Category Archives: philosophy

More Than Personal: Self-Portraiture & Auto-Perceptive Screens

A lecture by Nadine Boljkovac, CTM Fellow

“Inscribed within Chantal Akerman’s 2015 No Home Movie, Michael Haneke’s 2012 Amour and Philip Hoffman’s 2001 What These Ashes Wanted are experiences of transience and home, illness and mourning. And yet, poignantly persistent throughout these works are also flashes and images of enduring life and duration that emerge via instances of filmic self-portraiture and self-perception. These particular moments function as temporal cracks or materialised disruptions. While they render visible invisible strains and dimensions of pain, grief and loss, the brief fissures embody living portraits of both the deceased and the ‘living’ (the late filmmaker/motherless daughter, grieving partner, beleaguered widower) that attest not only to cruel actual separations between loved ones but also an endless process of distanciation from one’s former self. Such momentary glimpses of other worlds within the films, as enacted via seconds of self-portraiture and self-perception, reveal possibilities for difference as they envision alternative trajectories and futures – especially for the women of these works – with reverberations that long linger. Through an auto-perceptive screen, these processes materialise, fragment and liberate these already dead and endlessly dying women…”

Nadine Boljkovac is Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth University. She is an August-October 2018 Visiting Fellow of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, and the recipient of a University of Cologne 2018-19 Research Fellowship (Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies). Boljkovac was a University of New South Wales 2015-17 Postdoctoral Fellow (Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia), the Brown University 2012-13 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow (Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women), a University of Edinburgh 2010 Postdoctoral Fellow (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities) and University of Aberdeen 2009-10 Film Teaching Fellow. Her monograph examining affect and ethics via Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2013), was reissued in paperback in 2015. A second monograph is in progress, Beyond Herself: Feminist (Auto)Portraiture and the Moving Image. Most recent peer-reviewed works appear in ‘Materialising Absence in Film and Media’ (a 2018 Special Dossier, co-editors Saige Walton and Nadine Boljkovac for Screening the Past: A Peer-Reviewed Journal of Screen History, Theory & Criticism); The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (editors Tom Conley and Hunter Vaughan, 2018); and On Style: Transdisciplinary Articulations (editor Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank, 2018).

Event took place on October 16 at 6pm at Parsons 25 East 13th street, ‘Glass Box’ room E206, second floor.

The Trauma of the Earth: Lecture by Julius Greve

In early 2018, Julius Greve gave a lecture he called, On the Decomposition of Nature in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction. How to rethink trauma in the context of today’s turn to the question concerning materiality in the humanities? What is the role of fiction in the delineation of concepts of nature that resonate with, but are partially independent of, those forged in and by philosophical discourse? Julius Greve traces the concept of nature in the work of American writer Cormac McCarthy, as it is construed by literary rather than philosophical means, rendering visible a transhistorical and transatlantic constellation, including schools of thought such as Schellingian philosophies of nature and speculative realism.

CTM hosted Greve for this lecture. He also joined a seminar session in Post Planetary Design as a guest.

Acid Architecture: Symposium

With Warren Neidich, Ken Wark, Sanford Kwinter, Ed Keller, and Nora Khan.

In cognitive capitalism the mind and brain are the new factories of the 21st century. We are the cognitariat, mental laborers: our daily searches, likes and dislikes creating the lifeblood of vectorialist platforms. Originally denoting shifting relations of labor characterized by performativity, virtuosity and immateriality, cognitive capital’s current material mutations, especially those occurring in uncounted populations of neural synapses, now embody and extend networked cultural relations across our habitus.

This conference begins with these provocations and explores the ‘architectural’ implications of such changes. We introduce the notion of Acid Architecture as a term that, on the one hand, delineates a state of psychedelically induced mind warping resulting from excitation of alternative serotonergic active sites and, on the other, the resulting wall paintings, hive minds, design initiatives and architectures that emerge from the fanciful imaginings of this alternative state of consciousness. Acid Architecture can be hypothesized to function at all physical and temporal scales as a means of escape from the processes of normalization and governmentalization at hand in neurocapitalism’s contemporary forms of subjectivization.

Ed Keller moderated, spoke, and served as co-organizer with Warren Neidich.

Future of Mind: Symposium

Ed Keller, Bill Hibbard, Nick Land, David Weinbaum, Ben Goertzel.

The symposium explored the future possibilities of intelligence in the broadest way possible. What kinds of minds will future AGIs and robots possess? What kinds of collective intelligence will emerge among humans, cyborgs, robots, and AIs? What new types of complex self-organizing dynamics will arise, stretching beyond our current concept of “intelligence”? What will our current notions of “ethics”, “consciousness” and “creativity” look like from the perspective of 2050 or 2200?  

 The day featured a series of panels moderated by Dr. Goertzel and Prof. Keller, combining contributions of expert panelists with those of audience members. Five minute ‘lightning talk’ presentations by panelists were followed by discussions encouraging all participants and audience to develop a day long conversation. 

 Guests included Cosmo Harrigan, Natasha Vita More, David Weinbaum, Nick Land, Bill Hibbard, Reza Negarestani, Patricia Reed, Pete Wolfendale, Peter Watts, Ben Bratton, et al.  Convened and moderated by Ed Keller and Ben Goertzel.

 We partnered with The New Centre to host one day of their week long, parallel, #AGI seminar, and were joined by them in one panel. http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/live-blog- the-new-centre-2016-nyc-summer-residency-july-18-22/4077

SCHEDULE

9:30-10 AM: Workshop Introduction

10-11:15 AM: SESSION 1: The Future of the Individual: AGIs, Cyborgs, Uploads, and …

Epistemological horizons of the individual and collective mind. Rethinking the ethics and politics of mind beyond individual or gender.

◦ Panelists: Cosmo Harrigan, Natasha Vita-More, Amy Li, & by videolink Peter Watts

11:30-12:45: SESSION 2: Economies of Intelligence

The economics of intelligence; and the intelligence of economies. Continuing thoughts on the relation between emerging ‘radical economies’ and the role of cognitive & computational platforms. Infrastructure, complexity, collapse.

◦ Panelists: Ted Goertzel, José Cordeiro

12:45-2 – lunch break

2-3:15: SESSION 3: Ethics, Ethologies and Ecologies of the Emerging Global Brain

Non-anthropocentric models of cognition and intelligence. Blockchain and tech-ecology as platform for a ‘noosphere’. The absolute limits of the human. Critically unpacking various computational models and a broader definition of life and ecology. Addressing the human/non-human/alien relationship.

◦ Panelists: David Weinbaum, Nick Land, Bill Hibbard

3:30-4:45: SESSION 4: #AGI: Accelerate General Intellect

[organized with the collaboration of The New Centre]

◦ Panelists [TBC]: Reza Negarestani, Pete Wolfendale, Patricia Reed

Panel Abstract: What does it mean to accelerate the general intellect in the age of artificial intelligence? #AGI begins from the investigation of distributed networks from which thought assembles and into which it disperses. Unlike in the past, general intelligence, algorithms, and networks are together becoming as irreducible to the efforts of “universal” intellectuals as cultural and political movements have become to “universal” leaders. Will the future enable a more radical, integrated, but also more complex mode of cultural and political engagement? One predicated upon what Marx describes as, “the conditions of the process of social life itself… under the control of the general intellect.”*

#AGI explores the new intensifying developments in the field of AI that are making possible subjectless modes of the general intellect, more collective and more general than any single individual or network.

* Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 706.

5:00-6:15: SESSION 5: Mind Beyond Mind

The relations linking radical invention, aesthetics, biological networks, and cognition. The Stack.

◦ Panelists: Vlad Bowen, Elliott Sharp, Ben Bratton [by videolink]

6:15-6:45 : Workshop Wrap-up

Morning session video

Afternoon session video

In Service to Nothing: Intellectual Inquiry in the Open

In Service to Nothing: Intellectual Inquiry in the Open
Symposium at The New School
The Center for Transformative Media and punctum books
November 7 11AM-6PM
66 West 12th Street, room A404
https://www.facebook.com/events/1671272699787129/

“In Service to Nothing: Intellectual Inquiry in the Open” is a symposium, co-hosted by the Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design and punctum books, that takes as its launching pad three new and forthcoming titles by CTM+punctum authors–

• Michael Berger, ed., “Ravish the Republic: The Archives of the Iron Garters Crime/Art Collective” (Dead Letter Office, punctum books, 2015)

