Conference: Bodies beyond Borders. The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge, 1750-1950, 7-9 January, Leuven

After a bit of upheaval, major relocation of the Bodies in Movement headquarters and two long, painful months of internet silence (during which time most of the BiM team curled up into a tiny, modem-less ball in the corner of an empty room and rocked back and forth, wailing in pitiful denial), we are happy to announce that the BiM blog is back online and on track for constant future updates.

And, to top off the list, we present a fascinating meld of history, medicine and humanities straight from Belgium's Leuven. Celebrating the birth of anatomist Andreas Vesalius 500 years ago, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven will play host to 'Bodies beyond Borders. The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge, 1750-1950' on 7-9 January 2015.

The conference will fit in with two larger pursuits at KU Leuven: a research project on anatomy, scientific authority and the visualised body in medicine and culture in Belgium, 1780-1930, which investigates the history of anatomy in the country during the long nineteenth century; and an exhibition, 'Unravelling the Body. The Theatre of Anatomy', commemorating Vesalius and his influence on the anatomical tradition. However, further extending its scope, the conference seeks a wider conceptual and geographical focus:

Knowledge does not move by itself - it has to be carried. To better understand how anatomical knowledge moves from place to place, we will seek to trace the trajectories of its bearers.

The call for papers is open until 1 June 2014, with notification of acceptance distributed in early July. Organisers welcome contributions concerning the transit of anatomical knowledge in the widest interpretation of the phrase - from scientists, body parts and models to films, dissections and wall maps. Confirmed speakers include Sven Dupré, Helen Macdonald and many more. See the conference website for further details.

Conference: Philosophy after Nature, 3-5 September, Utrecht

 

Fresh off the presses, and with the digital ink still wet (or non-existent) on their new website, comes a ridiculously exciting joint Annual Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy, held at Utrecht on 3-5 September and entitled "Philosophy after Nature". While the call for papers remains wide, encompassing "all areas of contemporary European philosophy"), conference organisers are keen for contributions and panels which address the titular theme of the event - "Philosophy after Nature",

"in the sense of being in pursuit of nature's consequences. We invite perspectives on critique, science, ecology, technology and subjectivity as bound up with conceptions of nature and experiments with various positions in contemporary thought."

Confirmed plenary speakers currently include eminent figures Françoise Balibar, Rahel Jaeggi, Mark B. N. Hansen and (most enviably for this reporter) Michel Serres. Abstracts are due by 17 May 2014, which leaves plenty of time to produce presentation and panel proposals. The conference website currently lacks content, but the CFP can be found at the Society for European Philosophy website. Academics, graduate students and independent scholars are all welcome to submit.

Article: Maria-Daniella Dick and Robbie McLaughlan, "The Desire Network"

 

With Twitter hitting Wall Street hard yesterday and bouncing twice as high as any rubber ball stuffed with money, it seems appropriate to showcase one of the newer contributions to CTheory's Theory Beyond the Codes: Maria-Daniella Dick and Robbie McLaughlan's "The Desire Network". Casting their eye on Facebook, the authors conduct an intelligent theoretical and political examination of the Zuckerberg effect, which has "largely passed without any thorough critical analysis" through the same academy that saw its inception and disseminated it.

 

While perhaps touting the flag of rhizomatic relations, Dick and McLaughlan argue that in fact this angel of social networking phenomena not only represents but constitutes the ideology of a kind of liberal democracy predicated on the reshaping of desire as a process of perpetual production and, consequently, on a mutated capitalistic machine.

"...the truly revolutionary aspect of social networking is not how knowledge has become privatised, but the revolution that it has instigated in the way in which being now functions within this era of cyber-entrepreneurialism; this ontological shift effects, we argue, a correlative mutation in the function of desire which, in turn, effects a mutation in capitalism."

A "neurotic" portrait of Facebook's workings includes an analysis of David Fincher's 2010 film The Social Network, a quick cameo of Sean Duffy, and (more substantially) a compelling description of Facebook's enactment of the endless deferral of the real. What the authors somewhat chillingly conclude in their psychoanalytic sketch is a model in which "desire becomes its own network", endlessly producing without object or exit.

