Project: Marbled Reams

I have been invited to contribute a single page-work for the next 'issue' of the project, Marbled Reams curated by Tom Godfrey.

Tom Godfrey, Marbled Reams

Marbled Reams is a print project that launched at Publish and Be Damned 2009 with the initial production and display of 12 reams. The project continues with new reams being produced on a bi-monthly basis. The project is run by Glasgow based artist Tom Godfrey.

Marbled Reams is derived from an artwork produced by Godfrey with the same title in 2007 where a ream of A4 paper was marbled along one edge and displayed on a glass shelf.
 Realising the potential vested in a stack of blank paper, and the ease at which the title can be mis-read as 'Marble Dreams', the artwork has been developed into an editioning/publishing project where artists are invited to produce a single A4 work that is then photocopied onto an entire ream. This is then marbled along one edge, offering a shared origin for all 500 sheets, documented for the projects website, and then displayed in its entirety, highlighting another theme in the project of linking the display of printed matter with that of sculpture.

Previous Marbled Reams contributors:
 Laura Aldridge, Aline Bouvy & John Gillis
, Sean Cummins, 
Sean Edwards, 
Ed Fella
, Heike-Karin Föll , Dan Ford, 
Babak Ghazi
, Sam Gordon, 
Mark Harasimowicz , David L. Hayles
, Matt Jamieson, 
Scott King, 
Piotr Łakomy, 
Sara MacKillop, 
David Newey
, David Osbaldeston
, Anna Parkina, 
James Richards , James E Smith
, Jack Strange, 
Jean-Michel Wicker


Publication/Exhibition: In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities

I have been invited to contribute to a publication by Ordinary Culture, part of the exhibition In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities. My contribution will be from my ongoing series, Close Readings.

Background to the exhibition

In The Presence of Multiple Possibilities combines sculpture, video, performance and publication to draw attention to, and attempt to manifest, the discrepancy between predicted future and actual outcome.

 The exhibition brings together eight artists who explore the complex contingencies of translation, spontaneity, prediction and speculation. Either creating a structure for a continued development or deliberately leaving a work incomplete or uncertain, their works provide a space for the contemplation of multiple possible outcomes. Whether durational or static, all of the works hint towards their role in a longer trajectory. The project will include new commissions by Kimi Conrad, Matthew Noel-Tod and a commissioned publication by collective Ordinary Culture (formerly YH485). Ordinary Culture’s contribution to the project explores the publication as incomplete and subject-to-change, encouraging the participation of the audience in the materialisation of the exhibition’s legacy. 

Organised by MA Curating Contemporary Art students at the Royal College of Art, the project is funded by Arts Council England through Wysing Arts Centre’s Escalator Programme. 

Writing: Salvage - Selective Resurrection

I am currently working on a book chapter provisionally entitled, Salvage: The Selective Resurrection of the Shipwreck Motif, which will be published in the forthcoming book, The Semiotics of Shipwreck (ed.) Carl Thompson, (Routledge, 2013).

   

" Shipwreck evidences a failed performance, describing both the event of itself and its subsequent residue. It is the persisting remainder of an endeavour somehow prevented from reaching its goal; a trajectory of action suspended or ceased part way through. Shipwreck signals a break or rupture in the timeline of a journey, a disrupted narrative in which closure and completion are indefinitely deferred. In this chapter, I explore how the Romantic topoi of seafaring adventure and shipwreck are returned to within selected visual art practices since the 1970s. Central is an attempt to question how these motifs are reclaimed from the vaults of Romanticism within the work of certain artists, in order to be reinvested with critical significance within a conceptual lexicon. Reflecting specifically on the work of artists Bas Jan Ader (born 1942—lost at sea) and Tacita Dean (born 1965—), this chapter identifies a form of selective resurrection or salvage in operation within their respective practices, where the potentiality of the failing and fragmented — inherent in the topos of shipwreck — becomes re-conceptualized in critical terms, whilst (and perhaps only if) other aspects of this Romantic vocabulary are willfully held back. Admittedly, I am not a shipwreck scholar, but rather approach the semiotics of shipwreck through the concerns of my own research practice, Not Yet There. Exploring the relationship between irresolution, open-endedness and failure to contemporary art practice, Not Yet There focuses on models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist or refuse the pressure of a single or stable position (forms of classification and closure) by remaining willfully unresolved. Ader and Dean are thus approached as interlocutors to help put pressure on these concerns; the trope of shipwreck considered a prism through which to address the conceptual potentiality or potency of the failing and unrealized within their practice."


