advanced Studies in London. He lives in Oxford, is married and has two children.

Fordham’s research is focused on James Joyce, Modernism and 20th Century writing, specialising in Finnegans Wake, in genetic approaches to various texts, and uses of the cultural archive.  He has published widely in a range of journals and collections — on Geoffrey Hill and Derek Walcott, on Nabokov and Rushdie, on Zionism and Utopia, on DeLillo, Danielewski and Foster Wallace, and on Thomas Traherne. Work on Joyce has taken in such topics as China, music, censorship, Victor Hugo, Rudyard Kipling, and Television. He edited Finnegans Wake for Oxford World Classics (2012), and is currently working on an archivally informed Oulipean study of culture on a single momentous day - September 3rd, 1939, when Britain and France declared war on Germany.

---

ForArt 2016 Lecture and Seminar with Sianne Ngai

In this year's ForArt lecture, Sianne Ngai (Stanford University) will present Theory of the Gimmick - her new book on the gimmicky artwork as a capitalist aesthetic category.

Time and place: Sep. 9, 2016 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Amalie Skram-salen

Theory of the Gimmick

This talk explores the gimmick as a capitalist aesthetic category: a perceptual form linked in a relatively consistent way to an affective judgment or speech act. When we say that a made object is gimmicky we mean we “see through it;” that there is an undesired transparency about how an aspect of it has been produced and why. The contrived or gimmicky artwork thus confronts us with an object that would seem to undermine its own aesthetic power simply by calling attention to the process by which its effects have been devised. Sianne Ngai explores the mix of attraction and repulsion, of contempt and admiration that the gimmick elicits, exploring its implications in forms specific to capitalist culture spanning from the nineteenth century to the present.

NB! Saturday September 10, Litteraturhuset (Kjelleren) 15:00-17:00: Presentation and panel discussion about Sianne Ngai's influential 2012 book, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. With Stian Gabrielsen, Sara Orning and Gustav Jørgen Pedersen.

About Sianne Ngai

Sianne Ngai is Professor at Stanford University and specializes in American literature, literary and cultural theory, and feminist studies. Her books are Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Harvard University Press, 2012), winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize and the PCA/ACA Ray and Pat Browne award for Best Reference or Best Primary Source Work; and Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2005).  Sections of both books have been translated into Swedish, Italian, German, Slovenian, Portugese, and (forthcoming) Japanese. Her new book in process, Theory of the Gimmick, explores the "gimmick" as encoding a relation to labor (the gimmicky artwork irritates us because it seems to be working too hard to get our attention, but also not working hard enough), and as the inverted image of the modernist "device" celebrated by Victor Shklovsky.

Ngai was a recipient of a 2007-08 Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and in 2014-15 was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin, Germany. In 2015 she was awarded an honorary D. Phil in Humanities from the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark.

---

Tarek El-Ariss on The Leaking Subject

In this lecture, Tarek El-Ariss (University of Austin, Texas), will examine the question of leaking as a political practice (think WikiLeaks) as well as a fictional order involving storytelling and anticipation.

Time and place: June 1, 2016 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Aud. 5, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern

This talk examines leaking both as a political practice involving hacking and circulation and as a fictional order involving storytelling and anticipation. From the Arabian Nights to WikiLeaks, leaks operate as illicit texts that reveal, threaten, and engulf. Associated with involuntary bodily functions, leaking excludes leakers from the community by isolating, exiling, or incarcerating them as a way of controlling a contamination, containing a rupture, and interrupting a narrative flow. Specifically, the talk examines how the leaker becomes constituted in the event of the leak, becoming body in danger, in prison, oozing fluids and data. The talk shows how leakers are no longer authors of a text whose meaning they can define or control, but rather become constituted retrospectively through the fiction of the leak as public intellectuals, criminals, traitors, or heroes.

About Tarek El-Ariss

Tarek El-Ariss (PhD, Cornell 2004) is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (2015-16). He is author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (Fordham UP, 2013) and editor of The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (1800s-1900s) (Modern Language Association, 2017). His current book project examines the way that cyber modes of confrontation, circulation, and exhibitionism shape contemporary writing practices and critiques of power.

---

Gertrud Koch: The Human Body as Generic Form. On Anthropomorphism in Media

In this lecture Gertrud Koch will examine the relationship between the human body, technology and media considered through models of cooperation rather than antagonism.

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2016 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, A-blokka: Auditorium 3

The relationship between the human body, technology and media is mostly discussed in terms of determination and domination: the body determines the technologies (prosthetic model); or technology and the whole technological complex determine what the human body will be (cyborg model) etc. Instead I try to look at the body as a generic form that cohabits with technical objects in a shared practice and world. Modern thoughts on this relationship as social fabric reach from Max Weber to Gilbert Simondon. The model of cooperation rather than antagonistic domination can be studied in the production of special effects in films and video art from where the cases will be taken from.

About Gertrud Koch

Gertrud Koch teaches Cinema Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her many books and articles deal with aesthetic theory, feminist film theory, as well as questions of historical representation. She has written books on Herbert Marcuse and Siegfried Kracauer, the latter coming out in English in 2005 at Princeton UP, on feminist film theory and on the representation of Jewish history. She has edited volumes on Holocaust representation, perception and interaction, art and film theory. She is co-editor and board member of numerous German and international journals, such as Babylon, Frauen und Film, October, Constellations, Philosophy & Social Criticism. She has been Visiting Professor and Scholar at Columbia University, NYU, Washington University, at UIC, UPenn, the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, the Sorbonne III in Paris, and many others.

In conjunction with her lecture, Koch will hold a PhD workshop.

---

Ina Blom: Inside Equipment: The Autobiography of Video and the Transformation of the Artist's Studio

Kunsthistorisk Forening hosts this lecture on the occasion of the launch of Ina Blom's new book The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (New York: Sternberg Press, 2016).

Time and place: Apr. 6, 2016 7:00 PM, Kunstnernes Hus, Wergelandsveien 17

How should we think «studio practice» in the age of new media? In "Machine in the Studio. Constructing the Postwar American Artist" (1996), Caroline Jones traced an evolution where the isolated artist studios, inhabited by the painter-heroes of abstract expressionism, gives way to the quasi-industrial workplaces of Frank Stella and Andy Warhol. Yet a very different conception of artistic labor and its relation to technology emerges in early analog video art, where a number of works foreground the idea of a studio "inside the machine", literally displaced to the «unknown» realm of live electronic modulation. At this point artistic labor is no longer associated with mass production, but with emerging postindustrial accounts of labor as invention, and new conceptions of human/technical collectivity. Such works are instances of the autobiography of video: analog video’s exploration of new forms of technical/social memory and alternative social ontologies.

About Ina Blom

Ina Blom is a professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo and an art critic at Artforum, and Texte zur Kunst. Recent publications include "On the Style Site. Art, Sociality and Media Culture" (New York: Sternberg Press, 2007/2009) and "Raoul Hausmann et les avant-gardes" (ed. with Timothy Benson and Hanne Bergius); Paris: Les Presses du Reel, 2015. The edited volume "Memory in Motion. Archives, Technology and the Social" is forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press in May 2016.

---

Transformations of Musical Modernism

Book launch and panel discussion with Erling E. Guldbrandsen, Lars Petter Hagen, Natasha Barrett, Darla M. Crispin and Stan Hawkins. Musical performance by Tanja Orning, Anders Førisdal and Peter Edwards.

Time and place: Jan. 19, 2016 6:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Oslo (Amalie Skram-salen)

Book launch and panel discussion on the occasion of the publication of Transformations of Musical Modernism (eds.: Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson. Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Profound transformations in the composition, performance and reception of modernist music have taken place in recent decades. This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the forms that musical modernism takes today, how modern music is performed and heard, and its relationship to earlier music. In sixteen chapters, leading figures in the field and emerging scholars examine modernist music from the inside, in terms of changing practices of composition, musical materials and overarching aesthetic principles, and from the outside, in terms of the changing contextual frameworks in which musical modernism has taken place and been understood. Shaped by a 'rehearing' of modernist music, the picture that emerges redraws the map of musical modernism as a whole and presents a full-scale re-evaluation of what the modernist movement has all been about.
 

Program

• Erling E. Guldbrandsen (Professor, Dept. of Musicology, University of Oslo): "Transformations of Musical Modernism," introduction
• Lars Petter Hagen (Composer; Director of Ultima Oslo International Contemporary Music Festival): "Rethinking Modernism"
• Natasha Barrett (Composer; Researcher at Department of Musicology, Univeristy of Oslo): "Rewriting Modernism"
• Darla M. Crispin (Associate Professor; Head of Arne Nordheim Centre, Norwegian Academy of Music): "Replaying Modernism"
• Moderator: Stan Hawkins (Professor, Dept. of Musicology, UiO)

Musical performances by:

• Tanja Orning, Cello
• Anders Førisdal, Guitar
• Peter Edwards, Keyboard

Refreshments
 
Free Entrance / Open to all interested

---

2015

Imaging Technologies (with Patricia Pisters, Siegfried Zielinski, Matthias Bruhn)

A one-day symposium on image technologies and imaging practices with Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam) Siegfried Zielinski (European Graduate School, Saas-Fee) and Matthias Bruhn (Humboldt University, Berlin).

Time: Dec. 3, 2015

To an increasing extent, imaging technologies are integral to the ways we understand our situation, position and roles in society. This situation is mediated, constituted and upheld through technological images. In our image-obsessed and image-dependent culture, socializing practices are facilitated and quasi-automatized through imaging processes. Analyzing imaging technologies in a range of social situations of cultural and political significance, this symposium aims to create a productive distance, to open up a space for culture to look at itself looking – to image and imagine.

Program

• 10:00: Susanne Østbye Sæther introduces the symposium
• 10:15: Introduction of Patricia Pisters
• 10:20: Patricia Pisters: "Follow the Metal: Mines, Media and Minds"
• 11:50: Lunch
• 13:00: Introduction of Matthias Bruhn
• 13:05: Matthias Bruhn: "Piction - Images as Objects of Operation"
• 14:35: Coffee break
• 14:55: Introduction of Siegfried Zielinski
• 15:00: Siegfried Zielinski: "On Deep Time of Techno-Imagination. Past & Future Connected as Potential Spaces"

The symposium ends around 16:40.