• Gavin Keeney, “Knowledge, Spirit, Law, Book I: Radical Scholarship (CTM Documents Initiative, punctum books, 2015)

• Marc Lafia, “Image/Photograph” (CTM Documents Initiative, punctum books, 2015)

— in order to think through what it might mean, currently, to practice radically speculative forms of scholarship that work to evade, escape, and critique neoliberal and institutional-bureaucratic capture, or, as Keeney puts it in his book, that would work “against neoliberalist anomie and the preservation of postmodern différance as means to atomize consciousness and instill … a society of control.” Further, Keeney writes,

“Why is the speculative confined to the arts, or—worse still—to cultural studies (the circularity of endless discourse present there mimicking knowledge production based on citation and interpretation of received wisdom)? How have the arts been isolated and rendered toothless since the inception of modernism, when revolutionary-critical and productive work was one of the key operative elements of the “architecture” of modernism (if not modernity)?”

How, also, for those of us working the veins of so-called “academic” discourses, can we resist what Sarah Schulman has called “the gentrification of the mind,” working instead, in the words of Michael Berger, “to make unprecedented collaborations between art and theory, spirituality and labor, crime and love, writing and noise”? Further, of the work of the Iron Garters Crime/Art collective, Berger writes,

“The unquestioned divisions between genres and modes and forms could no longer be tolerated. The Academy would have to be thrown into the street. Theory would have to be disrupted by economic brutalities. Culture would have to be rewritten by the powerless. Sexuality and desire would have to be undermined by artistic frenzy and mystical devotion. Above all, we would have to be reckless yet cunning like the most devoted outlaws, protectors of a Wild Outside that has no real analogue in human rationality.”

We can look back to Foucault’s Preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus,” to see the situation framed this way: “How does one introduce desire into thought, into discourse, into action? How can and must desire deploy its forces within the political domain and grow more intense in the process of overturning the established order?”

“In Service to Nothing” will gather together authors and publishers who are working to foster and enact speculative, avant-garde scholarly praxes that resist the business-as-usual of the Public Research Institution, the Digital Humanities, Academic Publishing, Neoliberal Capital, and the like, in order to reinvigorate the question of intellectual creation outside of its intensive “management” as “property” within the contemporary university. Further, speakers have been selected because of the ways in which their work productively emerges at the intersections between the Institution, the University, the so-called Street/Outside, the Studio/Workshop, the Gallery/Museum, etc.

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

11:00am-11:30am
COFFEE/TEA

11:30am-12:00noon
Welcoming/Framing Remarks by Eileen Joy + Chris Piuma (Co-Directors, punctum books)

12:00noon-1:00pm
Alison Kinney (author of HOOD, forthcoming from Bloomsbury in Jan. 2016) + Michael Berger (Iron Garters Crime/Art Collective)

1:00pm-2:00pm
LUNCH BREAK

2:00pm-3:00pm
Karen Gregory (Digital Sociology, University of Edinburgh) + Gavin Keeney (Agence ‘X’)

3:00pm-3:30pm
COFFEE/TEA

3:30pm-4:30pm
Marina Zurkow (Multimedia Artist + Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts) + Marc Lafia (Photographer/Filmmaker + author of IMAGE/PHOTOGRAPH)

4:30pm-5:30pm
Joseph Nechvatal (Multimedia Artist, Paris + author of DESTROYER OF NAIVETES) + Ed Keller (Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design)

Hacking Feminism: May 9 & 10, 2015

Hacking Feminism

A two-day symposium on Saturday May 9, and Sunday May 10, 2015, The New School (NYC)
Hosted by CTM The Center for Transformative Media (Parsons, New School) and co-sponsored by CTM, The Graduate Center (CUNY) and Punctum Books. Co-organized by Patricia Clough (CUNY), Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (Western), Dan Mellamphy (Western), Svitlana Matviyenko (Western) and Ed Keller (CTM).