This chapter is proving a context for revisiting ideas in relation to failure, and for researching and thinking about the idea of the fragment in more depth. It has provided opportunity for engaging with a couple of recent publications addressing the idea of the fragment and the fragmentary including Camelia Elias', The Fragment: Towards a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre, (Peter Lang, 2004) and Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions, trans. Georgia Albert, (State University of New York Press, 1996) a few fragment from which can be read below:

“The fragment that has been understood is not a fragment anymore. By being ordered into a context it is done away with. Here the process of understanding is a struggle against its object. This shows that an experience of the fragmentary is already at work in the will to understand – in the urge to do away with the fragmentary […] The understanding of the fragment that makes the fragment harmless can be understood by way of our fear of the unmasterable” [i]


“Fragmentariness cannot be overcome. If an understanding of the fragment is possible, it cannot be an understanding that, ordering, masters, but only one that seems through the arbitrariness of the contexts it puts together and that opens them over and over to the unmasterable, which only reaffirms itself in them. Such an understanding renounces closure and wholeness because it is only in this way that what is to be understood can remain reachable in its unreachability; such as understanding is in its essence – or in the trouble of its inessence – fragmentary. It grasps and leave meaning at the very edge of meaning”[ii]

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[i]           Hans-Jost Frey, ‘Fragment and Whole’ in Interruptions, trans. Georgia Albert, (State University of New York Press, 1996), p.40
[ii]          Hans-Jost Frey, ‘Fragment and Whole’ in Interruptions, trans. Georgia Albert, (State University of New York Press, 1996), p.42-3

Reading Group: Spinoza’s Concept of Affect

Affect Readings @ Site Gallery, Sheffield

Thursday 3 May 2012, 6pm onwards

Spinoza’s Concept of Affect

The final reading group session at Site moves from considering the affective potential of collective witnessing, towards a return to origins of sorts – engaging with the notion of affect through the prism of a specifically Deleuzian-Spinozist set of readings. The session takes Gilles Deleuze’s Lecture on Spinoza’s Concept of Affect (Cours Vincennes, 1978) as its starting point for discussion, alongside the additional reading of the chapter Spinoza and Us (taken from Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1988).

Writing: Unwork

I am currently developing ideas for some new writing working with and around the idea of unwork.
Developing my approach from within recent writing (such as The Yes of the No!, Permission Granted and Room for Manoeuvre) I propose to explore the idea of unwork through a specifically semantic, as much as conceptual or theoretical line of enquiry. I am envisaging that the notion of unwork might be unraveled according to a number of ideas that could include:

- Unwork as a form of resistant or dissonant non-production or deviation of resources – a reversal, inversion, subversion, reworking of work’s time, specifically drawing on Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘la perruque’.
- Unwork as a term to describe or account for those forms of labour that refuse, resist, or otherwise fail to be easily classified as work (specifically in relation to notion of economic exchange) – the idea of vocation (including forms of spiritual labour); the figure of the volunteer, the amateur, the guardian, the player … duty of care ... labour of love … the relation of living to working (inherent in the term livelihood); ideas around the relation of meaning, meaningfulness, meaninglessness and work/unwork.

- Unwork in ‘palindromic’ relation to work where the work/unwork pairing is conceived as one of doing and undoing, making and unmaking. I am interested in exploring a shift from thinking about Sisyphean forms of labour (based on the mythic/absurd model of failure and repetition) which I have explored elsewhere (see Over and Over Again and Again) towards a form of Penelopian labour (the resistance inherent in the practice of doing/undoing, of refusing work’s closure or completion, by drawing on the mythic figure of the weaver/unweaver Penelope).

