18-08-2010

Switzerland, Zurich
Zurich University of the Arts - ZHdK, Förrlibuckstr. 62, room 2.421 (second floor)

Posted by: christoph-brunner

Category: Workshop/Seminar

Field: Multidisciplinary art

Source http://www.zhdk.ch/index.php?id=11678
http://www.zhdk.ch/index.php?id=vth

Workshop "Generating the Impossible"

with Brian Massumi (Université de Montréal) and Erin Manning (Concordia University, Montréal)

Time: 13.00 to 15.30 h

Introduction: Christoph Brunner and Gerald Raunig

Please sign up if you intend to come: christian.ritter [at] zhdk.ch

Abstract

"Invention is neither inductive nor deductive. It is transductive, corresponding to the discovery of the dimensions according to which a problematic can be defined. . It is the taking charge of a system of virtualities by the system of actuality. . No determinism presides over it. . It is the advent of possibilities."
-- Gilbert Simondon

According to Gilbert Simondon, invention is problematizing, rather than resolving. It does not realize possibility: possibility is precisely what emerges through invention. This means that there is no linear causal path as a means to it. What precedes its own means and its own possibility is impossible, until it happens. What could be more problematic? Simondon nevertheless underlines the rigourously technical nature of invention. Our talk will discuss a series of collective experimentations undertaken at the SenseLab in Montreal over the past seven years which attempt to put a concept of invention similar to Simondon's to the test toward the production of new forms of collaborative activity at the boundary between conceptual research and artistic creation. What techniques of relation foster the inventive emergence of collective possibilities? What economies of activity are involved? What are the politics of aesthetic activity guided by a problematic practice of invention in Simondon's sense?

Bios

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. In her art practice she works between painting, dance, fabric and sculpture (http://www.erinmovement.com). Her writing addresses the senses, philosophy and politics, articulating the relation between experience, thought and politics in a transdisciplinary framework moving between dance and new technology, the political and micropolitics of sensation, performance art, and the current convergence of cinema, animation and new media. Publications include Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her forthcoming manuscript, Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance will be published by Duke University Press in 2011.

Brian Massumi specializes in the philosophy of embodied experience, media theory, and political philosophy. His research is two-fold: the experience of movement and the interrelations between the senses, in particular in the context of new media art and technology; and emergent modes of power associated with the globalization of capitalism and the rise of preemptive politics. He is currently completing a book project entitled Perception Attack: Philosophy of Experience for Times of War (MIT Press). His previous publications include Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (MIT Press, 1992), and First and Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot (with Kenneth Dean; Autonomedia, 1993). He is editor of The Politics of Everyday Fear (University of Minnesota Press, 1993) and A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge, 2002) and was the founding editor of the University of Minnesota Press book series Theory Out of Bounds (1991-2006; co-edited by Michael Hardt and Sandra Buckley). His translations from the French include Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus and Jacques Attali's Noise. He is a professor in the Communication Department of the Université de Montréal, where he directs the Workshop in Radical Empiricism (Atelier en empirisme radical). With Erin Manning of the SenseLab, Concordia University, he co-organizes a series of events and activities under the title "Technologies of Lived Abstraction" dedicated to the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction. Also with Erin Manning he edits an MIT Press book series also entitled "Technologies of Lived Abstraction."
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Information concerning the concept and programme of Inventions:

http://www.zhdk.ch/index.php?id=inventionen

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