Presenters

Patricia Pisters

Patricia Pisters is professor of film studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies. She is programme director of the research group Neuraesthetics and Neurocultures and co-director (with Josef Fruchtl) of the research group Film and Philosophy. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003); Mind the Screen(ed. with Jaap Kooijman and Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, 2008) and  The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012). Her latest book Filming for the Future is on the work of documentary filmmaker Louis van Gasteren (Amsterdam University Press, 2015). For articles, her blog and other information see also www.patriciapisters.com.

Matthias Bruhn

Matthias Bruhn (Ph. D., Hamburg 1997) is an art historian and research associate at Humboldt University Berlin where he directs the research group The Technical Image, and a principal investigator and steering committee member of the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung – An Interdisciplinary Laboratory that aims at a comparative analysis of design processes in the humanities and the sciences. His main fields of interest are the ‘art history of science’, i.e. the contribution of artistic and aesthetic pratices to the production of knowledge; changing concepts of the image in relation to the evolution of modern media; and the role of imagery in the context of political iconology. He is the editor, with Claudia Blümle and Horst Bredekamp, of the bi-annual book series Bildwelten des Wissens established in 2003.

Siegfried Zielinski

Siegfried Zielinski is a professor of mediology and technoculture at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He is also the Chair of Media Theory – with a focus on Archaeology and Variantology of Media – in the Institute for Time Based Media at the Berlin University of Arts. He has recently been appointed rector of Karslruhe University of Arts and Design. Zielinski has published more than a dozen books and far over 150 essays, primarily in the areas of media history and theory. His most recent monographic book is published in 2014, in both English and German, titled Over the Head – Projecting Archaeology & Variantology of Arts & Media. Other recent publications include Deep Time of the Media – Towards an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, which was published by MIT Press (Cambridge MA, 2006), and from 2007 to 2008 he worked on a five volume book series on Variantology – Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies. Amongst others, Siegfried Zielinski was elected a member of the European Film Academy (EFA), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste), and the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain.

Abstracts

Patricia Pisters: Follow the Metal: Mines, Media and Minds.

At the beginning of Wim Wenders’s documentary film The Salt of the Earth (2014) photographer Sebastiao Salgado, describes how at the border of the immense human anthill of the Serra Pelada gold mine in the 1980s, he saw in a flash the entire history of humanity: the construction of the pyramids, the tower of Babel, the gold mines of King Solomon. Salgado’s famous photos of the Serra  Pelada are the starting point of my presentation in which I’ll try to ‘follow the metal’ and connect our technological imag(in)ing to the metallic materiality of our contemporary media culture. This presentation is part of a larger project on the filmmaker as metallurgists that bend and shape our collective consciousness by mining the archives of our audio-visual past.  Filmmakers, however, are not just smiths of sorts in a metaphoric way. I will look at the geological dimensions of our media culture by following a nugget of gold, a piece of silver and other metals in their metallurgic transformations into material forms, images and stories that construct our world.

Matthias Bruhn: Piction – Images as Objects of Operation

“Image Guidance” is a recent concept to describe the active role of imaging technologies in combination with other instruments of operation. A widespread example is screen-based devices employed in operation theaters that are directly connected with surgical or radiological tools, often enhanced by further virtual and augmented reality applications. Due to the increased role of imaging as a means of diagnosis and therapy, this short-circuiting of technologies leads to an almost inseparable fusion of information – here referred to as piction – with direct effects on the users’ navigation and interventions, in particular under the real-time conditions of clinical practice. Since this fundamental change involves a large variety of disciplines and practices in respect to epistemological, medical, computational, practical and aesthetic aspects (currently under investigation by a specialized research group in Berlin), the paper takes a step back in order to dissect these different layers and to discuss the possible contribution of fields such as art history or media aesthetic.

Siegfried Zielinski: On Deep Time of Techno-Imagination. Past & Future Connected as Potential Spaces

In Order to secure a rich future for creation by and through technical means, it is very necessary that we allow the objects of our desire as researchers a past that is at least just as rich and multifarious as we hope the future will be. Methodologically I would go even further: It is logical to couple the desired diversity and heterogeneity that marches with the arrow of time pointing forward with the confusing multiplicities of past and submerged present-days. An Archaeology and Variantology of media, in the way that I practise it, is basically a special type of game with potentialities, with space of possibility. Just as we are little inclined to accept a future that is pre-programmed technologically, we are not in agreement with historians or physicists who see history as a collection of given columns of facts that must be ploughed through in a linear fashion.

---

Sean Cubitt on "Political Aesthetics"

In this lecture, Sean Cubitt, Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmith's University, London, will reconsider the political work of media aeshtetics in light of shifting understandings of the political and the aesthetic in the 21 century. Open to all.

Time and place: Nov. 19, 2015 2:00 PM–4:00 PM, Eilert Sundts hus, A-blokka: Auditorium 3

Sean Cubitt on Political Aesthetics

This paper stems from observing a diminution of address to questions of politics in much of the work in media and perhaps most of all in cinema studies. In three books I have asked myself what cinema does, how visual media work, and what are they made of. The last of these, on environmental impacts of digital media, comes to the conclusion that economics, politics and society are conceptually and in practice inadequate to the task of repairing or reversing the contemporary catastrophes, from the intimate anecdotes of identity politics to global and non-human climate change. Instead I find that mediation, and more narrowly communication, is both the means and the goal of political life. Thus the task I set myself is to reconsider the political work of media aesthetics. This in turn requires, as a preliminary and perhaps as the major task, asking what we might mean by 'political' in the 21st century, and what we might understand by 'aesthetic'. In the early sketches I hope to present to the seminar, I suggest that the core terms for an enquiry into aesthetics might be Truth, Beauty and The Good. As to the political, the Aristotelean question still remains significant: what are the relations distinguishing ethics, friendship and politics? At what scales, from 'the personal is the political' to 'think global, act local', is politics undertaken?

Contemporary politics is anaesthetic, in the sense that it disavows the imagination that allows us to inhabit this world differently, or to inhabit different worlds imaginatively. Conversely, the media are themselves political in the sense that the governance of norms and standards frames, constrains and informs the imaginative potential of media cultures. Is it prudent or indeed politic, in a time when the conduct of politics is universally mediated, to reverse Walter Benjamin's maxim, and argue that it is time to aestheticise politics?

About Sean Cubitt

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and television and joint Head of Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. He is the author of The Cinema Effect (2005, MIT Press), and The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technology from Prints to Pixels (2014, MIT Press). Cubitt is the editor of the Leonardo book series, MIT Press, and is on the boards of a number of journals, including Screen, Visual Communication and Futures. Cubitt's research focuses on the history of visual technologies, media art history, and relationships between environmental and post-colonial criticism of film and media, three strands that converge around the political aesthetics.

The lecture is open to all interested.

---

"Living Together". Roland Barthes 100th Anniversary Celebration

The Seminar of Aesthetics celebrates the 100th anniversary of Roland Barthes on November 5-6 with lectures, workshops and round-table debates focused on Barthes' 1977 lecture series Comment vivre ensemble (How to Live Together). The events take place at the University of Oslo and Litteraturhuset (see program below). All lectures and workshops are open and public. No registration needed.

Time: Nov. 5, 2015–Nov. 6, 2015

In November 2015 The Seminar of Aesthetics will celebrate the French thinker Roland Barthes (1915-1980) with workshops, lectures and a round table debate. The ideological context is Barthes' extensive manuscript to a series of lectures at the Collège de France in 1977, called Comment vivre ensemble. Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens (published 2002; eng. trans. How to Live Together. Novelistic Simulations of some Everyday Spaces, 2013). In this text Barthes develops a particular system of 30 concepts in order to study so called idiorrhythmic life forms, that is, social connections which are capable of protecting the individual's need for tranquillity and contemplation and at the same time to accept other people's idiorrhythms.

Barthes investigates such life forms from early hermit communities, via Middle age monastic societies up to modern life institutions (like sanatoriums). As Barthes writes, the hermits of ancient times did not only live alone in their isolated places, they also participated in communities and social systems. A parallel situation, or structure, may be found in our own days, e.g. in the big cities, where a vast part of the population live in single households, and participate in society through work or various meeting places. The argument that Barthes outlines for investigating "living together" is highly relevant to reflection on new, modern forms of life.

Program

Thursday

• 10:15-12:00 Aud. 3, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern
  • Theme: Roland Barthes on "How to live together?" (Workshop in norwegian)
  • Chair: students from ILOS
  • Posts by: Frederik Tygstrup, Kjersti Bale, Hilde Bondevik
• 13:15-15:00 Aud. 2, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern
  • Theme: Distance and nearness
  • Chair: Johan Schimanski
  • Posts by: Reinhold Görling, Inga Bostad
• 16:00-18:00 Aud. 3 Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern
  • Chair: Karin Gundersen
  • Yves Hersant: "Idiorythmie: Roland Barthes and Pascal Quignard"
  • Hans Hauge: "Roland Barthes: Protestantism, Conservatism and Antimodernism (Philip Thody/Antoine Compagnon)"

Friday

• 09:15-11:00 Aud. 3 Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern
  • Theme: "ECOUTE/LISTEN" (Workshop in norwegian)
  • Chair: Christian Refsum
  • Posts by: Arne Melberg, Hallgjerd Aksnes       
• 13:15-15:00 Aud. 3 Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern
  • Theme: "ANIMAUX/ANIMALS"
  • Chair: Peter J.Meedom
  • Posts by: Michael Lundblad, Peter Valeur
• 17:00-19:00 Litteraturhuset, Wergelandsalen
  • Panel debate: "How to live together?" (debate in norwegian)
  • Chair: Knut Stene-Johansen
  • Participants: Karin Gundersen, Vigdis Hjort, Iver Neumann, Thomas Hylland Eriksen

---

ForArt Lecture 2015 with Tom Eccles

This year's FORART Lecturer is Tom Eccles, Director for the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York. He will discuss his evolving curatorial practice from public spaces in New York to experimental exhibitions, artistic production and monumental installations.

Time and place: Oct. 27, 2015 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Kunstnernes Hus

---

Philippe-Alain Michaud on The Image in Motion. Aby Warburg or the Staging of Art History

In this lecture, Philippe-Alain Michaud (Paris) will discuss Aby Warburg's cinematographic approach to art history and the question of reactivating the past.