- From unwork to unworkable: something in the word unworkable which speaks of both redundancy and impotency (unemployment) at the same time as a kind of wildness (a utopian desire even?), something existing in excess of what is considered workable, utilitarian, practical, possible.


Various texts and artistic practices are functioning as interlocutors or provocateurs for considering these ideas: Simone Weil's writing on duty, labour, training; Michel de Certeau's The Practices of Everyday Life; Lars Svendsen's dual texts on Boredom and Work; Michael Hardt on Affective Labour; artist Walter de Maria's Meaningless Work and Boxes for Meaningless Work; Pilvi Takala's The Trainee; Tacita Dean's The Presentation Sisters; Vlatka Horvat's This Here and That There; work by Cool and Balducci; Francis Alys' Bolero (Shoe Shine Blues) and other work in relation to rehearsal; work by Hanne Darboven; Cummings and Lewandoska's Enthusiasm (arranged into the categories of Love, Labour, Longing) 


These ideas were initially presented in response to an invitation from SCAF (Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum) to develop a position statement in relation to the next Sheffield Art Sheffield (2013), specifically exploring potential threads or links between the previous two festivals, ArtSheffield08, Yes No and Other Options (curated by Jan Verwoert) and ArtSheffield10, Life: A Users Manual (curated by Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher). 

Exhibition: Accidentally on Purpose

I have been invited to contribute to the public programme of the exhibition, Accidentally on Purpose  (QUAD, Derby, 
July 27 - October 7 2012) curated by Candice Jacobs and Fay Nicolson.

An exhibition, online publication, audio project and symposium exploring the occurrence of repeating problems and strategies for (re)approaching them. 

The exhibition takes its title from an American Sitcom situated in the banality of the everyday. Its characters strive to make the best of an unfortunate situation; repetitively re-negotiating the uncertainty of their lives. The desire for escapism through the consumption of mass broadcasts and episodic formulae offers an interesting context for this exhibition; which connects the quotidian sitcom to an exploration into the relationship between success and failure, looking at common place materials, familiar situations and repetitious processes as a point of departure. Artists include: Becky Beasley, Karen Cunningham, Michael Dean, Cyprien Gaillard, Ryan Gander, Paul Graham, Jonathan Monk, Rose O’Gallivan, Edit Olderbolz, Clunie Reid, Dan Rees, George Shaw and Ryszard Wasko.

More to follow soon.

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis (V)

Below are some images of the performance-lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, performed on the opening night of An Exhibition on the Study of Knowledge, at Stadtpark Forum, Graz on 13^th April 2012. The lecture was presented from Marjolijn Dijkman’s LUNÄ (2011), a facsimile of the original table around which an influential group of industrialists and thinkers known as the Lunar Society would meet each month in Birmingham. An Exhibition on the Study of Knowledge includes work by Rossella Biscotti, Marjolijn Dijkman, Nikolaus Gansterer, Toril Johannessen, Pilvi Takala, Haegue Yang, Gernot Wieland, and was curated by Margit Neuhold and Fatos Ustek. Previous iterations of the performance-lecture have taken place at  (Part I) M HKA, Antwerp; (Part II) KNAW and (Part III) Kunsthalle Project Space, Vienna, and (Part IV) NGBK, Berlin. A recent review of the publication Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought can be read here.

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, Nikolaus Gansterer & Emma Cocker, Documentation of a performance-lecture installation at Stadtpark Forum, Graz.  With Marjolijn Dijkman’s LUNÄ (2011) and Haegue Yang (images on the left)

Event: Site/Off-Site/Non-Site

Wednesday 11 April, 10 – 12.00

Nottingham Trent University

Becky Beinart and Mat Trivett (Wasteland Twinning Project); Jennie Syson (Hinterland) and Emma Cocker (Urban Retreat / Manual for Marginal Places).

This lecture explores three different projects that deal with specific marginal sites as their point of provocation. Drawing on the experiences of these projects, invited speakers interrogate the critical and creative potential of the wastleand or 'edgeland', addressing notions of liminality, classification and questions around the social, ecological and cultural value of the marginal landscape.