Participants List in alphabetical order
Anne Balsamo, School of Media Studies, The New School, USA
Shannon Bell, York University, Canada
Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Western University, Canada
Zach Blas, University of Buffalo, USA
Sarah Choukah, University of Montreal, Canada
Patricia Ticineto Clough, CUNY, USA
Lucca Fraser, Dalhousie University, Canada
Alexander Galloway, New York University, USA
Nancy Gillespie, Independent Scholar (NY-FLAG)
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, School of Visual Arts, USA
Margret Grebowicz, Goucher College, USA
Karen Gregory, CUNY, USA
Eileen Joy, Punctum Books, USA
Ed Keller, Parsons The New School for Design, USA
Svitlana Matviyenko, Western University, Canada
Dan Mellamphy, Western University, Canada
Luciana Parisi, University of London, UK
Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University, USA
Joshua Scannell, CUNY, USA
Oyku Tekten, CUNY, USA
McKenzie Wark, The New School, USA

To hack:

to cut with heavy blows in an irregular or random fashion;
to embarrass, annoy; to disconcert, confuse;
to cope with, manage, accomplish; to tolerate, accept; to comprehend;
to hesitate in speech; to stammer;
to break into a computer system by hacking;
to make a hack of, to put to indiscriminate or promiscuous use; to make common, vulgar, or stale, by such treatment;
to cut or chop up or into pieces, to chop off;
to make a clever, benign, and ethical prank or practical joke.

‘The body’ has been a central concept and site of power and subjectivity in the histories of feminism, and yet, in the age of ‘big data’ and ubiquitous computing, we are compelled to ask whether ‘corporeality’, ‘materiality’ and ‘embodiment’ have morphed into something beyond the conceptual boundaries of the ‘organic, fleshy, lived body’. Hacking Feminism seeks to gather together scholars and practitioners who are interested in exploring how the virtualization and informationalization of bodies have impacted — even challenged — central feminist concepts and tropes such as embodiment, materiality, corporeality, affectivity, and experientiality. How have widespread technical developments in Cybernetics and theoretical developments in Post-Humanism pushed feminist theorizations of the body away from the dialectics of individual phenomenological subjects and objects, towards multi-sensory design interfaces, trans-individual ecologies, and technically mediated embodiments? How is the rise of ambient and affective computing changing how bodies, especially ‘data bodies,’ are being measured? Is there a ‘messiness’ that escapes the ‘measurability’ of bodies? Or is this escapism itself a kind of romanticism? Can we still talk about a specifically feminist approach to theorizing both phenomenological (organic) and virtual (data) bodies?

SATURDAY MAY 9ᵗʰ: 66 West 12th street. Room 510, with alternate/spillover space in A404- check with front desk.

10.30 Seating open

10:45 OPENING REMARKS
—Ed Keller (co-organizer with D_Mellamphy, N_Biswas_Mellamphy, P_Clough and S_Matviyenko).

11:00–12: AUTOMATION AND SEX
—Luciana Parisi (11:00–11:30), Nandita Biswas Mellamphy (11:30–11:50),
Q&A (11:50–12:20).

12:20–12:30 COFFEE BREAK

12:30–1:50 THE NON-HUMAN UNCONSCIOUS:
THE PSYCHE IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY
—Patricia Clough (12:30–1:00), S Matviyenko (1:00–1:20),
Q&A (1:20–1:50).

1:50–3:00 LUNCH offsite.

3:00–4:20 CONTRA-INTERNET
—Zach Blas (3:00–3:30), Eileen Joy (3:30–3:50),
Q&A (3:50–4:20).

4:20–4:30 COFFEE BREAK.

4:30–6:10 THE LIVELINESS OF DATA
—Karen Gregory (4:30–4:50), Joshua Scannell (4:50–5:10),
Sarah Choukah (5:10–5:30),
Q&A (5:30–6:10).

6:10–6:30 COFFEE BREAK (performers prepare stage).

6:30–7:30 THE CHILDREN OF THE MERCY-FILES (performance).

8:00 DINNER.

SUNDAY MAY 10ᵗʰ: 65 West 11th Street, Wollman Hall, 5th Floor

12:00 Seating open.

12:30–1:50 INHUMANIST BIOPOLITICS:
PREHENSIVE GENDERING IN OCCUPATION
—Jasbir Puar (12:30–1:00), Alex Galloway (1:00–1:20),
Q&A (1:20–1:50).

1:50– 3:00 LUNCH offsite.

3:00–4:20 HACKING THE LACK
—Shannon Bell (3:00–3:30), Nancy Gillespie (3:30–3:50),
Q&A (3:50–4:20).