Time and place: May 30, 2015 1:00 PM–3:00 PM, Stenersenmuseet (Diorama)

The image in motion. Aby Warburg; or the staging of art history

Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the great German art historian who founded the school of iconology and lent his name to the famous Warburg Institute (today based in London), also accomplished a drastic displacement of the concepts on which the discipline founded its main principles. This displacement has so far not been analysed in its ultimate consequences. In his studies of the Renaissance, Warburg was no longer trying to interpret or analyse the visual facts of the past. Instead he wanted to reactivate the past, thus changing the very meaning of the notion of representation: knowledge was not conceived as discourse, but as re-presentation taking place on a stage. To understand this shift, one has to go back to the journey Warburg made in 1895 to Arizona, where he attended Hopi rituals, and to the consequences of this journey – the invention of a new art historical method founded on the ideas of projection and montage, borrowed from the recently born technology of film.

About Philippe Alain Michaud

Philippe Alain Michaud is curator at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in charge of the film collection. He is the author of Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York, Zone Books, 2006) and has written extensively on the relationships between art and film. He has also curated a number of exhibitions dedicated to the same topics.

---

2014

Charles Wilson: Listening in the Contemporary Moment

In this lecture, part of the conference ‘Listening to the Twentieth Century and Beyond’, Charles Wilson (Cardiff University) will examine the idea of the ‘contemporary’ and the forms of attention it fosters in relation to music

Time and place: Nov. 12, 2014 9:30 AM–10:15 AM, Aud. U35 Helga Engs Hus, Blindern

Listening in the Contemporary Moment

With notions of ‘postmodernism’ falling increasingly out of fashion and favour, ‘contemporary’ has been reinstated, perhaps by default, as the ubiquitous and seemingly neutral descriptor of the ‘epoch’ in which we find ourselves.  But, leaving aside its evidently problematic nature as a chronological category, the ‘substantivized’ contemporary (to use Lionel Ruffel’s term), while increasingly discussed in the fields of literature and art history, has received little attention in studies of music, at least in terms of its qualitative and chronotopic dimensions. If the contemporary (con-temporalis) is about moving with the times, what sort of times are we moving with?  Is the temporality of the contemporary radically different from that of the modern?  And in what ways might the ubiquity of the concept have affected the attitudes and postures of listeners, composers and, indeed, promoters of music? The paper will suggest that this seemingly omnivorous category is ultimately just as ideologically freighted as the modern, and its effects on the ways in which we attend to music – in the sense of both listening to it and valuing it – potentially no less determinate and far-reaching.

About Charles Wilson

Charles Wilson is currently Director of Education at the School of Music, Cardiff University, and was senior subject editor for twentieth-century composers on the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. He served as editor-in-chief (2009–12) of the journal Twentieth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press).  His research focuses on the relationship between historiography and practice (both personal and institutional) in the art music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Outside academia, he is vice-chair and programmer of Arcomis, a new music organization based in Cardiff.

Contact person: Erling E. Guldbrandsen, e.e.guldbrandsen@imv.uio.no

---

Branden W. Joseph: A Crystal Web Image of Horror: Paul Sharits' Structural and Substructural Mandala Films

In this lecture, Branden W. Joseph (Columbia University) will discuss the films of American avant-garde filmmaker Paul Sharits (1943-1993) - a leading member of the so-called structual film movement.

Time and place: Nov. 4, 2014 4:15 PM–6:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern

A Crystal Web Image of Horror: Paul Sharits’ Early Structural and Substructural Cinema

The work of the artist and filmmaker Paul Sharits has been associated with the genre of  “structural film “ ever since P. Adams Sitney codified it in an essay of that title in 1969.  As such, Sharits’ work—including his “flicker films” of rapidly alternating color frames and his “locational” film installations—has been discussed, with scant exception, as a cinema of abstract, modernist self-reflexivity addressed to the mind even more than the eye.

Yet, an examination of Sharits’ most celebrated early films—including Ray Gun Virus, Piece Mandala, and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G—his relationship to Fluxus, and aspects of his archive reveals an entirely different set of concerns,  centered on narrative, expression, bodily excess, social and political events, as well as the writings of Jack Smith, William S. Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, and Timothy Leary.  Drawing upon extensive archival research, this presentation seeks to approach  aspects of Sharits’ production that prevailing theories of structural film repress or preclude.  The result is an understanding of Sharits’ own conception of his earliest and most consequential work and a theorization of his film that undermines the view of modernist autonomy as the ultimate significance of his career.

About Branden W. Joseph

Branden W. Joseph is the Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.  He is the author of Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage (Zone Books, 2008), a modest sequel, The Roh and the Cooked: Tony Conrad and Beverly Grant in Europe (August Verlag, 2012), Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works (ed. Christopher Eamon; Steidl, 2005), and Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press 2003), which appeared in French translation on Éditions (SIC).  His writings have also appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, Critical Inquiry, October, Texte zur Kunst, Parkett, and Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, as well as in such books and catalogues as Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (2011), Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties (2012), Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (2012), and Angela Bulloch: Prime Numbers (2006).  He was also a founding editor and currently member of the editorial board of Grey Room, a journal of architecture, art, media, and politics, published quarterly by the MIT Press since 2000.

---

The ForArt Lecture 2014. Catherine Malabou on Plasticity: The Phoenix, the Spider and the Salamander

In this lecture, Catherine Malabou, Professor at the Center for European Modern Philosophy, Kingston University (UK), will discuss the concept of plasticity that has been central to her work at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience.

Time and place: Sep. 11, 2014 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Oslo

Catherine Malabou on her topic

In this lecture, I would like to present the concept of plasticity which has become a major category in philosophy, arts, psychology, but also and mainly neurobiology and cell biology, to just name a few. Starting with a general definition of this concept, I will then analyse how it helps us to move away from previous conceptions of the relationship between subjectivity and materiality and open new ones, which include a new vision of the mind, the body, and of meaning all together. In order to tie together all these questions, I chose to interpret a sentence, taken from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit : “The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.” This sentence, Hegel speaks of speaks of “recovery,” of healing, of the return, of the reconstitution of the skin after a wound, that is, of plasticity. I would like to suggest that three readings of this sentence are possible: a dialectical reading, a deconstructive reading, and a third reading that I will call post-deconstructive. This will help me to stage three moments of the history of philosophy : Hegelianism, deconstruction and post-deconstruction. These three readings come from three ways of understanding recovery, healing, reconstitution, return, or regeneration. I will present these three readings via three paradigms of recovery: the paradigm of the phoenix, the paradigm of the spider, and the paradigm of the salamander. Each time, I will see how the central meanings of plasticity (forming, explosion, healing) are always and intimately linked together.

About Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou, Professor at the Center for European Modern Philosophy at Kingston University, graduated from the École Normale Supérieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines (Fontenay-Saint-Cloud). Her agrégation and doctorate were obtained, under the supervision of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Her dissertation became the book, The Future of Hegel, Plasticity, Temporality, Dilaectic (Routledge, 2005). Central to Malabou's philosophy is the concept of "plasticity," which she derives in part from the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and from medical science, for example, from work on stem cells and from the concept of neuroplasticity. In 1999, Malabou published Counterpath, co-authored with Derrida. Her book, The New Wounded (Fordham 2011), concerns the intersection between neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, thought through the phenomenon of trauma. Coinciding with her exploration of neuroscience has been an increasing commitment to political philosophy. This is first evident in her book What Should We Do With Our Brain? (Fordham 2006) and continues in in her book on feminism (Changing Difference, Polity books 2012).

---

Mark Goble: How the West Slows Down

In "How the West Slows Down," Mark Goble (Department of English Studies, University of California, Berkeley) asks why slow motion - a prominent technique in modernist and avant garde cinema throughout the early decades of the twentieth century - finally takes hold of narrative cinema in a series 1960s movies morbidly concerned with fading eras and passing epochs.

Time and place: May 28, 2014 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern

How the West Slows Down

Why exactly does slow motion take so long? Looking at Westerns by Sergio Leone, Arthur Penn, and Sam Peckinpah, this papers explores the importance of slow motion not simply as a technology for making extreme acts of violence into beautifully choreographed spectacles that stop the course of narrative in its tracks; for these directors, slow motion also registers a desire to find a place within an increasingly routinized world for the kinetic energies and outbursts that had long provided the medium of film with some of its most primal subject matter.  By fetishizing slowness in all its symbolic torpor-as the moving-image of nostalgia itself-such films as Once Upon a Time in the West, The Wild Bunch, and Bonnie and Clyde indulge slow motion to achieve a vision of stylistic mastery over the drift of modernization.

I am especially interested in the way Leone and other filmmakers drawn belatedly to the Western replace its traditional emphasis on thrills and speed the with an pronounced aesthetics of slowness and duration. In this regard, I see these filmmakers exploring questions of temporality and modernity that pattern a range of artistic projects in the 1960s, and that are pursued with particular clarity and power in the writings and "earthworks" of Robert Smithson. The figures I'll be considering are variously aligned in their antipathy to a style of modernism that links innovation and acceleration, and are determined to articulate instead a sense of longer, deeper histories of the twentieth century that develop, if at all, at a pace that barely seems to move at all.

About Mark Goble

Mark Goble is Associate Professor at Berkeley University in California. His research focuses on the connections between literature and other media technologies from the late 19th-century to the present.  He is the author of Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (Columbia), and has published essays in journals such as ELH, MLQ, Modern Fiction Studies, and American Literature.  He teaches courses on U. S. poetry and visual culture, film and media theory, the New York School, and on such figures as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. He is currently at work on a book entitled Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow Motion, which explores the systemic relation between the experience of slowness and the limits of high technology across a range of film, literature, and new media art.

---

Curating and Politics: In Theory. A one-day seminar at the Henie Onstad Art Centre

Curatorial practice is increasingly associated with politics, as curating seems to involve a certain kind of engagement in society. But what exactly does that engagement amount to and what kind of politics are we talking of? Lectures by TJ Demos (London), Reesa Greenberg (Toronto), Gabriel Rockhill (Paris) and Cecilia Sjöholm (Stockholm).