Suggested Reading

Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Terrain Vague

Gil Doron … badlands, blank space, border vacuums, brown fields, conceptual Nevada, Dead Zones

Doina Petrescu, The Indeterminate Mapping of the Common

Reading group: Affective Labour & the Politics of Witnessing

I am currently facilitating a reading group at Site Gallery around the notion of Affect.

Affect Readings @ Site Gallery, Sheffield

Thursday 19 April 2012, 6pm onwards

Affective Labour & the Politics of Witnessing

The last reading group session opened out into an interesting discussion for wrestling with the possibilities and also the more problematic aspects of Alison Landsberg's notion of prosthetic memory. The next session extends the dialogue around the notion of affect further, by shifting attention towards affective labour and the politics of witnessing. These ideas will be explored through the prism of two texts: Michael Hardt’s Affective Labour and Jan Verwoert’s You Make Me Feel Mighty Real: On the Risk of Bearing Witness and the Art of Affective Labour. 

Events: Dumb Fixity Symposium

I have been invited to attend this event by McCormack & Gent, with the view to potentially working with the artists in relation to their project Dumb Fixity.

McCormack & Gent – Dumb Fixity Symposium

Friday 23rd March 2012

Centre for Creative Collaboration

16 Acton Street London Greater London WC1X 9NG

Who’s looking at who?

Object abuse: beyond tools, beyond brands, beyond auratic fetishism

This event will consider a less-explored reading of objects and things, questioning our relation with them and exploring the potential of other forms of address. We suggest that a new intention should be employed to interrogate our role in relations with objects – that in object abuse there lies the question of who or what is abused. Does co-presence allow another position, redressing our intentions and interactions – who’s looking at who? Might the animistic gaze reveal objects to be more than tools or resources? Or are we blinded by our fetishes? *

* ‘They (the Moderns) do have a fetish, the strangest one of all: they deny to the objects they fabricate the autonomy they have given them. They pretend they are not surpassed, outstripped by events. They want to keep their mastery, and they find its source within the human subject, the origin of action’. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

Review: Hanne Darboven / Raphael Hefti

Below is my review of the current exhibitions by Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti at Camden Arts Centre, an edited version of which is in the next issue of Frieze magazine here.

"Refusing the curatorial convention of the two-person show, Camden Arts Centre’s staging of simultaneous solo exhibitions nonetheless generates points of resonance and echo between artists paired. The recent coupling of the late German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven with the young Swiss artist Raphael Hefti was no exception, not least since (remarkably given Darboven’s almost half-century career) it was the first UK solo exhibition for both artists. An unlikely match at first glance, Darboven and Hefti’s work develops from sustained engagement with process, procedural techniques or methods repeated over time. Both adopt seemingly logical, technical, even routine means of production but then pressure these beyond their habitual limits until they fold or buckle, yield under the strain. Hefti’s is a nascent material investigation that attends to the potential of mistakes and misfires within commercial manufacturing processes, moments of productive error that result in material behaving unexpectedly, against intended function or utilitarian demands. Replaying the Mistake of a Broken Hammer (2011) repeated Hefti’s experience of accidentally interrupting the process of hardening steel, willfully rendering three large steel rods fragile as glass. Subtraction as Addition (2011) consisted of seven propped panels of toughened museum glass, treated (again and again) to a chemical process designed to limit undesirable reflection. Hefti’s over-application of this process inverts its original intention turning the glass mirrored and opaque, a palette of exquisite and ever-changing dawn and dusk hues. Within his work, standard factory methods are swerved towards aesthetic enquiry.

Darboven’s practice is one of adopting, yet somehow resisting the logic of various systems or structures. Whilst numbers figure within her work, mathematics itself is eschewed. Writing is undertaken as a form of not writing, her act of ‘writing writing’ preempts subsequent performing writing practices where as Della Pollock states, ‘writing as doing displaces writing as meaning’.[i] Darboven’s work has been described as marking or doing time performed through the act of daily writing. However, unlike other life-work projects (On Kawara, Roman Opalka) Darboven’s endeavour seems less about the chronological passage of life/time witnessed by and within practice, as a critical enquiry wherein time itself is considered material to be looped and folded, stretched and frayed. The exhibition presented a chronological sample of Darboven’s methods and working vocabulary, from her early mandala-like interventions on graph paper (Perforationen, 1966) and rehearsing of cursive script (O.T. [Endlosschriftschwünge – Studie zu "7Tafeln II"] 1972) to the acoustically pervasive 24 Gesänge opus 14,15 a, b (1984) in which she converted her numerical drawings into a musical score whose rhythmic variations were then played on an organ. Darboven often borrowed the calendrical form of diaries, year-books and work plans as a found template or grid through which she weaves the experience of multiple and conflicting temporalities. For example, Appointment Diary (1988/98) took an American Film Institute desk diary as its underpinning structure, its linear chronology already interrupted and punctured with film dates, the births (and deaths) of innumerable directors and actors. Darboven creates further slack and elasticity through her simultaneous filling and emptying of its time; its pages scored day after day with cursive handwriting, interpreted variously as the looping repetition of ‘I’ (of ‘present-ness’) or of ‘U’ (‘und’ – the accumulative promise of ‘and … and … and …’).

The experience of Darboven’s work can be overwhelming: even the moderate 305 drawings of 9 x 11 = 99 (1972) felt dizzying and impenetrable, a shimmering field of dense numerical calculations and indecipherable scrawl. The work tested out various permutational methods that would later come to characterize her work, including the formulation of the cryptic ‘K’ (Konstruktion) value, based on a cross-sum adding together a date’s constituent parts (e.g. 23.9.71 = 23 + 9 + 7 +1 = 40). The use of such organizing principles within Darboven’s practice does not generate a logic that can be rationally explained rather she produces a surplus of order that borders on the disorderly or irrational. Her example might well have provoked Sol LeWitt’s oft-cited sentence on conceptual art, ‘The logic of a piece or series of pieces is a device that is used at times, only to be ruined’.[ii] In some senses, the curators over-played the human endeavour of Darboven’s labour, presenting her drawing desk and writing implements as potential entry points into her very complex and involved (involuted) oeuvre. However, whilst the critical potency of Darboven’s practice rests in its resistant incomprehensibility or opacity – its refusal to be easily interpreted or explained – the deficit of engagement with her work in the UK perhaps suggests that some introduction of this kind might still be deemed necessary."


Emma Cocker

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[i]           Della Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’ in The Ends of Performance (eds.) Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, (New York: New York University Press, 1998) p.75.

[ii]           Sol LeWitt, Sentences on Conceptual Art (1967) 

Reading Group: Affective Memory

I am currently facilitating a reading group at Site Gallery around the notion of Affect.

Week 3 (22 March 2012), 6.00 – 7.30pm

Affect and Memory: the possibility and problematic of prosthetic memory

Continuing the exploration of the affective fragment or ‘refrain’ (following Guattari), the next reading group session addresses the relationship between affect and memory. Alison Landsberg’s writing on Prosthetic Memory is taken as a starting point for exploring the empathetic potential of affective memory whilst questioning what is at stake once the ‘affective refrain’ or ‘memory’ is detached or dislocated from its originary context, once it is open to commodification and exchange.

Suggested reading:

- to be skimmed, glimpsed, looked at, or read ….

Alison Landsberg, “Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22.2 (June 2009).

Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory, The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, (Columbia University Press, 2004), Chapter, Prosthetic Memory, pp. 25 – 48.

Reading Group: Fragments and Refrains

I am currently facilitating a reading group at Site Gallery around the notion of Affect.

News Animations/No Words for You, Springfield (Jeremiah Day with Simone Forti), 2008, 

performance still, Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Reading Group @ Site (Thursday 8 March)

Mobilizing Everyday Life/Fragments and Refrains

This week, the focus of Site’s ‘Affect’ reading group moves from the realm of shimmers and intensities, to investigate how the ‘affective turn’ might help shape the politics of everyday life, an ethical mode of operating in relation to both past and present. Using the current exhibition by Jeremiah Day at Site as a point of departure, reading addresses both the constitutive role of the affective fragment or ‘refrain’ and the empathetic potential of affective memory. The readings are intended as triggers for discussion, and reading group participants are invited to introduce further examples of practice and theory relevant to each week’s area of concern.