4:20–4:30 COFFEE BREAK.

4:30–6:30 HACKING HARAWAY
—McKenzie Wark (4:30–4:50), Margret Grebowicz (4:50–5:10),
Thyrza Goodeve (5:10–5:30), Anne Balsamo (5:30–5:50),
Q&A (5:50–6:30).

6:30-6:35 BREAK.

6:35–6:55 WRAP-UP OVERVIEW & SUMMARY, CLOSING COMMENTS—Ed Keller.

7:30 DINNER.

___
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE [pdf]: HACKING FEMINISM schedule

Cinema of Ethics, Ethics of Cinema: Nadine Boljkovac

‘A Secret Called Happiness’:
Cinema of Ethics, Ethics of Cinema

Saturday, December 13 at 6:00pm – 8:00pm

T. Lang Hall, 55 West 13th Street, NY NY

‘And then the earth, present to the point of filming it up close, at root level. How many times do the characters confront the earth, the mud, the original clay of which they were made, from which they seem not yet to be free, and chose to bury themselves in it’. (Marker, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, 1999)

‘Here we catch a glimpse of a future in which all mysteries are resolved. [. . .] this will come about because these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will lay the fragments of a single secret end to end, a secret with a beautiful name, a secret called happiness.’ (Resnais with ‘Chris and Magic Marker’, et al., 1956)

‘Forensic medicine,’ Claire Colebrook observes, ‘has its own functions and styles of inhuman observation.’ Prior to the 2015 paperback re-release of Untimely Affects, this presentation draws upon the text to undertake its own process of excavation and observation. It casts its gaze at relations between cinema and life – ethics, time and future, demarcations between material bodies (chemical, biological, social or political), and the production of affects – to speak of the unspeakable, ineffable, imperceptible and unthinkable.

Via traces that Chris Marker and Alain Resnais have left, ‘traces with which one can work, and contours to help draw up the map’ (Marker), this talk grasps at an interconnectedness among all assemblages of life, human and otherwise, to consider memory fragments in terms of the geography of a nomadic subjectivity. Such is to contemplate ‘the eternity of the lifeforces, not the perennity of death’ (Rosi Braidotti). Through multiple filmic excerpts and close readings, the talk will encounter foldings and doublings that engender subjectivities beyond the human. The excerpts will aid in an analysis of ‘beauty’ and an exploration of ways for seeing and thinking beyond destruction and extermination.

As it thereby attempts to trace what is beautiful and intangible, what is not in fact a ‘what’ but rather this, thisness, sign or ‘trigger’ (Steven Shaviro), the talk will obsess over ‘things that quicken the heart’ (Marker) … while questioning how temporal perceptions and sensations, as glimpsed through the moving image, affect ‘our’ perceptions, environments, and planet.
– Nadine Boljkovac

‘To think is to reach a non-stratified material, somewhere between the layers, in the interstices. Thinking has an essential relation to history, but it is no more historical than it is eternal. It is closer to what Nietzsche calls the Untimely: to think the past against the present—which would be nothing more than a common place, pure nostalgia, some kind of return, if he did not immediately add: “in favor, I hope, of a time to come”.’ (Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995, Deleuze)

Nadine Boljkovac (PhD, Cambridge) is Postdoctoral Fellow of Visual Culture & the Moving Image, Centre for Modernism Studies, UNSW. She was the Brown University 2012-13 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow, a University of Edinburgh 2010 Postdoctoral Fellow, and University of Aberdeen 2009-10 Film Teaching Fellow. Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) will be released in paperback in 2015. A second monograph in progress, Beyond Self and Screen, explores filmic instances of women’s self-portraiture.

Superpositions- A Symposium on Laruelle

October 10 & 11, 2014

‘Superpositions’ refers to the non-philosophical practice of conjugating distinct strata of academic discourse on the model of quantum interference rather than classical logic, which entails a distinctive ‘equalization’ of the standard hierarchies of disciplines and knowledges. The outcome of such a practice remains largely unknown. Perhaps similarly unknown is the work of François Laruelle, inventor of what has been most recently called ‘non-standard philosophy’. Laruelle, once named “the most important unknown philosopher working in Europe today” (Ray Brassier, 2003) has developed an innovative and powerful repertoire of concepts across an oeuvre spanning four decades and dozens of books. His work will undoubtedly come to have a significant impact on the critical practices of the humanities; this symposium explores Laruelle’s work across its possible relations to contemporary issues in philosophy, critical theory and media studies.