Time and place: Apr. 5, 2014 12:00 PM–5:00 PM, Henie Onstad Art Centre

Registration: booking@hok.no (free entrance)  Free shuttle bus: From Oslo and Sandvika to Henie Onstad Kunstsenter

Curating and politics

Within curatorial discourse, the term “politics” has usually referred to exhibition associated with artworks with a content related to current societal problems. But curatorial politics is not always connected with specific themes or subjects, or even with the artworks exhibited. It may also appear in less obvious ways, as a more subtle redistribution of established positions and perspectives through the curatorial strategies themselves, as is increasingly common in projects produced after the professionalization of the curator in the 1990ies.

The lectures presented at the seminar Curating and Politics: In Theory will oppose traditional perspectives on the politics of curating by approaching historical and contemporary exhibition projects in the perspective of Jacques Rancière’s definition of politics. Rancière does not consider politics as exercise of power, but as what occurs when the contingency of the dominant social order is revealed, ruptured and reconfigured for the better; that is, for a more equal and democratic system. His ongoing research aims to highlight the correlation between the art field and politics, as it appears at different moments in time. The seminar lectures attempts to contribute to that project by looking at how contemporary as well as historical curatorial projects may be said to reconfigure society’s established structures and question its dominant truths.

By approaching the diverse ways in which curating and politics intersect, Curating and Politics: In Theory aims to establish a framework for further research into the undeveloped, but highly interesting scholarly field associated with curatorial practice and politics.

About TJ Demos

TJ Demos is reader in modern and contemporary art at University College London (England), and art critic for magazines such as Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Art Press. He recently published The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013), and will contribute to the seminar with a talk on curating and politics in the light of global crisis.

About Reesa Greenberg

Reesa Greenberg is an independent scholar, museum consultant and writer. She is currently Adjunct Professor at York University in Toronto, Ontario, and at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec (both Canada). Greenberg co-edited Thinking about Exhibitions (Routledge, 1996), which may be said to have established curating as a theoretical subject. For the seminar, she will talk about the invisible politics involved with contemporary biennials.

About Gabriel Rockhill

Gabriel Rockhill is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University (USA) and Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris (France). Rockhill is invited to give a talk on how the aesthetic and the political relate to each other within the curatorial field, in the light of his recent research for Radical History and the Politics of Art (Columbia University Press, 2014).

About Cecilia Sjöholm

Cecilia Sjöholm is professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm (Sweden). Her main research interests are phenomenology, aesthetics, and the relation between the history of aesthetics and politics. Her most recent book, Regionality/Mondiality (edited with Charlotte Bydler), will be published in 2014. At the seminar, she will discuss how the commodification of the aesthetic world can be opposed through forms of artistic expression that implicate collective memory and solidarity.

The seminar is part of the PhD education at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo.

The seminar is initiated by Heidi Bale Amundsen and Gerd Elise Mørland, and organized in cooperation with The Seminar of Aesthetics and the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. With kind support from the University of Oslo, The Embassy of the United States in Oslo and the Norwegian Embassy in London.

---

Charles T. Wolfe: The Discreet Charm of 18th-Century Vitalism

In this lecture, Charles T. Wolfe (Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University) will present an 18th Century vitalism that differs productively from the vitalisms evoked in contemporary debates on biopolitics or aesthetic and literary theory.

Time and place: Mar. 6, 2014 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts Hus

The species of vitalism I am interested in is not the feverish form found in ruminations on biopolitics and fascism – where it alternates between being a form of evil and a form of resistance. Nor is it the diaphanous, and less-known form that exists in the worlds of ‘Theory’. Rather, vitalism as it concerns me is a malleable construct, often with a poisonous reputation (but which I want to rehabilitate), hovering in the realms of the philosophy of biology, the history of medicine, and the scientific background of the Radical Enlightenment. This is a more vital vitalism, or at least a more ‘biologistic’, ‘embodied’, medicalized vitalism.

I first distinguish between what I would call ‘substantival’ and ‘functional’ forms of vitalism, as applied to the eighteenth century. Substantival vitalism presupposes the existence of something like a (substantive) vital force which either plays a causal role in the natural world as studied by scientific means, or remains a kind of hovering, extra-causal entity. Functional vitalism tends to operate ‘post facto’, from the existence of living bodies to the desire to find explanatory models that will do justice to ‘vital’ properties in a way that fully mechanistic models (such as of Cartesian mechanism) cannot.

Time allowing, I make a second point regarding the reprisal of vitalism(s) in ‘late modernity’; from Hans Driesch to Georges Canguilhem (who was perhaps the first to call himself a vitalist, at a time and place when it was a ‘bad word’). In addition to the substantival and functional varieties, we then encounter a third species of vitalism which I term ‘attitudinal’, as it argues for vitalism as a kind of attitude. All of this presents, I hope, a vitalism which is neither tedious scientism nor repellent crypto-fascism: with its own discreet charm.

About Charles T. Wolfe

Charles T. Wolfe is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, and an Associate of the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism but (in a past life) was also an editor of the journals Chimères and Multitudes. He has edited volumes including Monsters and Philosophy (2005), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge (2010, with O. Gal),  Vitalism and the scientific image in post-Enlightenment life-science (2013, with S. Normandin) and Brain Theory. Essays in Critical Neurophilosophy (forthcoming 2014), and has papers in journals including Perspectives on Science, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, La lettre clandestine and Flash Art. His current project is a monograph on the conceptual foundations of Enlightenment vitalism. Wolfe is also co-editor of the Springer Series 'History, Philosophy & Theory of the Life Sciences'.

---

Grace Lees-Maffei: Looking Good? Aesthetics and Iconicity in Design History

In this lecture, Grace Lees-Maffei, Reader in Design History in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire will discuss what iconicity means in the context of design and how it relates to aesthetics.

Time and place: Jan. 9, 2014 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, Aud 4, Eilert Sundts Hus

Looking Good? Aesthetics and Iconicity in Design History

If Kant associated aesthetics with the senses, and the scholarship of aesthetics has foregrounded taste and value, or beauty, then an aesthetic approach to design history can be understood as privileging the visual. The history of design is rich in examples of work which may be harnessed to a view of design practice as an aesthetic enterprise. This is particularly foregrounded in an approach that equates the history of design with a history of styles in which, for example, neoclassicism is followed by Gothic, or Gothick, and then a flurry of Victorian eclecticism including Gothic revival, Neo-Gothic, and the Arts and Crafts Movement and its variation, followed by the various modern ‘isms’.

However, it is also seen in the recent fashion for icon design in mass and popular consumer culture. By no means reserved for design, today the terms ‘icon’ and ‘iconic’ are applied remarkably liberally to describe a surprisingly wide range of things, from the music of Beethoven’s 5th symphony to the fragrance of Chanel No. 5. Both of these things—a symphony and a scent—may be described, to some extent, as designed, but iconicity is perceived not only in objects, images, sounds and scents which are manufactured. It is a status also accorded to natural phenomena, such as the pumpkin, which are rendered iconic not through designers’ intentions, but through their consumption (both literal and symbolic) and mediation.

Anyone wishing to understand the iconic by looking at the various phenomena to which the label is applied would have difficulty finding some common characteristics in their physical properties, although it is instructive to consider some shared formal properties of design icons and it is possible to understand more about iconicity, the quality of being iconic, by referring to the history of icons. This lecture briefly reviews the roots of iconicity in design and then proposes the identifying characteristics shared by religious icons and design icons alike as functions of reception: representativeness, recognition and reverence. It explores the words ‘icon’ and ‘iconic’ and the processes of iconization by which iconicity in design is conferred before examining some case studies of iconic design which are representative of wider issues in design discourse, taken from Lees-Maffei's forthcoming edited book Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things (Bloomsbury Academic, April 2014).

About Dr Grace Lees-Maffei

Dr Grace Lees-Maffei is Reader in Design History in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire where she coordinates the TVAD Research Group in its work on relationships between text, narrative and image and Visiting Professor for the MA Design Cultures at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Grace's research centres upon mediation as a focus in design history. Her work is available in Design at Home: Domestic Advice Literature in the UK and the US since 1945 (Routledge, 2013), Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design co-edited with Kjetil Fallan (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), Writing Design: Words and Objects (Berg, 2011) and The Design History Reader co-edited with Rebecca Houze (Berg, 2010) and in journals including Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Women's History Review, Modern Italy and the Journal of Design History. Forthcoming titles include Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context: An Introduction co-authored with Nicolas P. Maffei (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization co-edited with Kjetil Fallan (Berghahn, 2016). Dr Lees-Maffei is Managing Editor of the Journal of Design History, a member of the Peer Review College of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Advisory Board member for The Poster.

---

Highlighting Ligeti: Le Grand Macabre

Seminar in connection with the presentation of György Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre at the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet. With director Valentina Carrasco, set designer Alfonso Flores, professor Erling E. Guldbrandsen and research fellow Peter Edwards

Time and place: Sep. 10, 2013 2:00 PM–4:00 PM, Formidlingssenteret, Operaen (Kirsten Flagstad's Plass 1)

Professor Erling. E. Guldbrandsen and post-doctoral research fellow Peter Edwards from the University of Oslo will give an in-depth presentation of György Ligeti’s monumental opera, Le Grand Macabre (composed in 1974-77 and revised in 1996). The presentation will include a discussion with director Valentina Carrasco and set designer Alfons Flores from La Fura dels Baus. Their spectacular production of the opera will be premiered at the Norwegian Opera on 7 September.

They will discuss the radical new production and the potential challenges that the director faces in staging this – now standard opera in the repertoire – in a radical new way.  They will also explore the composition of the opera, the narrative, the form of the opera, and the aesthetics of modern and post-modern opera.  

There will also be a tour of the opera stage with Alfons Flores before the presentation from 13-13:30. Reservation required (max.25): academy@ultima.no

---

Memory in Motion (double lecture with Pasi Väliaho and Wolfgang Ernst)

How do technologies change the way we remember?  In a double lecture organized by the Seminar of Aesthetics and The Archive in Motion, Pasi Väliaho and Wolfgang Ernst address how memory is set in motion, from early cinema to contemporary memory culture.