Suggested Reading:

Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphy, ‘An Ethics of Everyday Affinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain’ in The Affect Theory Reader, (ed.) Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke University Press, pp.138 – 157.

Further reading:

Michael Hardt, Foreword: What are Affects Good for?, in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social Turn (ed.) Patricia Ticineto Clough, (Duke University Press, 2007), pp.ix – xiii.

Félix Guattari, ‘On The Production of Subjectivity’, in Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, (Indiana University Press, 1995), pp.1 – 33.

Some brief notes on this week's session

For this session, the exhibition by Jeremiah Day at Site was introduced as a foil against which to consider some of our discussions around affect, specifically in relation to Guattari’s notion of the affective ‘refrain’. Less a form of ‘text’ that can be treated or read in the same way as other texts, the exhibition perhaps points to ways in which reading itself might be considered differently. The session began with the question of how these various readings around affect might be approached affectively? How can a theoretical text be encountered in the same way as one might an exhibition or performance or piece of music? What are the implications of encountering text affectively? We talked a little about the potency of a glimpse of an idea within the act of reading, of the affective potential of skimming, or exposing oneself to a text’s affect rather than its signification. What registers of meaning and of thinking are produced through different encounters; in the encounter between reading a theoretical text and a live encounter with a performance or an exhibition? Our emphasis for the reading group is on what the encounter opens up or out, rather than on what a text (or exhibition) means. Meaning is considered mobile and changing, always being modified and amended, never fixed. Ideas and reflections on the readings cumulate as a (not always legible or intelligible) palimpsest, rather than building towards comprehension or clarity.

Beginning with Michael Hardt’s question, ‘What are affects for?’ the session began with an expression of caution against the instrumentalization of the notion or concept of affect, a concern perhaps that the ‘affective turn’ could signal just another ‘turn’ within academia, its vocabulary adopted cynically as simply the ‘on-trend’ buzz-words within current cultural discourse. As a remedy perhaps, the reading of this session turned to the work of Felix Guattari (and his development of an ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’ and a ‘logic of affects’). “Guattari is opposed to more conservative attempts to mobilize affect, only in the service of its subsequent capture in a reductive and elitist logic of delimited sets. He opposes this with the idea of social practice or analyses with flexible and open-ended methodologies (meta-methodologies) that enable a ‘subjective pluralism’ engaging with the complexity of affective events. Furthermore, Guattari’s embracing of affect in social practice is ethical in that it evaluates practices of living … Guattari’s response is to take the everyday infinities and powers of affect very seriously; and to develop a creative responsibility for modes of living as they come into being”. Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphy, ‘An Ethics of Everyday Affinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain’, p.141

Writing/Text: Experiments along the brink of I

This text (below) has been written in response to encountering and participating in a series of action-research projects developed by Sara Wookey and Bianca Scliar Mancini including Movement in the City (Toronto, 2010) and Unfolding Zagreb (2009) (also led by Christoph Brunner, editor of the publication Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts Today). Taking the form of a performative prose-poem, the attempt is one of writing out from within a live and lived experience of a project, in order to enact or embody rather than describe or theorise the ideas emerging therein. It extends lines of enquiry from my other prose texts Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins (published in The Manual for Marginal Places, closeandremote, 2010); The Yes of the No! (produced as part of The Summer of Dissent, Bristol, 2009); and Pay Attention to the Footnotes (in collaboration with Open City 2007- 2010). The term 'tacturiency' is also the title (coined by artist Clare Thornton) of a collaboration that I am currently developing with her. 

Book launch II: Apeirophobia

Apeirophobia – Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry

Book Launch at Danielle Arnaud Gallery, Wednesday 21 March, at 19.00

Apeirophobia is a new publication by artists Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry exploring the processes of translating an artwork into book format, an extension of a theme in Kihlberg and Henry’s work of things changing form through processes such as memory and recall, documentation and revisiting histories and possible futures.