 

"The Desire Network" is available online at ctheory.net. While there, take some time to check out their new offerings, including Jussi Parikka's interesting "Dust and Exhaustion: The Labor of Media Materialism".

Conference: Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian, 26-7 September, York

Organisers for the two-day, interdisciplinary conference   "Ordinary/Everyday/Quotidian" at the University of York are currently calling for abstracts. The conference seeks to bring the quotidian onto the stage of academic debate and, by doing so, asks that we focus the rigors of critique upon the usually unnoticed or undetectable. Participants are encouraged

"to ponder, celebrate, and critique the quotidian, ranging from the furtive pleasures of pop to the dubious delights of junk: “Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one’s deepest nature, clues to secret yearnings, humiliating flaws? What habits, fetishes, addictions, inclinations? What solitary acts, behavioral ruts?”

The event has three confirmed keynotes - John Roberts (History of Art), Jennifer Baird (Classics and Archaeology) and Bryony Randall (English) - and will finish with a colloquium peopled by a further five academics from various humanities-based areas of study. With a keen interdisciplinary slant and compelling subject matter, the conference promises to provide a platform for some fascinating inquiry and dialogue.

Abstracts are due by 16 August and are welcome from any and/or multiple discipline(s). More information can be found on the website.

Recorded Lecture: McKenzie Wark, "Telesthesia: How Class and Power Work in the Post-Internet Age"

One of Google's data centers, photographed by Connie Zhou.

McKenzie Wark prods at our understandings of class and social relations with this half-hour video recording, "Telesthesia: How Class and Power Work in the Post-Internet Age", presented at the Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series hosted by the University of Berkeley's Center for New Media on 19 December 2012.

Extracted from his recent book Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (published by Polity in the tail end of last year), Wark offers us an intriguing snapshot at his thesis on the current "vectoral age". Tracing vectoral strategies from the deployment of military force at a distance, to creative reappropriation of spaces and information, and the tactics of growth deployed by rising Fortune 500 corporations such as Google and Apple, Wark proposes that in this post-internet age and "overdeveloped" (first) world, we have entered a third stage of commodity culture - beyond pastoralism and capitalism - of information ruled and managed by the vector. And as the concept of property becomes more abstract, he asserts that the vectoral class now unseats the capitalist in power and dominance.

"The vector becomes much more flexible, elaborate, refined in its flows of data. It is nowhere necessary to cluster related parts of the production process physically near one another. The vector opens the way to a spatial disaggregation of production. It isn't the multitude who fled the scene, it was capital." 

The lecture can be viewed at Archive.org, where various other Art, Technology, and Culture lectures can also be viewed and/or heard, kindly provided by the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Project: The Anthropocene Project, 10 January 2013 - 31 December 2014, Berlin (Part I)

In January of this year, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin opened a fascinating and ambitious new two-year initiative entitled The Anthropocene Project, which seeks to interrogate the effects stemming from the increasing destabilisation of the definition between man and nature.

 

Chasing a paradigm shift throughout the the twentieth and into the twenty-first century in the natural sciences, the project situates Paul Jozef Crutzen's coined geological epoch - the "anthropocene", an "age of mankind" - at its centre in order to explore the mutual enfolding of the "human" and "natural" relations.

 

The opening consisted of a four-day symposium of thinkers, artists, film-makers, scientists and scholars to in conversation over this theme. Recordings of these speakers, which included keynotes by Will Steffen, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, John Tresch and Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as a host of other dialogues, are available online at their website (some of which will be explored in more depth in Part II, posted next week).

 

Upcoming events include: the Unmenschliche Musk Festival: Compositions by Machines, by Animals and by Accident feom 21-24 February, which brings music production under critical inspection; a film series Anthropocene TV which begins on 22 May and continues until the project ends; "The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside" Conference with accompanying exhibition, from 21-22 June; along with many other events. Further information and multimedia are listed on the HKW website.

"Nature as we know it is a concept that belongs to the past. No longer a force separate from and ambivalent to human activity, nature is not an obstacle nor a harmonious other. Humanity forms nature. Humanity and nature are one, embedded within the recent geological record."