Excerpts from event at UStream:

SCHEDULE:
Detailed schedule- PDF
Friday, October 10, 2014: 7:30-8:30 pm
Reception and Introduction: Opening Lecture, Alex Galloway
Dorothy Hirshorn Suite, Room I205
Arnhold Hall 55 West 13th Street

Saturday, October 11, 2014: 9:30 am – 6:00 pm
Symposium
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Room 202
Arnhold Hall 55 West 13th Street

Superpositions
Non-Standard Perspectives on Critical Theory, Philosophy and Media Studies
A Symposium on Laruelle and the Humanities

List of Speakers:
Alex Dubilet (Berkeley, University of California)
Alexander R. Galloway (New York University)
Rocco Gangle (Endicott College)
Julius Greve (University of Cologne)
Katerina Kolozova (University American College-Skopje)
Dave Mesing (Villanova University)
Benjamin Norris (The New School)
Anthony Paul Smith (LaSalle University)

Organizers:
Rocco Gangle (Endicott College)
Julius Greve (University of Cologne)
Ed Keller (The New School/CTM)

SIGNAL PATH: The Present and Future of SOUND and NOISE [or, Fury]

‘Focusing and defocusing of a signal passed through a random turbulent atmospheric medium.’

SIGNAL PATH: The Present and Future of SOUND and NOISE [or, Fury]
Friday, May 30, 9 AM- 5PM
T. Lang Conference room, 55 West 13th Street, second floor, New York City
Free and open to the public

SPEAKERS / PERFORMERS
Elliott Sharp, Perry Hall, Joe Ravo, Eldritch Priest, Marc Couroux, Quinn Dougherty,
Brendan Byrne, Joe Saavedra; Danil Nagy, Lisa Ekle, Yuval Borochov;
Punctum Records Artists: Roger Sellers, Topher Sipes, Andrew Stevens
Organized and introduced by Ed Keller, Director, CTM.

[speaker bios: https://www.facebook.com/events/475157329283875/permalink/484687074997567/ ]

Excerpts from the event at UStream:

More symposium footage at UStream event channel:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/signal-path-symposium

SYMPOSIUM OVERVIEW
‘What is the signal path- the ‘information flow’ through ‘instruments’? What models and disciplines might be useful to invoke when asking this question? Looking to computation, the way that memory is articulated is illustrative of the specific challenges faced when we contrast a more static form of storage, such as a flipped bit [or a printed page]- against a more dynamic form, such as delay line memory, a 1950s technology that used sound waves propagating through tubes of mercury. These examples underscore what might be at stake when we translate theories of noise to the sonic disciplines, and musical and sonic concepts to disciplines as diverse as geology, economics, material science, architectural design, and geo-politics.

This symposium offers an invitation to explore the space of research and practice in sound that is keenly attuned to the value of ‘noise’. The intention is to reveal approaches both pragmatic as well as platforms theoretic, across the political/arts/sciences spectrum. We ask: what kinds of exchange exist between these domains, and what evidence can be offered to ‘prove’ the existence of those exchanges? How can we re-imagine our concepts and definitions of ‘noise’ to suit the unique geo-bio-political situation we find ourselves in today?’ – Ed Keller

SUGGESTED THEMES [a partial list]
Pragmatics: evidence from designers, builders, software makers, players, composers working with noise.
Noise and various forms of cryptomorphology situated against the potentially monotonic nature of various forms of temporality/capital [see Pasquinelli’s work on entropy]
• Models of different kinds of noise/time to re-situate sound practice, performance, composition
• Role of noise in cybernetic models of emergent and complex systems
Theoretical component- study of examples [both inside and outside music] who are thinking this through.
Parallels [apophenias] between concepts found in the discipline of cryptography, and sounds and patterns in the resonant world.
How does sound and noise manifest through geologies and geographies- thinking the post human; large time scales in relation to sound; deep time recording and industrial landscapes [Andy Weir].