At the launch Kihlberg and Henry will be in discussion with artist and writer Emma Cocker and designer James Langdon to discuss some of the issues of making an artists book and publishing. 

Apeirophobia by artists Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, designed and co-edited by James Langdon, includes texts by: Emma Cocker / Brian Dillon / Mladen Dolar / Eli Noé. Published by VIVID 2011.

Exhibition: An Exhibition of a Study on Knowledge

An Exhibition of a Study on Knowledge

Opening Event: 13^th April 2012: Lecture Performance 'Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis' with Emma Cocker and Nikolaus Gansterer. Artists: Rossella Biscotti, Marjolijn Dijkman, Nikolaus Gansterer, Toril Johannessen, Pilvi Takala, Haegue Yang, Gernot Wieland

The knowledge society, designed for livelong learning, serves as foundation of the present capitalist order, cognitive capitalism, which foregrounds multiplicity evoked through cognitive work in knowledge economies. Here knowledge is not longer a tool but becomes the actual ‘product’. Such to a large extent interdisciplinary functioning economies involve a broad range of specialists: economists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, geographers, chemists and physicists, as well as cognitivists, psychologists or sociologists. For the knowledge flows they generate, livelong learning, prescient education and communication are increasingly fundamental. Currently, we witness how education stratifies societies and plays an important role in the class struggles in schools and universities. Self-learning methods are becoming increasingly significant as precarious developments in the public education and fields knowledge-production have lead to privatization of knowledge as well as restricted access to education. The exhibition itself as a study brings together a group of international artists in the midst of current changes of the production and position of knowledge. Their artistic practices expand on other domains of critical thinking to bring out scientific, statistical, discursive, empirical, playful or artistic perspectives on knowledge. Aiming at an encapsulation of ephemerality (knowledge), the exhibition will enhance the position of an investigation at large, than a mere display of conceptual objects.

Curated by: Margit Neuhold and Fatos Ustek 

Forum Stadtpark Graz:

Opening: Friday, April 13, 2012. 6:00 pm

Duration: 14. 4. – 12. 5. 2012

Part of the festival: aktuelle Kunst in Graz: 4. – 6. 5. 2012

Reading Group: To Move and Be Moved

Affective Readings @ Site Gallery, Sheffield

Thursday 23 Feb 2012, 6pm onwards
Thursday 23 February, 8 March, 22 March, 5 April, 19 April. 

In partnership with If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, I am hosting a series of reading group discussions at Site Gallery in Sheffield, for exploring a number of texts relating to the notion of AFFECT. The reading group is linked to the forthcoming exhibition by Jeremiah Day at Site Gallery, entitled 
Of All Possible Things
, 2 March - 7 April 2012. Jeremiah Day is one of five artists commissioned by If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, to make a new work as part of Edition IV – Affect (2010-2012). In Jeremiah Day’s work questions of site and historical memory are explored through fractured narratives, employing photography, speech, and improvisational movement. 


Week 1: Intensities and Shimmers
The first reading group will take place on 23 Feb, with two texts by Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect, available here and Concrete is as Concrete Doesn't available here. There will also be reference to the introduction chapter ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ from The Affect Theory Reader, (ed.) Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2010. 

Brief overview the first session: 

The first session of the Affect reading group operated in introductory terms, sketching out a broad conceptual context through which to consider the notion of affect. This reading group purposefully advocates different intensities and durations of engagement with the reading material – asserting the value of glimpsing or skimming (or even electing to not read) alongside more conventional close reading methods. Emphasis was placed on the critical function of performing tangents, asides and anecdotes within the event of reading – where an encounter with a given text operates as a point of departure, provoking or triggering unexpected lines of flight, associations and connections. Coming together as a diverse group of artists and researchers from different backgrounds, it felt necessary to acknowledge the importance of these different perspectives and approaches – where the reading group was framed as a site for working with and through ideas, for sharing points of resonance, for producing dialogue through partial and subjective readings rather than striving for clarity of understanding, for fixing and defining the meaning of terms encountered.