Exhibition: "BUSY. Exhausted Self / Unlimited Ability", 20 September 2012 - 13 January 2013, Vienna

Cosima von Bonin, "The Bonin / Oswald Empire's Nothing #04" (2010)

21er Haus at the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere houses "BUSY. Exhuasted Self / Unlimited Ability", an exhibition which critically responds to the changes in human relations to labour economies, replacing the "role conflicts and schizophrenia" symptomatic of hierarchical, industrial society with "stress, depression, and burn out" which characterises information capital.

 

Curator Bettina Steinbrügge adapts the idea of Cosima Rainer in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna to provide this comment on work, precarity, artistic process and the valuation of time. The pieces selected for this show springboard from the always "busy", work-time and life amalgamation in contemporary culture and the resulting disappearance of time itself. As contributing artist Manfred Erjautz comments in a slick podcast of interviews of those involved, "We've got enough time anyway - we only handle it the wrong way".

"Art was once the utopian counter model to achievement-oriented and other-directed gainful employment, a realm of freedom opposing the realm of necessities. Today, it has developed before our eyes to a model for a mobile and autonomous “Ich-AG,” or “Me-inc.,“ to the ideal of project-related work."

Conference: Body Projects Conference, 9 March 2013, York

 

The often contestatory themes of body modification and feminism meet for a day of discussion at the University of York on 9 March 2013. The "Body Projects Conference" adopts a wide definition of body modification - "from shaved legs to buttock implants; from the honed 'fit' body to 'fat-reducing' surgery; from self-tanning to pro-ana; from piercings to gender reassignment, and much more" within an interdisciplinary academic environment.

 

Organisers are currently seeking proposals for twenty-minute presentations and ideas for performances and/or artwork, to be submitted by 10 December 2012. The call for papers can be found here. The program and guest speakers have yet to be announced, but further details will soon be posted on their website.

"It has been claimed that the unaltered female body is an unacceptable entity in the contemporary west and that the female body physically bears the marks of contemporary culture through the modification enacted upon it. The body is part of the embodied experience of an individual, but also, and increasingly, an object for critique."

 

Interview: John Schaefer with Frank J. Oteri & Paul D. Miller, "The Art of Noise"

On 15 May 2009, WNYC radio's Soundcheck program hosted this radio interview between announcer John Schaefer, Frank J. Oteri (composer and editor of NewMusicBox) and Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, sampling extraordinaire and member of faculty at the European Graduate School) as part of their "Sound Off" Friday Series.

While the "noise versus music" theme which underpins this radio interview continuously threatens to flatten the complexities of the conversation, Oteri and Miller nonetheless manage to conduct an informed and eloquent auricular tour of the relationship between noise sampling and the music industry of the twentieth/twenty-first century. The Futurists, Public Enemy, sonic algorithms, Merzbow, Rhys Chatham, and the ancient Chinese composition Pipa all cycle through the discussion along with a myriad of other topics which test the limits of music recognition and the possibilities of sonic en/de-coding.

"Repetition and giving things a sequence changes the way you hear. ... I think the hidden architecture of the twentieth century was the uneasy tension between noise and repetition."

Paul D. Miller

 That interview, along with other recorded segments of Soundcheck are archived at the WNYC radio website.

 

Lecture: Anna Gibbs, "Gestural Dispositions: On the Intermedial Migrations of Writing", Edinburgh, 26 October 2012; & Exhibition: "Art & Music - Search for New Synesthesia, Tokyo, 27 October 2012 - 3 February 2013

Those based in Edinburgh have the opportunity to attend a public lecture by Anna Gibbs, "Gestural Dispostion: On the Intermedial Migrations of Writing" next Friday (26 October), at the University of Edinburgh. Exploring the interstices of writing and gesture, Gibbs' presentation promises an incisive exploration of experimentation and corporeal imbrication in the practices of reading and writing.

 

The event is free and officially opens the Extending Gesture Colloquium (which Ky blogged here), a fascinating and intimate weekend event addressing concepts of the gestural in a number of different artistic and cultural fields. Registration to the public lecture is not necessary. More information on the event and the colloquium can be found at their website.

"Printed text suppresses the relation between writing and gesture, but what happens when text becomes a moving architecture into which we can enter, and when - becoming animated - it begins to exhibit strange behaviours?"



