1994 research outputs found
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Modelling Abstraction
Full text linkAt the risk of oversimplifying, models work by abstracting from the complexity of things: they shed detail and introduce distortion toward ends as numerous as the models themselves. This is as true of neural networks — which can compress huge amounts of online data to an app that can be run on a smartphone — as it is of crash-test dummies, which render the human body in a plastic form better suited for studying high-speed impact. At the same time, models are more than just stripped-down versions of the real thing, instead they are artefacts that produce unexpected social and epistemic effects, and that can end up transforming what they were merely designed to represent. This event explores the problem of abstraction through the lens of modelling practices, taking as its point of departure the recently published volume Breaking and Making Models (ICI Berlin Press, 2025). The discussion focuses on a central philosophical tension articulated throughout its pages: the role of abstraction in enabling, shaping, and sometimes constraining the epistemic and imaginative scope of scientific and artistic practices. Contributors to the discussion will consider the productive and limiting aspects of abstraction in modelling, from grounding knowledge of hardly accessible events in the world to obscuring and distorting the complex ‘nature’ of those same events.00:00 Introduction by Marietta Kesting06:05 Talk by Julia Sánchez-Dorado17:06 Talk by Ross Shields31:14 Talk by Maria Dębińska39:30 Discussio
Time and Desire in Queer Post-Cinema
Full text linkQueer Post-Cinema: Reinventing Resistance offers a novel perspective on the subject of queer cinema, highlighting the interplay between the cinematic dispositif and digital media in post-cinema. The conversation between Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Katrin Pahl will focus on the field’s connection with subjectivation as linked to sexuality. This entanglement, which is both normative and subjugating, encompasses processes of rejection and exclusion. Deuber-Mankowsky introduces a new form of resistance in accordance with Gilles Deleuze’s interest in the techno-social mechanisms characteristic of a society of control. She argues that in the context of the current subordination of digital film, image production, big data, and AI to the capitalist regime of control and surveillance, resistance’s reinvention lies in the aesthetic function of the cinematic image. In contrast to the social purpose of the visual, the aesthetic function of the image is characterized by a ‘supplement’, a creative preservation that refers to time’s qualitative nature: enduring and coexisting, it is that of a virtual, open future, embracing queerness in time. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky is Professor Emerita of Media Studies and Gender Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She has been a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, Paris, and Indonesia. She is an Associate Member of the ICI Berlin, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Historical Museum, and a member of the board of the Centre d’études du vivant CEV/Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on topics in critical, feminist, and queer theory, media philosophy and epistemology, temporality and media aesthetics, philosophy of technology as well as Jewish Philosophy. Her latest publications include Queeres Kino/Queere Ästhetiken als Dokumentationen des Prekären, co-edited with Philipp Hanke (ICI Berlin Press, 2021), and the essay ‘“New Stars Were Rising in the Sky”: On Benjamin’s Concept of Cosmic Experience and Technology around 1930’, in Technics: Media in the Digital Age, ed. by Nicholas Baer and Annie Van den Oever (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). Katrin Pahl is Professor of German and Gender Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD from the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley and has served for many years as co-director of JHU’s Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality. The arc of her research is situated in the field of affect and emotion studies with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. Pahl was awarded the Best Article in Feminist Scholarship Prize from the Coalition of Women in German for ‘Transformative Translations: Cyrillizing and Queering’ and has given the Kenneth Weisinger Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Fellow of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’ at the Freie Universität Berlin and a Senior Fellow at the IKKM, Weimar. Her latest book is titled Sex Changes with Kleist (Northwestern UP, 2019). Two recent articles, “Blood Run Beech Read: Human–Plant Grafting in Kim de l’Horizon’s Blutbuch”, in Open Cultural Studies and “Improbable Intimacy: Otobong Nkanga’s Grafts and Aggregates”, in Theory and Event, contribute to her current research on ‘Transgenerational Trauma and Queer Lives’. 00:00 Introduction by Christoph F. E. Holzhey07:07 Introduction by Katrin Pahl14:46 Talk by Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky51:41 Discussio
Poetics of Scale
