Syneme Announces Telearts Summer Institute II in Calgary

TeleArts: Artists Collaborating Over High Speed Networks

3 Week Summer Workshop Intensive

July 4-22, 2011

http://syneme.ucalgary.ca

http://syneme.ucalgary.ca/groups/synemesummer/

• Univ of Calgary Credit offered for remote participation (registration info below).

http://www.ucalgary.ca/admissions/visiting_exchange

http://www.ucalgary.ca/registrar/openstudies

http://www.ucalgary.ca/registrar/forms_students

www.ucalgary.ca/uci

http://www.ucalgary.ca/hotelandconference/hotel

http://www.cic.gc.ca/EnGLish/visit/visas.asp

http://syneme.ucalgary.ca

DanceFilmCall_TFF.pdf

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS, Topanga Film Festival
Dance Film Showcase:
This is the second year for the program directed and curated by Cari Ann Shim Sham*, which for it's first year in 2010, screened films including Nora (Alla Kovgan & David Hinton), Advance (Mitchell Rose), Mothers & Daughters (Margaret Williams & Victoria Marks) and Chili Pepper (David Rousseve).

Submissions should focus on one of the following areas:
1.) Choreography for camera-original work made specifically for video or film or re-staged for the camera.
2.) Experimental and digital technologies-work that extend the boundaries of dance and can exist only in video, film or new technologies.
3.) Student work-submissions produced while the filmmakers were students or by current students.
Deadlines: Early Deadline  $25 April 15, Regular Deadline $35 May 15, Late Deadline $40 May 31st
Please apply through Withoutabox:  https://www.withoutabox.com For more info: http://topangafilmfestival.com/

Other Submission Categories for the Topanga Film Festival include:
Short Films, Documentary Competition, Online Smart Phone Competition
Continuing on last year’s success of the online film competition, www.suitableforallscreens.com, this year Topanga Film Festival will continue to explore new changes in technology by having an online competition for films shot entirely on a smart phone.  Visit www.suitableforallscreens.com, or www.topangafilmfestival.com/suitable for more information.

MISSION & OBJECTIVE
Now in its 7th year, TFF is dedicated to the exhibition of independent cinema that explores trans‐format content and inspires the imagination. The festival provides a unique opportunity to enjoy a wealth of international content that ranges from pure unbounded creativity to empowering and educational. The festival endeavors to bridge cultures, create and expand community, provide cultural exchange, and networking opportunities.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
“The Topanga Film Festival is a true original. A chance to see great films under the stars in one of the most magical spots on the continent.  A jewel of a festival.”
~ Wendie Malick,, actor

Deep in heart of Southern California’s counter-culture enclave Topanga Canyon, a small evolution is brewing. Organizers of the 7th Annual Topanga Film Festival, to be held July 28th -31st, 2011 have expanded to include a documentary film competition, 4 days of panels, workshops, networking opportunities and additional prizes. With hands-on demonstrations of cutting edge technology, those in attendance enjoy a user friendly, culturally creative experience.

Last year’s winner of the Short Film Competition, “God of Love,” by Luke Matheny went on to win the 2010 Academy Award in the same category.  The previous year’s winner of the Short Film Competition, won by Kim Spurlock with her film “Down In Number 5,” went on to win the Oscar for Student Film of The Year.

Nominated as "one of the 25 coolest film festivals in the world" by Filmmaker Magazine, the Topanga Film Festival accepts any genre of short film into competition that challenges conventions with an original voice and point of view. The open-air festival reflects the international and eclectic taste of its community.  Known as "the smallest festival with the biggest prize" we award prizes valued in excess of $80,000. 

The Topanga Film Festival is a project of the International Humanities Center, a 501[c]3 non‐profit organization.
120 N Topanga Canyon Blvd #215 | Topanga CA 90290 | t: 310 455 4700 | topangafilmfestival.com

Choreographic Captures Competition 2011 - Deadline April 30

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to announce the Deadline for the Fourth International Choreographic Captures Competition: April 30, 2011!

We invite filmmakers, media artists, directors, choreographers and dancers from all over the world to create short choreographic art films in the format of an advertising clip (max. 60 sec) and submit them to JOINT ADVENTURES. The films should deal with choreography and movement in the broadest sense.

Please find the entry conditions and the registration form on www.choreographiccaptures.org or attached!

The winners can look forward to monetary and cinema prizes awarded by an international and independent jury of experts. The winners of 2011 will be presented during the commercial break in numerous cinemas in Germany and abroad – themed “Art for those who didn’t ask for it!”

We would appreciate it very much if you could forward this information to interested colleagues, artists and partners.

Besides that we want to offer you the possibility to enhance the program of your festivals or events by showing 35 of the excellent short films submitted to the Choreographic Captures Competition in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The price for this DVD would amount to € 50. Please find the fax form for ordering attached.

Thank you very much and warm regards from Munich


Walter Heun
Artistic & Executive Director
JOINT ADVENTURES
Choreographic Captures: now on    and   join us or follow us now!
______________________________

Include hashtag #dancetechtv in your tweets!

One poor and one 0 by BADco. (Croatia)

World premiere: 17.-19.10.2008 @ 19:30 Dom im Berg, Graz


In 1 poor and one 0 BADco. returns to the scene of the first film ever shot – Workers Leaving The Lumiere Factory: the factory gates. The first moving images ever made show workers leaving their workplace. The movement of the workforce from the place of industrial work into the world of film: the starting point for the problematic relationship between cinema and the portrayal of work.

From its outset cinema tended to leave the manual labor out of the picture, focusing rather on atomized stories of individual workers once they have left their workplace: their romances, their transgressions, their destinies in the course of world events. Cinema starts where work ends.