Otomo Yoshihide + Yasutomo Aoyama, "without records," 2012. Exhibition view from "x sound : On and After John Cage and Nam June Paik", Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi-do, Korea.

For any readers of the BiM blog currently based in Tokyo (or planning to travel there within the next five months), The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is soon to be opening the third exhibition in their "Tokyo Art Meeting" series. Art & Music - Search for New Synesthesia (27 October 2012 - 3 February 2013) introduces internationally-established musician Ryuichi Sakamoto as general advisor to a project which sees to explore, sample and inhabit the complex relations between "music", form, texture and the visual. It features work by sonic artists such as John Cage, Tōru Takemitsu, Ryoji Ikeda, Otomo Yoshihide and  Florian Hecker.

 

The exhibition kicks off with a concert by Carsten Nicolai and is run in conjunction with the "Tokyo Sonic Art Award" open competition for young sonic artists.

"According to Sakamoto, our humanocentric modern society has developed a system of control over the social environment, information and nature. This microcosmic inclination is gradually being destroyed through globalization and the energy crisis. Against this sociopolitical background, Sakamoto uses sound and the visual to reconsider our relationship with nature in a broad sense, attempting to recall a macrocosmic way of thinking."

 

Conference: Feminism, Science & Materialism Conference, 14-15 February 2013, New York

The Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York has banded together with the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies to organise the Feminism, Science & Materialism Conference, set to take place on 14-15 February 2013. Featuring Karen Barad as a keynote speaker and focussing on "feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by he materialist turn", this event has positioned itself perfectly for platforming the newest developments in material feminism and other current research that cuts across the fields of science and feminism.

With the mounting interest in Barad's work, this conference will no doubt feature not only Barad's own most curent work but will also spotlight some of the ways in which her contributions (particularly on agential realism) have been taken up within other fields and areas. The organisers are currently seeking extended 1000 word abstracts, due by 1 November 2012. Topics range from reflections on the turn towards materialism to reflections on the political implications of neo-materialism for feminism and the relation of matter to the social, with a range of other issues in-between.

CUNY appears ready and willing to provide a space for new academic research in materialism, with the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies having for the last year busied itself with a fascinating series of seminars and events revolving around the theme of "embodiment" in interdisciplinary science-humanities engagements (more details of which can be found at their website). Bodies in Movement will be looking out for recordings that might be produced from this event for those of us not fortunate enough to be able to attend.

Article: Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner and Bruno Latour, "Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation"

Valérie November, Eduardo Camacho-Hübner and Bruno Latour argue for mapping reefs and risks in this call for a redefinition of cartographical interactions, "Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation", published in volume 28 of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2010) and now available online for free download.

Written almost as both rationale and prelude to work by the three authors on the mapping of risk, November, Camacho-Hübner and Latour here contend that the advent of accessible, interactive and user-defined digital mapping practices has the capacity to free us from a modernist, "mimetic" mapping impulse towards a more contingent, navigational interpretation. They argue that mimetic mapping, which relies on a spurious resemblance between representational map signs and a "real", outside territory, entrenches space and territory as part of a fixed and objective reality. Navigational practices, on the other hand, casts maps as "the dashboards of a calculation interface" for a succession of signposts via which movement can be negotiated. A shift towards navigational interpretation deeply implicates not only a freedom from "the tyranny of space" but also the inclusion of a whole set of "subjective" factors recognised in risk geography within practices of mapping.

"As soon as we shift to the navigational interpretation of geographical techniques, we realize that there is nothing especially spatial about geography. Any map is simply one set of inscriptions leading to and coming from another series of dissimilar signposts to help navigators find their way through their trajectories."

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space has recently included this work by November, Camacho-Hübner and Latour within a group of various "highlight" articles for open access availability. The articles, including, inter alia, a translated section of Michel Serres' Les origines de la géométrie, Graham Harman's "I am also of the opinion that materialism must be destroyed" and Michael Brown and Claire Rasmussen's "Bestiality and the Queering of the Human Animal", are accessible to nonsubscribers in order to provide an idea of the kinds of papers published in the journal.

