834 research outputs found
BeHere:Prosthetic Memory in the Age of Digital Frottage
No full textMasaki Fujihata’s BeHere: The Past in the Present (2018 –) is an augmented reality installation and a mobile phone application. In this chapter, Lushetich and Fujihata focus on three areas: a) the latent – semi-visible – image emerging from what they call ‘digital frottage’; b) mediated and remediated co-presence; and c) the affective anarchive (an archive that is also not an archive), in order to articulate the ways in which vast quantities of found, data-processed images of a bygone Hong Kong era combine with micro- and meta-events, phenomenal, and micro-temporal human scales to co-create prosthetic memory
Introduction to Beyond Mind
No full textSymbolism is cohesive. It gathers heterogeneity over time, across fields of human endeavor and systems of communication. Non-sequiturs, paradox and tautology, appear dissipative. Yet they are highly productive in reticular and fractal ways. Suffice it to look at the philosophical tautology of Parmenides’s kind, which suggests that being "is"; at the practice of the koan, which collapses dualistic thinking by way of incompatible propositions, such as "the Eastern hill keeps running on the water"; at logical paradoxes in which the operative logic is sabotaged by its own means, as in Hempel’s paradox; at absurdist dramatic texts in which protagonists record empty time in order to mark the emptiness of the time they are recording, as in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; or at paradoxical games like Maciunas’s Prepared Table Tennis played with paddles that have huge holes in them. In all of these examples, the existence-apprehending processes occur via unexpected itineraries, in vacant but nevertheless enunciative codes, in seemingly futile, yet calibrating performances, and in a temporality that is the cumulative time’s "other." They catapult the mind into the realm of the extra-linguistic, the para-logical and the meta-experiential, or they transfigure it through a series of reticular iterations. Forty years after Varela et al’s groundbreaking work on the embodied, emotional and environmentally embedded mind – that marked a definitive departure from its former strictly rational conception – there is a need to re-examine the territory that lies beyond mind for a different reason: the proliferation of algorithmic logics that rely on the idea of a rational agent (human or algorithmic) making logical, self-serving decisions. This special issue explores neither-rational-nor-irrational forms of thinking and making. It sketches a cartography of a-rational processes of meaning- and knowledge-production that operate across numerous sites, practices, and disciplines: visual and media art; literature; art history; music; dance; film; intermedia and photography. Part I "Ahistoricity, Assemblages and Interpretative Reversals" focuses on the legacy of the (neo) avant-garde and amodernism. Part II "Destinerrance, Labyrinths and Folds" investigates the ways in which the Derridian delays/detours and the Deleuzian folding function as concrete ways of embodied knowledge-production. Part III, "Immanent Transcendence", offers a glimpse into the reticular and iterative structuring of transcendence that does not pre-exist immanence but is its residue
The Given and the Made:Thinking Transversal Plasticity with Duchamp, Brecht, and Troika’s Artistic Technologies
No full textThe work of Marcel Duchamp, George Brecht, and Troika is in direct dialogue with science as a socio-cultural nexus, not in a straightforwardly collaborative way but in a manner that distils an artistic technology from a transposition of the existing social-scientific technologies. This chapter argues that Duchamp’s erotic accidentals in n+ dimensions, Brecht’s event scores (four-dimensional performative ready-mades), and Troika’s dice-based cellular automata challenge three socio-scientific dogmas that order the world. These are: 1) space is inert and three dimensional and time is ‘added’ as the fourth dimension; 2) language is static and atemporal; and 3) evolution is temporally linear – phenomena develop from simple to complex. Duchamp, Brecht, and Troika’s artistic technologies, by contrast, articulate transversal plasticity while also revealing the underlying indeterminacy of space-time, as a phenomenon and concept.<br/
On Game Structures
No full textOn Game Structures is an interdisciplinary platform for querying the logic of artistic, epistemological and economic moves and strategies. In art, science and philosophy, as in social praxis, every position is always an intersection of past moves. And every new move, in turn, alters the existing structure by altering the relationship between the structure’s constituent elements: time, space, rules, goals, and modes of interaction. This dynamic interpenetration of play – as emergent activity – and games – as coagulated structure – is, in this issue, explored in scholarly and artistic ways. Examples of the hybrid tropes the contributors engage with are liminoid social rites, playbour (the neoliberal fusion of play and labour), mathematical-musical recursion, Taqiyyah (the Islamic jurisprudence which embroils truth and falsity), porn-sports, and phantasmal ludicity.<br/
Performative Disciplinarity in Alternate Reality Games from Foucault to McKenzie and Beyond
No full textFor Foucault, discipline was a subtle form of power that coerced the body in order to control its movements, attitudes, and moods. For McKenzie, it is oppressive-excessive performance that takes the place of overt disciplinarity in the twenty-first century. By situating alternate reality games (games that transcend the spatio-temporal delimitation of the “magic circle”) within the discourse of positive and negative freedom, Lushetich queries the capacity of existential amplification (found in all forms of performance and play) to reaffirm corporeally the (neoliberal brand of) negative freedom through what may be termed “ludic servitude”.<br/
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