The text ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ provided a useful ‘way in’ for many of us, presenting a vocabulary (if at times florid, abundant) for thinking about affect as a force of encounter, a gradient of intensity, the felt and yet untranslatable experience of a body’s capacity to both affect and be affected. “How to begin when, after all, there is no pure or somehow originary state for affect? Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pas body to body (human, non-human, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us … across a barely registering accretion of force relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed be the world’s apparent intractability. Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusal as much as its invitations', Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth, p.1

Drawing on the work of Spinoza, affect can be considered as potential, ‘a body’s capacity to affect and be affected’. Central to our discussions, emerged the question of how a body moves from the condition of being affected towards developing their capacity to affect, from being blown about by affective forces (of which they have no control or understanding) towards harnessing such forces to cultivate an ethical and political approach to daily life. “How does a body marked by its duration by these various encounters with mixed forces, come to shift its affections (its being-affected) into action (capacity to act)?” Melissa Greg and Gregory J. Seigworth, p.2

Writing: The Affective City

Image: from Movement in the City, Toronto, 2010

I am in the process of writing a new text, provisionally entitled 'Experiments Along the Brink of I', as part of a collaboration with artists Sara Wookey and Bianci Scliar Mancini. The writing draws on a sustained period of conversation with these artists, where I have both been witness to and participant in a series of workshops for exploring 'movement in the city' or even a form of 'social or everyday choreography', including Movement in the City (Toronto, 2010) and Unfolding Zagreb (2009) (also led by Christoph Brunner, editor of the publication Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts Today - see details below). I am envisaging that the text will echo the model of 'essaying' developed as part of my collaboration with Open City and within my pamphlet-manifesto The Yes of the No!. The chapter/sections deal with (as a provisional list) (1) the affective city; (2) body as force; (3) testing limits; (4) rehearsal; (5) warming/stirring; (6) fold/unfold; (7) speeds and slownesses; (8) collectivity/connectivity; (9) appropriate/appropriate; (10) befitting; (11) immersion & observation. The development of the text undoubtedly draws on my experience of collaboration with Open City (which I have previously interrogated through the prism of a specifically Spinozist/Deleuzian set of ideas in writing such as Performing Stillness). It also connects closely with ideas emerging as part of a text I am also writing on the work of Cezary Bodzianowski (called Squaring up to the Round Hole) and the concerns of the reading group around notions of affect (in collaboration with If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution) that I am hosting shortly at Site Gallery in Sheffield. 


Practices of Experimentation: Research and Teaching in the Arts Today, co-edited by Christoph Brunner

Practices of experimentation lie at the heart of creative research and teaching in higher education in arts. The Department of Art & Media at Zurich University of the Arts offers a unique teaching and research environment as a laboratory of converging and diverging practices of experimentation. Its Bachelor and Master's programs are supported by two research institutes within the department, the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) and the Institute for Critical Theory (ith).

Practices of Experimentation investigates how the different fields of fine arts, photography, media arts and theory interlace with each other, inspire and differentiate one and another. The book presents 15 positions in text, image, video and sound by theorists and artists. They enquire how practices of experimentation constitute one of the most advanced approaches to research and teaching in arts worldwide. They ask how practices of experimentation are able to unfold, take position and enquire current discourses on artistic creation, the relation between art schools and society, the specific production of knowledge in the arts and the particularities of inter- and trans-disciplinary teaching and research in the arts.

Contains essays by Ute Meta Bauer, Maria Eichhorn, Knowbotic Research, Jörg Huber, Marianne Müller, Gerald Raunig, Nils Röller and Richard Wentworth. With a foreword by Giaco Schiesser and Christoph Brunner.

Text in English & German.

Giaco Schiesser read philosophy and German literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. He conceived and established as its head the new department New Media at the School of Art and Design Zurich in 1997-2002. He is professor for the theory and history of media and culture and director of the Department of Art & Media at the Zurich University of the Arts.

Christoph Brunner is artistic and research assistant to the head of the Department in Art & Media at Zurich University of the Arts and doing his PhD on research-creation at Concordia University in Montreal. He is also a member of SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), co-editor of Inflexions (www.inflexions.org) and researcher at the Institute for Critical Theory (www.ith-z.ch).