Blog: Dataisnature

Dataisnature is the exciting blogging labour of Paul Prudence, an audio-visual performer and installation artist whose intimate addessal of "computational, algorithmic and generative environments" ensure that his finger is very much on the digital pulse of contemporary process- and procedure-generated artistic creations and creators.

The blog, which has been publishing on and off since 2004, contains samples of some truly hypnotic graphic, sound, video and generally multimedia works, including in the relatively recent past the eerily fleshy sound-video multimedia piece Aequa by outfit Idrioema and Leondardo Solaas's abstractly seething series Affinitive Swarms, as well as works by earlier artists such as, most recently, Nicolas Schöffer's "Spatio-Lumino-Chronodynamic" sculpture.



Leonardo Solaas, part of Affinitive Swarms series (2011)

While exploring the various nooks and crannies of this long-running blog, follow the links listed under the "innerspace" menu to the left to Paul Prudence's own experimental audio-visual works.

Exhibition: "Superhuman", 19 July - 16 October, Wellcome Collection, London

The collection of curios at the Wellcome Trust (self-coined as "a free destination for the incurably curoius") organises around the theme of "Superhuman" until October of this year. Designed to overlap with the furor of the London Olympics and its celebration of engineered, amplified and sculpted athletic bodies, "Superhuman" explores the limits of corporeality through the interventions of technology, prosthetics and medicine.


Metalosis Meligna, 2006 by Floris Kaayk

Enhancements take centre stage in the Wellcome Collection's exhibition, which encompasses myth, ancient history, the comic genre, medical objects, the work of contemporary artists and more to structure its panoptic investigation. Various events are also part of the Collection's itinerary, including poetry and performance afternoons (entitled "We Are All a Cyborg"), a chance to fondle some synthetically fashioned body parts, and a symposium on "Human Limits" (28-29 September) at which will be screened one of the first films to depict space travel alongside panels of academic speakers from multiple disciplines.

"Glasses, lipstick, false teeth, the contraceptive pill and even your mobile phone - we take for granted how commonplace human enhancements are. From Icarus to i-Limbs, ‘Superhuman’, which opens at Wellcome Collection today, explores the extraordinary ways people have sought to improve, adapt and enhance their body’s performance."

Article: Rachel C. Lee, "Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other 'Novel' Devices"

Rachel C. Lee delves into the techno-textural and spices it with a literary turn in her new article, "Haptics, Mobile Hendhelds, and other 'Novel' Devices: The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media" for CTheory's Theory Beyond the Codes.

An analytical reading of Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003) is embedded in the heart of Lee's article, but one which is provokingly framed by consideration of new media's haptic concerns - from the "stretch-and-pinch" of the iPhone to the sticky "glaze" of the immersive console gaming experience. By repositioning literary analysis within a web of "multipoint tactilities", Lee seeks to highlight the affective possibilities of literature's ludic interactivity.

"...my point has been not so much to align Truong's novel with the console game's flashing images that the user now putatively physically controls ... as much as to provoke, through the analysis of the novel's tactile devices, recognition of new media's emphasis on interactivity (that narrower meaning of tactility) as thoroughly caught up in a cognitive challenge. Cognitive challenge is at the core of immersion..."

Lecture: Barbara Rauch, "Technologies of Conveyance" and Ted Hiebert, "Werewolves, Magnetic Fields and Fingerprints of a Technological Imaginary"

CTheory Live offers two new streamed lectures scheduled for 16 March 2011. Join Barbara Rauch for "Technologies of Conveyance" at 2:00pm (PST) and Ted Hiebert for "Werewolves, Magnetic Fields and Fingerprints of a Technological Imaginary" at 3:00pm (PST). The bracket, entitled "Visions for the Posthuman Future: Art, Technology, and Theory" comprises part of the new research initiative "Digital Inflections" by CTheory focusing on theory and new media.

Rauch, director of the e_Motion Laboratory at OCADU, is a leading researcher exploring the boundaries of natural and digital environments. Her presentation investigates the future of artificial emotions and virtual affect in a posthuman culture increasingly shaped by the power of technology.

The second lecture by Hiebert will expand on Roland Barthes' notion of technology as an extension of theatre in the context of relational art. His perspective breaks with the discourse of authenticity, proposing a way of seeing technology that relates the question of technology to social, ideological and sometimes delirious relationships.