Time and place: June 6, 2013 1:00 PM–2:50 PM, Auditorium 2 Eilert Sundts Hus

Please note: the lectures begin at 1 o'clock sharp (NOT at 13:15)

Wolfgang Ernst: Liquefying the Archive / Sonification of Memory

“Liquefying the archive” describes the current softening of the once well-defined institutional archive into more flexible forms of existence. This happens technologically when the “digital” archive, instead of representing a traditional container, becomes a fluid format for perpetual migration and aims at getting independent from specific technologies and operating systems. On the discursive level the archive has been ”opened“ up to name all kinds of storage, to the point where it becomes almost identical with the data circulation and communication diagrams of the present. In this way, what used to be called ”the archive“ is brought closer to the dynamics of a remembrance whose multiple tempor(e)alities are musical in character. Sonic time machines represent an-archival forms of up-dating storage and memory (re-)circulation. This diagnosis of contemporary memory culture will be examplified with reference to the electronic (analog), symbolical (digital) and material heritage of Erkki Kurenniemi (and others, such as Friedrich Kittler).

Wolfgang Ernst is Professor and Chair of Media Theories at the Institute for Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. His most recent books are Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses: Medien und Archive am Ende (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007), Chronopoetik: Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2013), and Digital Memory and the Archive (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

Pasi Väliaho: Screens of Forgetting

This talk addresses how the question about the modulability of memory has haunted the aesthetics and politics of moving image media ever since the beginning of cinema. Focusing on both early filmic forms and present-day virtual reality applications, it investigates screen technologies with respect to the psychological rationalities and practices of therapy within which the administration and regulation of remembering and forgetting—in the realm of traumatic memory in particular—has been differently conceived during the past 150 years.

Pasi Väliaho is Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Department of Media & Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam University Press, 2010). His articles have appeared in e.g. Theory, Culture & Society, Space & Culture, Parallax, Theory & Event and Symplokê.

---

CASSIRER AND THE AESTHETIC: Expression, Representation, Significance

The Seminar of Aesthetics invite you to rediscover the aesthetic philosophy of Ernst Cassirer in this one-day seminar with Marion Lauschke, Carmen Metta, Fabien Capeilleres and Aud Sissel Hoel. The seminar is open to all interested.

Time and place: Feb. 28, 2013 9:00 AM–4:00 PM, Aud. 1, Helga Engs Hus

For many years the leading neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) was thought to be a name of the past. However, in recent years Cassirer’s philosophy has been the subject of increasing attention from researchers and scholars. Particularly his doctrine of “basic phenomena” has been hailed as something completely new and original on Cassirer’s part, bringing him into contact with modern phenomenology and hermeneutic philosophy.

One of the things that scholars have (re)discovered in Cassirer is his rich understanding of what one could call “the aesthetic dimension” of myth, language, art and science. Under the caption “Cassirer and the aesthetic – Expression, Representation, Significance” the Seminar of Aesthetics at the University of Oslo has invited four eminent experts on “Cassirer and the aesthetic” to illuminate the relevance and significance of Cassirer’s thinking for present day aesthetics.

About Marion Lauschke

Marion Lauschke holds a doctorate in philosophy. She wrote her thesis on Cassirer, published in 2007 as Die ästhetische Vorgeschichte der Symbolphilosophie Ernst Cassirers und die symbolische Form der Kunst, and currently belongs to the Kolleg-Forschegruppe Bildakt und Verkörperung at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

About Carmen Metta

Carmen Metta, Associate Editor of the «Cassirer Studies», is currently employed as Research Fellow in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Naples "L'Orientale", where she collaborates with Prof. Giulio Raio. Her doctoral thesis on Cassirer and Klee was published as Form and Figure. A Reflection on the Problem of Representation between Ernst Cassirer and Paul Klee (Quodlibet, Macerata 2009)..

About Aud Sissel Hoel

Aud Sissel Hoel is Associate Professor of Visual Communication at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She is the co-editor of a new book on Cassirer’s view on technology, Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and is currently manager of the research project Picturing the Brain: Perspectives on Neuroimaging.

About Fabien Capeilleres

Fabien Capeilleres lives in Paris and Princeton. He teaches contemporary philosophy at the University of Caen and is associate researcher at the CERPA "Metamorphoses" in Paris I. He is the French representative for the Ernst Cassirer-Gesellschaft and the scientific editor for the French series of Cassirer's Oeuvres (Éditions du Cerf, 1988-..., 52 vol); volume XII  Ecrits sur l'Art (1995) compiled most of Cassirer's texts on Art. His PhD was on "Cassirer's Transformation of Transcendantal Philosophy" (1993) and his Habilitation on Kant. He is currently writing a monograph on Francis Bacon's paintings considered in a Cassirerian perspective.

---

Archives and digital/social ecologies. Double lecture with Matthew Fuller and Tara McPherson

Open seminar with Matthew Fuller (Goldsmith's College) and Tara McPherson (University of Southern California), organized by the Seminar of Aesthetics.

Time and place: Dec. 10, 2012 2:00 PM–5:00 PM, Aud. 3, Helga Engs Hus

Tara McPherson: Theory in the Machine, or, A Feminist in a Software Lab."

How did a feminist film scholar trained in post-structuralist theory end up running a software lab?  In answering that question, this talk engages various histories in the development of computational systems in order to argue that we need more humanities scholars to take seriously issues in the design and implementation of software systems.  Humanities scholars are particularly well suited to help us think through such topics as the status of the archive as it mutates into the database, the possibilities for less hierarchal computing, and the cultural contexts of code.  In short, the talk argues that we need to do more than theorize new technologies; we also need to build them.

Matthew Fuller: Evil Archiving is Happy Archiving (On Evil Media)

In a context in which media are increasingly operational as control systems, biological in their handling of affect and information, and distributed amongst themselves and with multiple scales of reality, we need a pragmatics that is capable of recognizing the collapsing of the technical into the cultural, social and ecological, while recognizing the opportunities for power that such a situation presents.The concept of evil media implies a broad conception of mediality: whilst it includes the usual repertoire of systems of signification that can be detached from the body, it also works at the level of brains, neural entrainment and physiologically potent chemicals that are manageable as signals. But the evil media approach also works with contemporary grey media: expert systems, workflow, databases, human-computer interaction and the sub-media world of leaks, networks and permissions structures that establish what eventually appears as conventional media.  These systems are now far more widespread and significant than those that are most apparent as media and their relative invisibility offers numerous opportunities for interesting uses.  This lecture will review some of the uses of grey media in relation to the question of the archive and archival systems.

About Tara McPherson

Tara McPherson is an Associate Professor at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. She is the founding editor of Vectors Journal and the author of Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Camera Obscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, Race in Cyberspace, 24, The New Media Handbook, The Visual Culture Reader 2.0, Virtual Publics and Basketball Jones. She is currently co-editing two anthologies on new technology (including one for the MacArthur Foundation’s initiative in Digital Media and Learning) and working on a book manuscript on new media.

About Matthew Fuller

Matthew Fuller is David Gee Reader in Digital Media at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Evil Media (MIT Press 2012), Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (Autonomedia) and Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (MIT Press, 2005) and editor of Software Studies: A Lexicon (MIT Press, 2008). He is involved in a number of projects in art, media and software, a number of which may be accessed through http://www.spc.org/fuller/

---

The ForArt Lecture 2012: Collecting Conceptual Art: How to Buy an Idea

Open public lecture with Christophe Cherix (Museum of Modern Art, New York) organized by The Seminar of Aesthetics in collaboration with ForArt on Oct 26, 18:00, Litteraturhuset.

Time and place: Oct. 26, 2012 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Oslo

Conceptual Art is the name of a tendency rather than an art movement. It derives from the term “concept art” coined in 1961 by the musician and activist Henry Flynt, but finds antecedents both in the historical avant-gardes and in the American post-World War II period, with artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg, respectively. It is associated with a departure from the physicality of the art object as such and frequent relies on language and documentation in order to guarantee its own existence.

Since 2007, the Museum of Modern Art has acquired a number of important collections of art from the 1960s and 1970s, including the Art & Project Collection, the Seth Siegelaub Collection, and the Daled Collection, all of which relate to the rise of Conceptual Art in the Western World. Nearing 500 works, they have transformed the collection of The Museum of Modern Art into a pre-eminent center of European and American Conceptual Art. The experimental gallery Art & Project was founded in Amsterdam in 1968 by Adriaan van Ravesteijn and Geert van Beijeren , who worked closely with the leading European and American galleries specializing in Conceptual Art and, through 1989, published the Art & Project Bulletin, a series of artist-produced publications distributed free of charge around the world. From 1968 to 1971, Seth Siegelaub, then based in New York, promoted the work of some of the most important figures of the time, such as Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner, organizing landmark exhibitions, both in traditional spaces and, most significantly, in the form of books, in which the exhibition catalogue itself served as the exhibition. In 1971, together with lawyer Robert Projanski, he published the Artist’s Right Reserved Sale Agreement, the first document of its kind to outline, in the form of a contract, an artist’s rights with regard to his or her work. In Brussels between 1966 and 1978, Herman and Nicole Daled assembled a collection focused on new strategies being developed by artists of their time, acquiring several canonical examples of Conceptual Art, including works by Marcel Broodthaers, Hanne Darboven, and Dan Graham.

In a time when Conceptual Art, which mostly existed on the fringes of the institutional art world, is being collected and studied as one of the key historical touchpoints of the twentieth century, the critical issues it brings forward in relation to authorship, display, and ownership of artworks, as well as the internationalization of the art world, the participation of the spectator, and the artists’ right to control their own work, need to be fully addressed both scholarly and curatorially. This presentation focuses on these three collections and their place in the Museum today.

The lecture is followed by an open seminar/ panel discussion at the Astrup Fearnley Museum on Oct. 27, 13:00. Participants: Christophe Cherix  (MoMA), Sabrina van der Ley (The National Museum of Art, Norway), Tone Hansen (Henie Onstad Art Center) and Ina Blom (UiO)

About Christophe Cherix

Christophe Cherix is The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is a specialist on modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on printed art of the 1960s and 1970s. He has done in-depth work on the productions of a large number of artists, including Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Barry Le Va, Allen Ruppersberg, and Mel Bochner, John M. Armleder, Maurizio Nannucci and Lucy McKenzie, and has curated exhibitions such as Print/Out, a survey of prints, books, and ephemera from the late 1980s to the present (2012), In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960-1976 (2009); Projects 88: Lucy McKenzie (2008); and Book/Shelf (2008), an exploration of how artists have used the book as an object in contemporary art. He has been a chief curator at the Cabinet des estampes at the Musée d'art et d'histoire in Geneva, and has written extensively for museum catalogues and art journals. At the Museum of Modern Art he has been responsible for the acquisition of a number of European and American collections of Conceptual Art as well as the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus collection, an in-depth documentation of the founding and development of the international Fluxus movement.