Full text linkWhat is a poetics of scale? This talk draws on Mina Gorji’s practice as a poet and literary critic to explore the affordances of lyric to move between multiple scales of perception, experience, and time. Between sound and history, insect and constellation, crystal and volcano, the temporality of a verse line and deep time, how can poetry disrupt and expand the ways in which we understand belonging? At what scale of time, for example, is a person, a wasp, a word or plant — native/ atopic/ extant/ extinct? To examine such questions, Mina Gorji will read from a variety of poems to think about how the experience of lyric listening activates different registers of scale. Mina Gorji is Associate Professor in English at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Pembroke College. She has published widely on lyric poetry of the Romantic period, and is co-director of the Centre for John Clare Studies. She is currently completing a book on Listening in and to Romantic Lyric poetry, funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. She has two collections of poetry with Carcanet: Art of Escape (2020), which recently, in translation, won the International Award for Womens’ Writing in Italy (Premio di Scrittura femminile) and Scale (2022) a White Review Book of the Year, and was described in Poetry Review as ‘a gorgeous book of miniatures’ and in the Irish Times as ‘a book of deep sonic attention’.00:00 Introduction by Manuele Gragnolati06:36 Talk by Mina Gorji54:58 Discussio
what kind of we could we be?:the poetics of we
No full textAt the 14th Gwangju Biennial in 2023, a group of 100 artists, curators, and scholars participating in the biennial’s public programme continued the research and brainstorming initiated at documenta fifteen and wrote a document about the poetics of collectivism
New Scholarship on Futurism:From Techno-Mystics to Afro-Futurism
Full text linkThe first comprehensive avant-garde of the twentieth-century, Italian Futurism sought to integrate modern life into every imaginable medium and format, from painting to politics, photography to dance, architecture to music. In particular, sculpture’s theory and practice offered a singular proving ground for the drive to merge art and existence. Sculpture offers a distillation of Futurism’s larger aims and frustrations: a will to mechanize haunted by the tradition of craft; the liberation of flight burdened by mass and gravity; the lyrical mutiny of form chastened by the exigencies of design; and a dream of totality splintered by the contingency of the fragment. A phenomenon as widespread and enduring as Futurism – outlasting Dada, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and nearly every other ‘historical’ avant-garde it influenced in one way or another – is bound to be shot through with all manner of incongruities. Art historian Ara H. Merjian presents new publications on the Futurism movement and its relationship to twentieth century avant-garde aesthetics and modern politics. The talk will focus on the many paradoxes of Futurism and its afterlives: the tensions between technology and transcendentalism, matter and metaphysics, nationalism and internationalism. Notwithstanding the vast ideological chasm between F.T. Marinetti’s racist and imperialist imperatives and the phenomenon of Afrofuturism, what progressive elements might be salvaged from the movement? Despite a rhetorical wish for cultural oblivion, Futurism persists as the paradigm – and the unconscious – of twentieth-century avant-gardism at large: an ideological crusade as much as an artistic project; a relentless assault upon the boundaries separating art from life; a drive for some invigorating futurity greater than the sum of its aesthetic and ideological parts. Ara H. Merjian is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He has recently published two books on Futurism: Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (Yale, 2024) and Futurism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2025). He has written and edited several books, including Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (2023), Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (2020), and Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chirico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism (forthcoming 2025). He has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, and the San Quentin State Penitentiary College Education Program.00:00 Introduction by Manuele Gragnolati02:59 Introduction by Filippo Bosco09:57 Talk by Ara H. Merjian48:22 Discussio
Why Read and Listen to Stella do Patrocínio?
No full textThis text examines Stella do Patrocínio’s marginalized voice, exposing racism, colonialism, and state violence. Analysing her falatório, it critiques psychiatric and literary silencing and misrepresentation, urging a shift from reductive representation to confronting systemic erasure
Le « Panthéon du Grand Cirque de France »:Présences françaises dans la fable d’ <i>Uccellacci e uccellini</i>
No full textLe premier épisode du film Uccellacci e uccellini de Pier Paolo Pasolini critique certains courants de la culture française, tout en exprimant une admiration ambivalente. Pasolini, influencé par la France, satirise une pensée rationaliste absolutisante et caricature le panthéon des autorités et des intellectuels français. Il oppose la « pensée sauvage » à la rationalité occidentale à travers une confrontation entre un aigle muet et un dompteur français. Le film, inspiré entre autres des fables de La Fontaine, critique l’intellectualisme bourgeois et le marxisme français. Pasolini y dénonce la stagnation intellectuelle en France. Ainsi, par l’allusion à des figures comme Sartre et Mauriac, il symbolise une hiérarchie culturelle figée, et souligne la nécessité d’un renouveau face à une société capitaliste en pleine mutation