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Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny
Full text linkWhat do the Pixelvision videos by artist Sadie Benning and the tentatives by philosopher and social educator Fernand Deligny have in common, and what links them to the question of models? Both want to change the existing view of the world and its respective models that are firmly anchored in society — in its values, feelings, and affects. And both build on the singularity and contingency of the present in order to initiate a practice of worlding that is less exclusive and less violent. And yet, as I will show, models play a crucial role for both in their exploring different forms of worlding. The question is, of course, what we mean by ‘model’
The Slime Mould’s Many Bodies, or Modelling Networks with Physarum polycephalum
Full text linkNetworks created by the slime mould Physarum polycephalum have been the object of interdisciplinary studies and artistic interventions for more than two decades. This paper examines different practices of abstracting humans’ and slime mould’s lines of movement into networks and investigates how Physarum networks are used to explore human patterns of movement and vice versa. It argues that, far from anthropomorphizing the slime mould, the effect of these experiments is instead a slimy rendering of the human
Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human Montage
Full text linkThis essay explores the psychoanalytic work of Willy Apollon, and the creative work of Lygia Clark and Clarice Lispector, to rethink the human through an aesthetic lens. While Apollon locates the human outside the cultural montage that controls creativity and desire, Clark’s sculpture Bichos and Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. model the human as a different, transindividual kind of montage through the aesthetic practice of breaking prevailing models of language, subjectivity, and sculpture
Micropolitics Revisited:The Trouble with the Scale of Interpersonal Life
Full text linkWhat trouble can come from straining to know a thing closely, ‘microscopically’? Since the mid-twentieth century, US social scientists studying face-to-face interaction have been by turns fascinated and frustrated by the ‘small’ scale of their object of knowledge and the scrutiny it seemed to demand. They often turned to mechanical recording and playback technologies — from dictation machines to 16mm film — in an effort to grasp human interpersonal life in all its subtlety. This talk returns to the 1970s, when the science of interaction got a new, if contested, politics. Along with social movement activists, some scholars of interaction came to argue that ‘the interpersonal’ was an important micropolitical domain in which otherwise diffuse formations — authoritarianism, heteropatriarchy, anti-Black racism — manifested themselves in practice. They hoped to pinpoint these pernicious formations with recordings and detailed transcripts of talk. But these scholars of the small were quickly forced to explain how this micropolitics related to a politics elsewhere and how interaction itself related to a proverbial wider world. Was interaction a microcosm, for instance — or even a paracosm, a little world of its own? How exactly did the ‘interpersonal’ relate to the ‘institutional’, ‘micropolitics’ to ‘mass’ politics? In this talk, Lempert argues that, while interaction has no intrinsic, ontological scale, this legacy of scalar contestation has shaped what one thinks interaction is and what studying it can — and cannot — deliver. Michael Lempert is an interdisciplinary linguistic and cultural anthropologist who writes widely on the theme of social interaction. He is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and was formerly Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University. He has been a Richard and Lillian Ives Faculty Fellow at Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellow in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS), and a visiting professor at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He is the author of Discipline and Debate: The Language of Violence in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (University of California Press, 2012; winner of the 2013 Clifford Geertz Prize), co-author (with Michael Silverstein) of Creatures of Politics: Media, Message, and the American Presidency (Indiana University Press, 2012), and co-editor (with E. Summerson Carr) of Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life (University of California Press, 2016). His latest book, From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale (University of Chicago Press, 2024), traces how face-to-face interaction became a scaled object of knowledge in mid-twentieth century America
what kind of we can we be?:collective futures
No full textPhotographs ‘harvested’ from a collective writing exercise that took place at Asia Forum’s inaugural event on 23 April 2022, held at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia as part of the 59th Venice Biennale. This built on and further developed ideas discussed at a panel talk titled ‘collective futures’, which featured Reza Afisina, a new-media artist and member of ruangrupa, and Saodat Ismailova, a film director and artist
Thinking Operationally:Collectivism in Modern Japan and Its Contemporary Evolution
No full textReiko Tomii traces the evolution of Japanese collectivism since the 1960s. From art groups connected to dantai, to postwar shūdan and performative networks, she proposes the notion of ‘operation’ to describe artists’ social labour, alongside ‘expression’ to demonstrate how strategic alliances forged modern and contemporary art infrastructures. Through theory and historical examples, she argues that collectivism merges aesthetic and social practice in Japanese modernisms