CHALLENGE CONCEPT [an OBLIQUE STRATEGY]:

“To give the statement life and colour, let me anticipate what will be explained in much more detail later, namely, that the most essential part of a living cell- the chromosome fibre may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal. ” Schrodinger, ‘What is Life?’, 1944

“The principal internal storage in the Univac I system is the 1000-word acoustic delay-line memory, consisting of 100 10-word mercury registers. Twelve additional 10-word registers function as intermediate storage for input and output; six more are spares. With modified circuitry, seven more channels control the temperature of seven mercury tanks, and one more channel is used for the 10-word Y- register. The total of 126 mercury channels is contained in the seven mercury tanks mounted on the backs of sections MT, MV, MX, NT, NV, NX, and GV. Each tank is divided into 18 channels. Physically, each of the 10-word register circuits is made up of three sections:

_ The acoustic delay, consisting of a channel in a column of mercury, with receiving and transmitting crystals mounted at opposite ends.
_ An intermediate-frequency (i-f) chassis, electrically connected to the receiving crystal, and containing amplifiers, a detector, and a compensating delay. The i-f chassies are mounted on the shell of the mercury tank which they serve.
_ A recirculation chassis, containing a cathode follower, a pulse former and retimer, a modulator, which drives the transmitting crystal, and input, clear, and memory-switch gates. These chassies are mounted in the sections adjacent to the mercury tanks.”
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/vs-univac-mercury-memory.html

ABOUT THE EVENT
On May 30 2014, CTM presents two events engaging sound in both the performative and theoretical dimensions.

_ ‘SIGNAL PATH- The Present and Future of Sound and Noise [or, Fury]’, a one day symposium
_ ‘The Lost Weekend’, an evening of performances with Punctum Records

The SIGNAL PATH symposium is part of a year long CTM series, ’The Future of Guitar and Instrument Design’, that has brought internationally renowned luthiers, designers, builders, materials innovators, composers, performers, theorists, and sound designers together to explore points of connection between the traditions of musical instrument design and sound production. A full day symposium will include scholarly presentations, research papers, and instrument demonstrations; informed by materials science, emergent materials, parametric design, the internet of things, physical computing, networked sound, and ultimately considering the politics of ‘noise’.

‘The Lost Weekend’, an evening event with Punctum Records. will provide an opportunity for performance by symposium participants, and showcase some of Punctum Records’ artists:
Marmalakes, Taft, Battle Bend, Bridges, Roger Sellers, and David Moss; for the full ‘Lost Weekend’ lineup and program/venues: http://www.punctumrecords.com/lostweekend/
CTM and Punctum Books/Punctum Records formed an imprint/event partnership in 2013.
For more information on the books and recordings published and forthcoming, and the CTM
Future of Instrument Design lecture/performance series, please visit:
http://ctm.parsons.edu/the-future-of-guitar-and-instrument-design/
http://futureguitar.tumblr.com/
http://ctm.parsons.edu/publications-2/publications/
http://punctumbooks.com/imprints/
http://ctm.parsons.edu/a-rogue-frequency-book-and-record-launch/

VENUES
SIGNAL PATH: The New School T. Lang Center, 13th Street: all day event
https://www.facebook.com/events/475157329283875/

LOST WEEKEND: Wollman Auditorium, 11th Street, Punctum Records evening event
https://www.facebook.com/events/640671442654124/
Lost Weekend is organized by Punctum Records/Books [Eileen Joy, Dan Rudmann]; with
Ed Keller, CTM.

Evan Calder Williams: The Sabotage of Life

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

MAY 14th, the ‘GLASS CORNER’, room E206, 25 East 13th Street, 7.00 PM – 10PM

The last in the series, this lecture tackles the last aspect of sabotage responsible for the century’s worth of attacks on it: its negation of the centrality of “life” as an ideal to organize around and in defense of. Contrary to many of its most recent advocates, sabotage does not suggest the surge of an irrepressible human vital urge against “deathly” mechanisms of capital and state. Instead, it produces a crack in the assumed bond of human-life-work, insists on dangerous collaborations with mechanisms both inhuman and “against life,” and reminds us that only those who insist on the primacy of life itself could support one so unlivable.

Topics include: the birth strike, Neo-Malthusian and otherwise; hostile objects; material feminist urban design; slapstick; unwaged time.

Williams will be in conversation by theorist and artist Hannah Black.

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-4-tickets-11588885669?aff=efbevent

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