---

Sabeth Buchmann on Lene Berg's "Kopfkino"

Open guest lecture with Sabeth Buchmann (Berlin/Vienna): Counted Stories. Thoughts on Lene Berg's Kopfkino.

Time and place: Oct. 12, 2012 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, Fritt Ord, Uranienborgveien 2, Oslo

Counted Stories. Thoughts on Lene Berg's Kopfkino

In connection with Lene Berg's new exhibition opening at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter October 11, Sabeth Buchmann will lecture on Berg's recent film Kopfkino (2012).

Kopfkino was filmed over the course of two days in Berlin with a set of exceptional characters. We find ourselves at the periphery of our culture amidst so-called unworthy objects: eight women who earn their living by fulfilling the sexual fantasies of their clients.

According to Buchmann, the title of Berg's new film provokes a discussion on the status of cinema within visual arts. Historically film has served as a medium through which certain modes of narration, documentation, mise-en-scène, role playing and imagery could be integrated in the realm of avant-garde practices, but today film represents a distinct genre or domain within the art and exhibition market.

Considering the way in which Kopfkino reflects on the work of dominatrixes and submissives as a structural mode of cinematic fiction, the lecture will focus on Berg's strategy to relate her 'narrative documentation' to conceptual forms of image production.

About Sabeth Buchmann

Sabeth Buchmann is a Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and an art critic contributing to a number of journals, books and museum catalogues. Recent publications include Denken gegen das Denken. Produktion - Technologie - Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (2006), Art After Conceptual Art (ed. with Alexander Alberro, 2006), Film Avantgarde Biopolitik (ed. with Helmut Draxler and Stephan Geene, 2009).

She is an editor at Texte zur Kunst and a co-editor of PoLyPen - a book series on art criticism, aesthetics and political theory (b_books, Berlin). Buchmann has contributed an essay to the catalogue publication for Lene Berg's exhibition (Henie Onstad Kunstsenter/Sternberg Press, 2012).

The lecture is organized by the Seminar of Aesthetics in collaboration with Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK).

For more information contact Chief curator HOK Caroline Ugelstad: cu@hok

---

Lorraine Daston on The Science of Clouds

Open guest lecture with Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute, Berlin), organized by The Seminar of Aesthetics.

Time and place: Sep. 13, 2012 12:15 PM–2:00 PM, Aud. 5, Vilhelm Bjerknes Hus, Universitetet Blindern

The Science of Clouds, or: The Limits of Representation

Since the early nineteenth century, meteorologists have been trying to classify clouds according to genus and species, on the model of the Linnaean classification of organic species. But what exactly is the object of inquiry in this case?

The terminology of genus, species, and variety, familiar from organic classification schemes of plants and animals, is applied to clouds only by analogy, and by stretched analogy at that. Even the most resolute of cloud classifiers admitted that their schemes applied only "to the broad features of any sky, for no two skies are ever exactly alike any more than any two faces".

A botanist or a zoologist might retort that all organisms, scrutinized closely enough, are also unique individuals; nonetheless, taxonomy is possible. But the predicament of the cloud classifiers is more dire. As the most recent (1975) International World Cloud Atlas concedes, "[c]louds are continuously in a process of evolution and appear, therefore, in an infinite variety of forms." Darwin's puzzle of speciation is inverted for the cloud classifiers.

Darwin had to explain why are organisms clumped in recognizable species rather than smeared out in an infinitely graduated continuum; the meteorologists must explain how the infinitely graduated continuum of clouds can be clumped into genera, species, and varieties. In the same decades during which Darwin sought to undermine the most plausible example of the ancient ontology of natural kinds, meteorologists asserted its validity for the least plausible example. Is the cirro-cumulus cloud a natural kind like the dandelion and the housecat? This lecture explores the role – and limits – of scientific visualization in defining the object of inquiry.

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her recent publications include (with Peter Galison), Objectivity (2007), Wunder, Beweise und Tatsachen: Zur Geschichte der Rationalität (2001), and (co-edited with Elizabeth Lunbeck), Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), as well as essays on the history of  scientific facts, objectivity, curiosity, probability, and attention which have appeared in various journals and collections.

---

A Culture of Cruelty

Open guest lecture with Sylvère Lotringer (Columbia University) organized by the Seminar of Aesthetics.

Time and place: May 25, 2012 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 3 Helga Engs Hus

A Culture of Cruelty

In the 30s and 40s, a number of writers and thinkers obsessed by the decline of religion, the deterritorialization of the culture and the rise of fascism set out to go to the root of the cultural malaise and of the pervasive sense of doom. They turned themselves in living laboratories studying at their own expense the possibility of restoring symbolic bonds strong enough to keep society together. Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, Georges Bataille's sacrificial rituals, Simone Weil's  willing misfortune and their emphasis on collective experience were so many attempts to pre-empt the coming hecatomb.

Sylvère Lotringer is a literary critic and cultural theorist. A younger contemporary of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault, he is best known for synthesizing French theory with American literary, cultural and architectural avant-garde movements through his work with Semiotext(e) ; and for his interpretations of French theory in a 21st century context. An influential interpreter of Jean Baudrillard's theories, Lotringer invented the concept "extrapolationist" as a means of describing the hyperbolic world-views espoused by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. Lotringer is a Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and a Professor of Foreign Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. He has also published extensively on the French "high modernists," Antonin Artaud, Simone Weil and Georges Bataille.

---

2013

The ForArt Lecture 2013: Mark Wigley on Architecture in the Age of Radio

In this lecture and seminar, Mark Wigley, Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, will explore architecture’s nervous encounter with liquids—the material flows in pipes and the immaterial flows of radio waves.

Time and place: Oct. 11, 2013 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Oslo

Pipeless Dreams

Our buildings, like ourselves, are filled with pipes. Water, gas, electricity, and information flow inside walls, floor and ceilings, crisscrossing basements and running across rooftops. A complex interconnected net of tubes supports each space, from the largest waste pipes to the finest wires. Yet these tubes are rarely allowed to enter the space. They are asked to bring things in or take things away but are meant to remain outside.  A pipe can only enter a room if concealed. Pipes must always be close to us yet unseen and unheard. A huge effort is made so that the sound of movement within them cannot enter. No evidence of flow is allowed. No rustle, gurgle, whoosh, hum, shudder, click, or thud. Architecture itself might be largely defined by this psycho-sexual embarrassment. After all, the basic definition of interior is now less to do with walls, doors and windows and more with the countless valves that regulate the flows in all the tubes and the array of orifices through which material is allowed to enter and leave our spaces. And the ever expanding repressed world of pipes always has its leaks, blockages and occasional overflows. The building and the discipline occasionally gets covered in what it wants to exclude. There is an astonishing architecture of pipes, a radical liquid architecture.

The lecture is followed by a seminar//panel discusion on OCT 12, 13:00 at the Museum of Architecture, (The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design)

ForArt Seminar 2013: Broadcasting Shelter

Every object, including ourselves, seems to have a radio attached to it. Every event is suspended in countless overlapping waves of communication. Our environment is completely flooded with signals. The space of radio we inhabit is more infinitely more complex than the space of visible buildings. We still engage with physical objects, even encounter them as a kind of anchor or resistance against all the unseen flows, but the physical environment is much more intimately sensed and engaged by hidden signals--so closely and continuously that it is not so much an encounter between the visible and invisible worlds but a kind of symbiosis, a vibration between object and radiation. The line between them is no longer clear. The defining characteristic of radio is its disinterest in objects. It literally passes right through them. Yet the objects around us are located, marked, connected, exposed, infiltrated, monitored, reorganized, promoted, locked, archived, protected, dissolved, and even destroyed in the space of radio transmissions. Object and radio have become inseparable. There is an unprecedented blurring of object and information, territory and map. It is as if every object lives only to broadcast itself. Architectural discourse is afraid of radio, and with good reason.

About Mark Wigley

Mark Wigley is Dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The author of The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (1993), White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995; both MIT Press), and Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (010 Publishers, 1998), he coedited, with Catherine de Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond,(MIT Press, 2001). He has curated exhibitions at the MoMA in New York, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, The Drawing Center in New York, and the CCA in Montreal.

In the panel

• Thomas McQuillen, Head of Department of Architecture (AHO)  
• Kelly Shannon, Professor in Landscape Urbanism (AHO)
• Mari Lending, Professor in Architectural History (AHO)

---

Robert Pfaller (Vienna): Is Reason the Enemy of Pleasure? A Materialist Account.

Robert Pfaller is a professor in Philosophy at the Universität für angewandte Kunst in Vienna. His fields of research includes psychoanalysis, art, materialism and postmodernity. He is particularly known for his writings on "Interpassivity", a concept he has developed in cooperation with Slavoj Žižek.

Time and place: Oct. 3, 2013 4:00 PM–6:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts Hus, Blindern

Contemporary Western societies indulge in fighting against pleasure, in the name of reason: be it reasons of health, sustainability, economy, emancipation or security. The same has occurred in almost all 20th century aesthetics which considered themselves as liberating or emancipatory: neo-marxist theoreticians such as Lukacs, Adorno or Benjamin condemned pleasure within the arts by political reasons, just as Laura Mulvey did for feminism, and many others in the name of identity politics etc.
Yet, according to the materialist lessons of Bertolt Brecht, the claim for what life is worth living for is the necessary condition for any emancipatory stance. If we take that into account, we have to ask ourselves: Do we have to renounce pleasure in order to be enlightened? What can we learn from art and everyday culture about this problem? Is pleasure an effect of illusion? Or does it arise, on the contrary, when we are beyond illusion? And is pleasure, finally, only something for the rich? Does art have to remind us of that?   

