Category Archives: philosophy

Evan Calder Williams: The Sabotage of Space

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MANUAL OVERRIDE: THE SABOTAGE OF CAPITAL
4 Lectures by Evan Calder Williams
LECTURE 3: THE SABOTAGE OF SPACE

APRIL 28, the ‘GLASS CORNER’, room E206, 25 East 13th Street, 7.00 PM – 10PM

 

The qualities that made sabotage one of the twentieth century’s bad words – its cunning, conspiracy with complex apparatuses, invisibility, and “time-release” effect – are not qualities it invented. Rather, they are found in the basic coordinates of that century’s spatial system. If, as the previous talk explored, the history of sabotage is one of drift and diffusion, moving from a specific practice in wage-centered struggles through legal and military codification to a general concept of subterfuge and hostility, it is so only as an index of real changes happening to and through the material networks of capital. This talk considers those networks and changes through the lens of sabotage, focusing in particular on two histories: the Metropolis, both as the large city and as the process of expansion that dissolves the coherence of the city/country divide, and pollution, as an idea giving the West nightmares for a good two millennia and now showing itself inseparable from daily life. Topics include: Kiev’s ice barricades; Doreen Massey’s feminist geography; miasma, blocked signals, and the birds of Antigone; recent digital animation; Deepwater Horizon and the burning ocean; floods of work and water; Piranesi’s serpents; Günther Anders and Massimo Cacciari; the earth’s crust.

The talk will be followed by a response by, and conversation with, Sabu Kohso, a theorist and translator currently researching and writing on the aftermath of Fukushima.

Free and open to the public. Seating is limited, please register on Eventbrite.
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/evan-calder-williams-the-sabotage-of-space-manual-override-lecture-3-tickets-11410835115

For more information on Calder Williams’ 2013/14 lectures:
http://ctm.parsons.edu/events/lecture-series/2013-14-fellows-lectures/

 

Post Planetary Capital Symposium

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Sunshine, Boyle

Post Planetary Capital Symposium
Monday, March 24, 2014 from 9:00 AM to 9:30 PM (EDT)
Co-organized by Ed Keller and Ben Woodard
Wollman Hall 66 West 12th Street 5th floor   New York, NY
Free and open to the public.

 


Introduction and opening of symposium

More symposium footage: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/post-planetary-capital

 

As the dull glow of nationalism and cold war politics has faded from governmental space programs it is little surprise that space exploration has undergone widespread privatization.
Yet it is only recently that potentially massive profitability has accelerated off-planet projects, replacing narrower and perhaps unrealistic dreams of space tourism with asteroid mining (purportedly a multi-trillion dollar industry) and long term Mars colonization. Such projects present an odd combination of new technologies (especially advanced robotics) and lower cost older technologies (rocket propulsion) deployed in unfamiliar and lawless territory.

While much has been said regarding the internal limits of capital, much yet remains to be said about how capitalist imperatives can be taken off-world, questioning whether capital[ism] has external limits as it begins to spread across the solar system and out into space. Is the fact that asteroid mining extends an old logic of environmental degradation rendered moot by its non-terrestrial location? Does off-world colonization by non-governmental entities lay troubling ground work for the advent of mega-corporations and unregulatable capitalism?

Furthermore, the complicity between capitalist expansion and space exploration which centers upon large-scale collective action potentially questions stock oppositions between capital and ecological betterment, technological progression and radical politics, as well as space travel and non-national collectivity. This one day symposium aims to address the potential strategies and claims surrounding these issues.

– Ed Keller, Ben Woodard

PARTICIPANTS
Julieta Aranda [artist / editor of eflux journal]
Amanda Beech [CalArts]
Kai Bosworth  [UMN]
Benjamin H. Bratton [DGP/UCSD]
Ed Keller [CTM/Parsons]
Deneb Kozikoski [Columbia]
Carla Leitao [RPI/Pratt]
Geoff Manaugh [Gizmodo/BLDGBLOG]
Rory Rowan [Wageningen University, The Netherlands ]
Keith Tilford [New School]
Ken Wark [New School]
Ben Woodard [University of Western Ontario]
Kazys Varnelis [Columbia Univ. GSAPP]

Additional speakers TBA

A Rogue Frequency: book and record launch

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Yume Cyan, Last Dance of the Fairies, Nagoya City, Japan (June 2013)

punctum and the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons The New School for Design are co-hosting A Rogue Frequency on Saturday, September 28th, from 5:30-8:00 pm @Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (66 Fifth Avenue), to celebrate the launch of punctum records and to feature a reading/sound/music mashup with musical artist Taft, plus Katherine Behar + Emmy Mikelson, Jamie “Skye” Bianco, Andreas Burckhardt (author of punctum’s A Sanctuary of Sounds), Rachel Cantor, Oliver Kellhammer, Léopold Lambert, Marget Long, Dominic Pettman, Allen W. Strouse (author of punctum’s forthcoming My Gay Middle Ages), and Marina Zurkow. Books will be available for purchase and there will also be a reception. The Facebook page for the event is HERE.

 

 

Cyber-Nietzsche | 04.13.2013

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On April 13,  2013, The Center for Transformative Media (CTM) at Parsons The New School for Design presented ‘Cyber-Nietzsche: Tunnels, Tightropes, Net-&-Meshworks’: a day-long symposium on the relation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy to Media Studies, Cybernetics, and the so-called ‘Digital Humanities’ (Human, All too Human?).

The Nietzsche Workshop@Western is an annual international conference that provides an academic forum for scholars and students to discuss the most salient issues of contemporary society in light of the critical perspectives and politico-philosophical insights of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Speakers included:

Jen Boyle, Coastal Carolina University;  Sarah Choukah, Universite de Montreal;  Pawel Krol, Universite Laval;  Nicola Masciandaro, City University of New York;  Jimmy Raskin, Miguel Abreu Gallery; Dylan Wittkower, Old Dominion University; Joseph Nechvatal, School of Visual Arts;  Eugene Thacker, The New School;  Babette Babich, Fordham University;  Gary Shapiro, University of Richmond, Emeritus;  Shannon Bell, York University;  Dominic Pettmann, The New School; and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy & Dan Mellamphy, Western University.

Full conference at UStream:

Selected NWWiv presentations at Vimeo: