Hi Everyone,
To follow on Sophie’s post, let me add:
a letter: “What is research in contemporary art?” ,
a note about what’s at stake for research-creation at the Synthesis Center,
and a revised introduction to the TML article "The Atelier-Lab as a Transversal Machine”.
Looking forward to discussing these experiences and ideas for the future, 2:30 - 4:00 EST today. (Zoom links at end of this email.)
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Synthesis @ ASU Whats at stake?
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Synthesis @ ASU Whats at stake?
The Topological Media Lab was built to create poetic-computational techne : gestural media and responsive environments that are quite alien to what most computer scientists and engineers, and media theorists and artists for that matter mean by computation or media.
One of Synthesis’ major research streams is to explore as deeply as possible what we can do poetically and philosophically with gestural temporal textures, non-anthropocentrically.
Art all the way down: We do not eschew techne. Indeed we create our own tactics, techniques, code, instruments and platforms, attentive to criteria and concerns very different than market-based art, technoscience or carbon capitalism. But rather than rest content with DIY techne, we go deep into coding and speculative engineering below the conventional boundary between art and “mere” technology, detourning the conceptual frames that scaffold store-bought kits and ready-made forms of art and design.
Radical criticality: we do not accept the terms handed to us by carbon capitalist commodity technology. Thus, a lot of the critiques such as identity politics, media theory, and digital humanities, are problematic because they are not adequate to the technicity in play (Simondon). And commentary and representation, however clever, do not suffice as critical engagement, at least for Synthesis.
Co-articulation: no “ontological” distinction between creator and spectator, indeed between subject and object, director and engineer, means that the actants and intentions in a situation do not pre-exist the event.
Non-anthropomorphic: While we always work from our lived human condition, we do not think and act as if we humans are the only or the most important beings in the world.
Enchantment of the everyday: Rather than make work for the frame of art, we insert interventions into everyday built environment that create conditions under which ordinary can assume significance or even symbolic charge.
Topological media: Palpable continuous fields that vary continuously in response to continuous transformation.
Responsive media: Fields of light, sound, gesture, moving matter that vary continuously to arbitrary activity, admitting gestural or calligraphic nuance, and un-preschematized play.
SC wants to host research projects that help build the constantly evolving delta of research streams: enduring questions, propositions, inquiries that we’re pursuing with all our forces and friends. Here are some: http://synthesiscenter.net/research/
e.g.
• Multi-scale rhythmanalytic approach to experience
• Using gestural (responsive) media to explore temporal texture
• Ontogenesis and the emergence of sense
• Experiential simulations: how can becoming weather or ocean
be a mode of non-anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic
but embodied and enactive experience?
• Vegetal life: non-anthropocentric approach to ethico-aesthetic individuation
I also attach a snapshot of what’s currently in play (Synthesis Brief slides). There are infinitely many ways to explore these enduring questions or propositions. Can we explore any of them not as soloists in ego-based art, but jointly?
What I’d like to explore with you about your proposed project(s) is not the what, but the why — what’s at stake?
Let’s talk and see if we can develop some common interests first…
By the way, in addition to the projects related to the streams, we have a new crop of small PhD projects co-sponsored that may be getting ready for hosting at SC, including:
One of Synthesis’ major research streams is to explore as deeply as possible what we can do poetically and philosophically with gestural temporal textures, non-anthropocentrically.
Art all the way down: We do not eschew techne. Indeed we create our own tactics, techniques, code, instruments and platforms, attentive to criteria and concerns very different than market-based art, technoscience or carbon capitalism. But rather than rest content with DIY techne, we go deep into coding and speculative engineering below the conventional boundary between art and “mere” technology, detourning the conceptual frames that scaffold store-bought kits and ready-made forms of art and design.
Radical criticality: we do not accept the terms handed to us by carbon capitalist commodity technology. Thus, a lot of the critiques such as identity politics, media theory, and digital humanities, are problematic because they are not adequate to the technicity in play (Simondon). And commentary and representation, however clever, do not suffice as critical engagement, at least for Synthesis.