About Robert Pfaller

Robert Pfaller is the author of Zweite Welten und andere Lebenselexiere (Fischer Verlag, 2012), Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt. Elemente materialistischer Philosophie (Fischer Verlag, 2011) and Ästhetik des Interpassivität (Fundus, 2008); in other languages: (2009) Sublimation and ‚Schweinerei‘. Theoretical Place and Cultural-critical Function of a Psychoanalytic Concept, in: JEP, Journal of European Psychoanalysis, No. 29, 2009 – II: 11-47; (2008) Materialism’s Comedy, in: Bedeutung Magazine. Philosophy – Current Affairs – Art – Literature – Review – Analysis. Vol. 1, London: Bedeutung Publishing Ltd., 2008: 20-28;  (2007) Why Zizek? – Interpassivity and Misdemeanours: The Analysis of Ideology and the Zizekian Toolbox, in: International Journal of Zizek Studies, vol. 1, number 1; (2006) Splendor and Secrets of the Evident. Psychoanalysis and Philosophy in the Work of Erwin Wurm, in: Erwin Wurm, The artist who swallowed the world, ed. By Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006: 283-288; (2006) The Familiar Unknown, the Uncanny, the Comic, in: Slavoj Zizek (ed.): Lacan. The Silent Partners, London/New York: Verso, 2006: 198-216.

The lecture is open for all interested!

---

2012

International PhD Seminar: Rethinking Modernism Across the Arts

The PhD programme at the Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo: “Musicology and Theatre Studies, Aesthetics, and the History of Arts and Ideas” (leader: Erling E. Guldbrandsen) in collaboration with the PhD programme for Literature and the “Aesthetic Seminar” at the UiO presents this International PhD Seminar on Modernism in 20th Century Literature, Music, Theatre, and the Arts.

Time and place: May 22, 2012 10:00 AM–May 23, 2012 5:00 PM, Seminar Room 1, ZEB Building, UiO/Blindern

Within and across the arts, conceptions of modernism are changing. From the very outset, modernist movements in literature, music, theatre, and the arts have been embedded in controversy, discussions of which are far from over.

Despite the increasing heterogeneity of modernist idioms, modernism nevertheless seems to retain certain notions of historical contingency, certain conceptions of writing (écriture), of reconstruction and re-working of language and form, and it also features high levels of self-critical theoretical reflection as part of the creative process.

This seminar discusses the profound transformations that have taken place within modernism during the last century, also drawing on historical connections to wider cultural contexts of different modernist movements.

In recent decades, there have been significant shifts in our views of different modernisms, shifts that have deeply influenced the creative processes as well as the critical understanding of modernism as a whole.

What is the legacy of this powerfully influential movement in Western art and culture, where did it come from, how has it been performed and perceived and what is the position and significance of modernism today?

Keynotes speakers:

• Susan McClary (Cleveland)
• Julian Johnson (London)
• Frederik Tygstrup (Copenhagen)
• Knut Ove Arntzen (Bergen)
• Bente Larsen (Oslo)
• Erik Tonning (Bergen)

The seminar is open to all interested.

Organizer: PhD programme at the Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo: “Musicology and Theatre Studies, Aesthetics, and the History of Arts and Ideas” (leader: Erling E. Guldbrandsen) in collaboration with the PhD programme for Literature and the “Aesthetic Seminar” at the UiO.

---

Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation

Open guest lecture with professor W.J.T. Mitchell, organized by The Seminar of Aesthetics.

Time and place: Mar. 28, 2012 5:00 PM–7:00 PM, Aud 2 Helga Engs Hus

An attempt to survey the role of images and media in the global revolutions of 2011 insofar as they involved the occupation of iconic public spaces from Tahrir Square to Zucotti Park in New York.

About W. J. T. Mitchell

W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. Under his editorship, Critical Inquiry has published special issues on public art, psychoanalysis, pluralism, feminism, the sociology of literature, canons, race and identity, narrative, the politics of interpretation, postcolonial theory, and many other topics. His publications include: "The Pictorial Turn," Artforum, March 1992; "What Do Pictures Want?" October, Summer 1996; What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Picture Theory (1994); Art and the Public Sphere (1993); Landscape and Power (1992); Iconology (1987); The Language of Images (1980); On Narrative (1981); and The Politics of Interpretation (1984).

---

On Giorgio Agamben and the Poetics of Indifference

Open lecture with professor William Watkin (Brunel University London), organized by The Seminar of Aesthetics.

Time and place: Mar. 22, 2012 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 7, Eilert Sundts Hus

The lecture  will outline the relation between Agamben’s work in the field of poetics and his wider philosophical project. It will commence with an overview of Agamben’s philosophy, focusing on the notions of indifference and of communicability. With the basic architecture of Agamben's thought on board, the large majority of the rest of the paper concerns Agamben’s local comments on poetics. In particular it considers issues of poetic language as pure materiality, xenoglossia, glossolalia, onomatopoeia, enjambement, caesura, form, structure, rhythm and rhyme around a three part definition of the communicability of the term poetry in Europe in terms of language, lineation and rhythmical structure. The paper ends with an odd observation, a definition of poetry that is a definition of its inoperativity, and a use of poetry that is intended to sacrifice poetry in favour of wider philosophical aims.

William Watkin is professor at Brunel University London. His most recent book is The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis (Continuum, 2010). Previously he has published On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and numerous articles on literature and philosophy. Watkin is currently working on a second book on Agamben, focusing on the topic of indifference-indistinction.

---

2011

Asger Jorn

Welcome to The ForArt Seminar 2011: "Le Futur du Passé; Asger Jorn revisited".

Lecturers: Hal Foster, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Oda Wildhagen Gjessing, Helle Brøns og Knut Stene-Johansen.

Time and place: Nov. 5, 2011 10:00 AM–3:30 PM, Nasjonalgalleriet, Forelesningssalen

Program

• 10:00 - 11:30 Knut Stene-Johansen: Introduction (Asger Jorn, The Future of the Past and The Security Entrances).
• 10:30 - 11:30 Hal Foster: Animal Jorn, Creaturely Cobra
• 11:30 - 12.30 Lunch
• 12:30 - 13:30 Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: Critique and Crisis: The Avant-Garde in a Post-Revolutionary Time.
• 13:45 - 14:15 Oda Wildhagen Gjessing: Asger Jorn and Edvard Munch. Regarding the ‘transition leading to the liberation of color, to painterly spontaneity’.
• 14:15 - 14:45 Helle Brøns: Masculine Resistance. Art, Gender and Desire in the Production of Asger Jorn.
• 14:30 - 15:30 Round table discussion

Abstract and bio

Knut Stene-Johansen: Introduction (Asger Jorn, The Future of the Past and The Security Entrances).

This short introduction will situate Jorn as the important artist he was (and still is), and reflect upon some of Jorn's titles as key concepts for understanding his art today.

Knut Stene-Johansen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oslo. Among his research interests are French theory, medical humanities, aesthetics and 18th Century studies. His publications include Illness in Context (eds. Knut Stene-Johansen and Fredrik Tygstrup), Rodopi, 2010 and Forførelsens historie (The History of Seduction), Spartacus, 1998. Stene-Johansen is also an experienced translator, among other things of the work of Roland Barthes and Deleuze/Guattari.

Hal Foster: Animal Jorn, Creaturely Cobra

In my lecture I discuss the presence of the creaturely in Cobra in general and Jorn in particular as a pointed intervention in postwar debates about humanism.

Rather than a belated expressionism or a revived primitivism, I see the creaturely in this art as the expression of a crisis in the political order of the period.

To this end I juxtapose Jorn, Constant, and others with Bataille on the prehistoric as well as Derrida and Agamben on the animal.

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art & Architecture at Princeton & co-editor of "October" magazine and books. His most recent books are The Art-Architecture Complex (Verso, 2011) and The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha. Previous books by Foster include The Return of the Real (MIT Press, 1996) and Compulsive Beauty (MIT Press, 1993).

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen: “Critique and Crisis: The Avant-Garde in a Post-Revolutionary Time.”

This presentation will analyze Asger Jorn's attempts to search for a post-war avant-garde context at a time when the avant-garde as the self-proclaimed unifier of art, critique and life was becoming more and more difficult.

The inter-war avant-garde project was in a state of permanent crisis already by the late 1940's and Jorn was very aware of this but nonetheless engaged in a number of avant-garde projects from COBRA to the Scandinavian Institute of Vandalism.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is an art historian and cultural critic. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.

He is the author of a number of books in Danish on the avant-garde and has published articles about anti-capitalist activism, the revolutionary tradition, and the Situationist International in journals such as Multitudes, Rethinking Marxism, and Third Text. Recent publications include “On the Turn to Liberal Racism in Denmark” in e flux journal, no. 22, 2011, and the anthology Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Nebula & Autonomedia, 2011).

Oda Wildhagen Gjessing: "Asger Jorn and Edvard Munch. Regarding the ‘transition leading to the liberation of colour, to painterly spontaneity’.”

Based on the concepts of “the liberation of color” and “painterly spontaneity”, I will attempt to characterize the development Asger Jorn underwent during his formative years as an artist.

Of particular importance in this context are two experiences that seem to have had great significance for him, notably his encounter with Edvard Munch's art in the National Gallery in Oslo in 1937 and 1945 respectively.

Oda Wildhagen Gjessing has an M.A. in Art History from the University of Oslo in 2005. The topic of her thesis was the work of Asger Jorn. Since 2004 she has published articles in periodicals and exhibition catalogues in Norway and Denmark. She has curated several exhibitions and has been employed by the Munch Museum in Oslo and the Bergen Art Museum. Since 2009 she has worked as advisor/curator for the DnB NOR Savings Bank Foundation, with special emphasis on building up the Foundation’s art collection.

Helle Brøns: "Masculine resistance. Art, gender and desire in the production of Asger Jorn."

Gender issues are a recurrent – though not very recognized – theme in Asger Jorn's painting, writing and group activity.

In my paper I will address questions of masculinity, thinking in oppositions and gendered notions of art and creation as it is discussed in the lengthy public dispute between Jorn and Danish writer Elsa Gress in 1964.

Helle Brøns has a Mag. Art in Art History from University of Aarhus (2007) and is currently writing a doctorate on Asger Jorn at the University of Copenhagen, in affiliation with the National Gallery of Denmark and the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. Brøns has previously worked at Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art and The Danish Arts Agency. She is the author of: "The Shock of the Old" in Hvad Skovsøen Gemte. Jorn's Modifications and Kirkeby's Overpaintings, (ed. Teresa Østergaard Pedersen) Museum Jorn, 2011, and Asger Jorn, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2009.

About Asger Jorn

The Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-1973) played an important role in European art during the 1950’s and 60’s, constructing networks all around the continent.