Co-articulation: no “ontological” distinction between creator and spectator, indeed between subject and object, director and engineer, means that the actants and intentions in a situation do not pre-exist the event.
Non-anthropomorphic: While we always work from our lived human condition, we do not think and act as if we humans are the only or the most important beings in the world.
Enchantment of the everyday: Rather than make work for the frame of art, we insert interventions into everyday built environment that create conditions under which ordinary can assume significance or even symbolic charge.
Topological media: Palpable continuous fields that vary continuously in response to continuous transformation.
Responsive media: Fields of light, sound, gesture, moving matter that vary continuously to arbitrary activity, admitting gestural or calligraphic nuance, and un-preschematized play.
SC wants to host research projects that help build the constantly evolving delta of research streams: enduring questions, propositions, inquiries that we’re pursuing with all our forces and friends. Here are some: http://synthesiscenter.net/research/
e.g.
• Multi-scale rhythmanalytic approach to experience
• Using gestural (responsive) media to explore temporal texture
• Ontogenesis and the emergence of sense
• Experiential simulations: how can becoming weather or ocean
be a mode of non-anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic
but embodied and enactive experience?
• Vegetal life: non-anthropocentric approach to ethico-aesthetic individuation
I also attach a snapshot of what’s currently in play (Synthesis Brief slides). There are infinitely many ways to explore these enduring questions or propositions. Can we explore any of them not as soloists in ego-based art, but jointly?
What I’d like to explore with you about your proposed project(s) is not the what, but the why — what’s at stake?
Let’s talk and see if we can develop some common interests first…
By the way, in addition to the projects related to the streams, we have a new crop of small PhD projects co-sponsored that may be getting ready for hosting at SC, including:
***
The Atelier-Lab as a Transversal MachineRevue française d'études américaines (2012)Introduction (Revised April 2020):Two decades ago, Felix Guattari pointed to the heterogeneous machines around us: material, semiotic/diagrammatic/algorithmic, corporeal, mental/representational/informatic, libidinal/ affective. Guattari’s Chaosmosis asked how we could construct machines that act transversally across those machines. From 2001 to 2013, the Topological Media Lab (TML) worked as a university-based atelier-laboratory transversal to computer science, performing arts, architecture and the built environment, to generate insights and techniques in the domain of new media and responsive environments. The TML was an academic research center for gestural, performative, and embodied expression in responsive media environments.The TML’s theoretical project concerned ontogenesis in performative event — how subjects and objects take shape in a continuous dynamical ontology. Its critical inquiry started from the limits of discrete representation, and seeks alternatives to linguistic-semiotic analysis in the form of non-metric topological, dynamical, potential-theoretic and other material patterning. An important aspiration was to discover non-anthropocentric ways to articulate improvisatory ethico-aesthetic gesture.Improvisation does not mean something willful or random. It is conditioned by past aspiration and heuristics, but not by a deterministic plan. The atelier was motivated by the question: How can ordinary actions in everyday environments acquire symbolic charge? What makes some environments enlivening and others deadening?Reflexively, we ask: To what extent can we instantiate labs or ateliers for the creation of apparatuses for ethico-aesthetic improvisation? This contribution describes institutional, socio-technical, political, economic issues around running such an atelier-laboratory as an alternative social economy complementary to post-industrial, “knowledge-based” economies.
On Apr 22, 2020, at 8:15 PM, Sophie Strassmann <sophie.strassmann@mail.mcgill.ca> wrote:
Dear PSF Community,Xin Wei has prepared an agenda of conversation tomorrow, Thursday @2:30 PM - 4 PM (EST). Please read the introduction Xin Wei kindly composed below so that we can hit the ground running! Here is the link to the original article, that we strongly suggest taking a look at.Zoom/Meeting Access:Use this link with the following password; 20202021. If that link doesn't work, use this one (shouldn't have a password).Hope to see you there!Sophie