Influenced by Munch and Picasso as well as Kandinsky, Klee and Miró, Jorn insisted on the primordiality of painting and the fictional character of artistic creation at a time when avant-garde artists challenged the very concept of art itself.

Yet, his interest in old Nordic art and culture shows his desire for an alternative to the classical heritage of southern Europe.

One of the last modernists, Jorn was deeply engaged in the politics of his time and preoccupied with the political impact of artistic creation.

Through movements such as Helhesten, CoBrA, Mouvement international pour un Bauhaus imaginiste, International Situationism and beyond, Asger Jorn operated on the boundary between art and life.

To revisit Asger Jorn today is to discuss the ways in which his works may offer new sensibilities, politics and plateaus for navigating in critical times.

Hal Foster: on Post Criticism

---

The ForArt lecture 2011

Time and place: Nov. 4, 2011 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Wergeland

Critical theory took a serious beating during the culture wars of the 1980s and the 1990s, and the 2000s were only worse. Under Bush the demand for affirmation was all but total, and today there is little space for critique even in the universities and the museums.

Bullied by conservative commentators, most academics no longer stress the importance of critical thinking for an engaged citizenry, and, dependent on corporate sponsors, most curators no longer promote the critical debate once deemed essential to the public reception of advanced art.

Indeed, the sheer out-of-date-ness of criticism in an art world that couldn’t care less seems evident enough. Yet what are the options on offer? Celebrating beauty? Affirming affect? Hoping for a “redistribution of the sensible”? Trusting in “the general intellect”?

The post-critical condition is supposed to release us from our straightjackets (historical, theoretical, and political), yet for the most part it has abetted a relativism that has little to do with pluralism.

About Hal Foster

Hal Foster is Townsend Martin Professor of Art & Architecture at Princeton & co-editor of "October" magazine and books. His most recent books are The Art-Architecture Complex (Verso, 2011) and The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha. Previous books by Foster include The Return of the Real (MIT Press, 1996) and Compulsive Beauty (MIT Press, 1993).

---

Knut Ebeling: On Wild Archaeologies – from Kant to Kittler.

The lecture will focus on the phenomenon of  “Wild Archaeologies” – that is, on archaeologies that have appeared in the history of knowledge outside of Classical Archaeology: Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, Freud’s archaeology of the soul, Benjamin’s archaeology of modernity, Kittler’s archaeology of media – and even Kant’s archaeology of metaphysics. 

Time and place: May 20, 2011 3:15 PM–5:00 PM, Aud. 4, Eilert Sundts hus

All of these various projects experimented with a material reflexion of temporality and presented alternatives to the conventional historical thinking of the past. What do these various projects have in common? What is their - historical, philosophical and epistemological - relation to Classical Archaeology? And how are we to understand Giorgio Agamben’s recent claim, that “the archaeologist’s gesture is the paradigm of every human activity”?

About Knut Ebeling

Knut Ebeling is Professor of media theory at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and Lecturer at Stanford University Berlin. Recent publications include: Die Aktualität des Archäologischen – in Wissenschaft, Medien und Künsten, Frankfurt am Main 2004; Das Archiv brennt (with Georges Didi-Huberman), Berlin 2007; Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Philosophie, Medien und Künsten (Mithg.), Berlin 2009; Wilde Archäologien 1. Theorien der materiellen Kultur, Berlin/Zürich 2011.

---

Thierry de Duve: Joseph Beuys and the German Past, Tentatively.

Time and place: Apr. 29, 2011 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 2 Helga Engs hus

The celebrated and controversial German artist, Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), is as well known for his claim that “every human being is an artist” as for his sculptural oeuvre made of such unusual materials as fat and felt. He will here be put in a historical context, going back to the German Romantics, that reveals what his awesome and disquieting artistic and political ambition has been.

About Thierry de Duve

Thierry de Duve is a Professor of aesthetics and art history at the Département d’arts plastiques de l’Université Lille 3. He has been a visiting professor at Sorbonne, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University, and was the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Distinguished Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His books include Pictorial Nominalism; On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1993, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, Editions Dis Voir, 1996 and Kant After Duchamp, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.

---

Between Culture and History: The Study of Music in its Context

Time and place: Mar. 17, 2011 1:15 PM–4:00 PM, Seminarrom 454 P.A. Munchs hus

Panel discussion

• Susan McClary: What Musicology Can Bring to Historians
• Jacqueline Warwick: The Aesthetics of Singing in Popular Music

About Susan McClary

Susan McClary (Professor of Music and Associate Vice-Provost of the International Institute, UCLA; Ph.D. Harvard, 1976) teaches music analysis, history, and early-music performance. Her research focuses on the cultural criticism of music, both the European canon and contemporary popular genres. She is best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), which examines cultural constructions of gender, sexuality, and the body in various musical repertories, ranging from early seventeenth-century opera to the songs of Madonna. McClary is also author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000), Georges Bizet: Carmen (Cambridge University Press, 1992; Italian edition. 2007), and coeditor with Richard Leppert of Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (1987).

About Jacqueline Warwick

Jacqueline Warwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music, specializing in music history, feminist approaches, and popular music. Her research focuses particularly on the function of popular music in negotiating gender and generation identity, and her book Girl Groups, Girl Culture: Popular Music and Identity in the 1960s (Routledge, 2007) discusses the importance of 1960s girl groups such as the Shirelles, the Ronettes and the ShangriLas, both to girl culture and to rock'n'roll history. She has published articles on topics such as the Beatles, vocal aesthetics in rock singing, bhangra in the South Asian diaspora, and expressions of anger in girls' music. Together with Steven Baur and Raymond Knapp, she is a co-editor of Musicological Identities: Essays in Honor of Susan McClary (Ashgate Press, 2008).

---

2010

 

---

Wolfgang Ernst (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin). Intro by Eivind Røssaak.

Time and place: Oct. 6, 2010 3:00 PM–5:00 PM, Nasjonalbibliotekets Slottsbibliotek, Solli plass, Oslo

Archival Time(s)

The lecture will be held on the occasion of the launch of the article collection "The Archive in Motion: New Conceptions of the Archive in Comtemporary Thought and New Media Practices. Studies from the National Library of Norway" (Novus Press 2010), red. Eivind Røssaak.

Abstract

Inspired by artistic practice in modernism, media-theoretical analysis focuses on the message of the medium itself. Applied to memory agencies and especially the ,digital archive', this method demands not only a close analysis of its different technology but a new interpretation of its different epistemological and aesthetical dimension as well. While the traditional archival format (spatial order, classification) will in many ways necessarily persist, the new archive is radically temporalized, ephemeral, multisensual, corresponding with a dynamic user culture which is less concerned with records for eternity but with order by fluctuation. New kinds of search engines will not only answer the needs of media arts but develop into a new "art of the archive" itself.

Wolfgang Ernst, Professor and Chair (Media Theories), Institute for Musicology and Media Studies, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin. His books include: Das Rumoren der Archive: Ordnung aus Unordnung, (2002, in Swedish as Sorlet från arkiven, 2008), M.edium F.oucault. Weimarer Vorlesungen über Archive, Archäologie, Monumente und Medien, (2000), Im Namen von Geschichte: Sammeln, speichern, (er)zählen (a thesis on the infrastructure of memory, 2003), Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses. Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. Jahrhunderts) (2007). Co-author of: Semën Karsakov: Ideenmaschine. Von der Homöopathie zum Computer (2007, with Wladimir Velminski). Co-editor of: Suchbilder.Visuelle Kultur zwischen Algorithmen und Archiven (2003, with Stefan Heidenreich and Ute Holl), and: Computing in Russia. The history of computer devices and information technology revealed (2001, with Georg Trogemann and Alexander Nitussov). Among several articles: "Logistik der Bibliothek" (on erotic and illegal books at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich) in: Der" Giftschrank". Erotik, Sexualwissenschaft, Politik und Literatur. "Remota": Die weggesperrten Bücher der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek, ed. Stephan Kellner (2002). See also: Geert Lovink's "Interview with Wolfgang Ernst" athttp://laudanum.net/geert/files/1060043851/

---

2009

The ForArt lecture 2009: Gordon Matta-Clark in Italy: Communities organizing futures

Time and place: Oct. 16, 2009 6:00 PM–8:00 PM, Litteraturhuset, Amalie Skram-salen

Molly Nesbit is Professor of Art History at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum.  Her books include Atget’s Seven Albums. Yale University Press, 1992 and Their Common Sense, Black Dog Press, 2000.  Midnight: The Tempest Essays - a collection of her essays on contemporary art - will be published in the fall of 2009 by Periscope Press. Since 2002, together with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, she has been organizing Utopia Station:  a book, exhibition, seminar, website and street project.

---

Life/Time In- and Outside the Spectacle: Film, Avantgarde and Biopolitics

Time and place: Sep. 24, 2009 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 5, Eilert Sundts Hus, UiO

Sabeth Buchmann is Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and Head of Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies. She is an editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst and a co-editor of ‘Polypen’ – a publication series on art criticism and political theory. Her publications include Denken gegen das Denken. Produktion – Technologie – Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Hélio Oiticica und Yvonne Rainer, Berlin 2007, Art After Conceptual Art  (with Alexander Alberro), The MIT Press, 2006, Wenn sonst nichts klappt: Wiederholung wiederholen in Kunst, Popkultur, Film, Musik, Alltag, Theorie und Praxis, Berlin/Hamburg 2005 and Film, Avantgarde und Biopolitik, (co-edited with Helmut Draxler und Stephan Geene), Vienna 2009.

---

The arrière-gardes in the 20th Century: The Esthetic Modernity’s Other Face

Time and place: Sep. 17, 2009 2:15 PM–4:00 PM, Aud. 7. Eilert Sundts Hus, UiO

William Marx is Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Paris X (Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense) and the director of the research group Équipe Valéry in Paris. His research focuses on the history of literary critics and esthetic theory in France and Europe, especially during the postsymbolic and modernistic periods. His publications include Vie du lettré, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, "Paradoxe", 2009, Naissance de la critique moderne : la littérature selon Eliot et Valéry (1889-1945), Arras, Artois Presses Université, L'Adieu à la littérature: histoire d'une dévalorisation (XVIIIe-XXe siècle), Editions de Minuit, 2005, "Études littéraires : Manières de critiquer", 2002, and Les Arrière-gardes au XXe siècle : l’autre face de la modernité esthétique, (red.), Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2004.