Starting from these initial images, 1 poor and one 0 sets about exploring the multiple ways of leaving the work behind. What happens when you get tired? When is the work we devote ourselves to exhausted? What comes after work? More work? What happens when there is no more work? What is the complicity between the history of contemporary dance and the history of post-industrialization?

1 poor and one 0 is a twofold performance: while the performers develop the manifold forms of dissolution of the working subject before the audience, the audience is slowly drawn into a process of transformation: from the popular medium of cinema to the political theater of populism. Theater exhausted in moving images, images exhausted in the theater of movement. A change of perspective.

Directors: Tomislav Medak & Goran Sergej Pristaš
Authors and performers: Pravdan Devlahović, Ivana Ivković, Aleksandra Janeva Imfeld, Ana Kreitmeyer, Tomislav Medak, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Nikolina Pristaš, Zrinka Užbinec
Dramaturgy: Ivana Ivković
Stage: Slaven Tolj
Costume design: Silvio Vujičić
Video: Ana Hušman
Light design: Alan Vukelić
Sound design: Ivan Marušić-Klif
Sound technician: Jasmin Dasović

Company manager: Lovro Rumiha

Inspired by the work of Auguste and Lois Lumiere, Samuel Beckett, Vlado Kristl, Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki.

Coproducers: Steirischer Herbst, University of Zagreb – Student center – Theatre &TD

Supported by: Zagreb City Council for Education, Culture and Sport; Ministry of Culture of Republic of Croatia

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both. Now either. Now the other. Sick of the either try the other. Sick of it back sick of the either. So on. Somehow on. Till sick of both. Throw up and go. Where neither. Till sick of there. Throw up and back. The body again. Where none. The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all.
– Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983

Little by little we are replaced … by uninterrupted chain of images, enslaving one another, each image at its place, as each of us, at our place, in the chain of events on which we have lost all power.
– Dziga Vertov Group, Here And Elsewhere, 1972

This circulation of value in the cinema-spectator nexus is itself productive of value because looking is a form of labor.
– Johnathan Beller, Cinema, Capital of the 20th Century, 1994

The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it. Films about work or workers have not become one of the main genres, and the space in front of the factory has remained on the sidelines. Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind… In the Lumière film of 1895 it is possible to discover that the workers were assembled behind the gates and surged out at the camera operator’s command. Before the film direction stepped in to condense the subject, it was the industrial order which synchronized the lives of the many individuals.
– Harun Farocki, Workers Leaving the Factory, 2001

Interview with vana Ivković and Tomislav Medak at the Balkan Dance Platform 2009, Novi Sad, Serbia

We have received an overwhelming response by artists in Greece, Cyprus, Germany, Italy, USA, Canada, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Spain and more! As a result we have decided to extend the submissions deadline to April 10th, 2011 to allow more artists more time to send us their work. Keep the submissions coming, there’s extraordinary material and we’re so excited to find out about it! The call for submissions is here.

Join us on Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=752151042#!/pages/Between-the-Seas-Festival/128267620577566

Critic and culture writer Claudia LaRocco speaks with choreographer Stephen Petronio about his monumental work Underland, with music by Nick Cave, soon to be presented in New York, at the Joyce Theater. To celebrate the occasion, LaRocco and Classical TV present Petronio’s exciting 2010 work, Ghostown.

Go to complete article

Form Facebook post:

10 years after: Today is the 28th of March, 2011, exactly 10 years after the first Ballettikka Internettikka live Internet performance by Igor Štromajer & Brane Zorman Photo: TV Slovenia (Saša Šavel) reports about the first Ballettikka Internettikka from Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, 28 March 2001. http://bit.ly/9rpqGJ http://www.intim...a.org/bi

There were a ton of little snags along the way, but I built a small, simple program entirely out of Max/MSP (dynamic metronome - I posted about it in December) that I have since built an installer for using NSIS ( nsis.sourceforge.net ).  

I'm pretty stoked about the idea that I can use Max to build a professional .exe from the ground up and distribute it.

I have a beta version available for download here:

bibbysound.com/shop

Give it a try, let me know what you think.

In recent years, technological innovations have given rise to a new field, dance technology. Populated by artist-practitioners, technologists, and theorists, this new area encompasses performance, research and development of video game technologies, motion capture experimentation, and dance for the camera. For some time, work in dance technologies has advanced without a recognizable critical dialogue in the United States.

This began to change in October 2009, when the World Performance Project at Yale, in collaboration with SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology in residence at MIT, convened an international cohort of artists and scholars for a one-day meeting at Yale.  That event, “Emergent Global Corporealities: Dance Technologies and Circulations of the Social,” brought artistic creation, comparative media theory, and emergent technologies together with considerations of the social and corporeal.

This group reconvenes at MIT in April with additional participants for Version 2.0. “Dance Technologies and Circulations of the Social @ MIT” brings a dozen researchers to MIT to present their original media-focused research. The two-day symposium includes readings, demonstrations, and some small-scale performances, culminating in an anthology of writings to be edited by the conference convenors.

The symposium convenors are Thomas F. DeFrantz, Professor, Music and Theater Arts at MIT and Harmony Bench, Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University.

Confirmed Participants Include:
Johannes Birringer, Chair in Performance Technologies, Brunel University
Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer in Dance and Film Studies, University of Surrey
Maaike Bleeker, Chair, Performance Studies, University of Utrecht
Ian Condry, Associate Professor, MIT
Scott deLahunta, Independent Artist, Berlin
Simon Ellis, Independent Artist, London
Jason Farman, Assistant Professor, Washington State University
Susan Kozel, Professor, University of Malmo
Petra Kuppers, Associate Professor, University of Michigan
Nick Monfort, Associate Professor MIT
Chris Salter, Associate Professor, Concordia University
Marlon Barrios Solano, researcher/on-line producer/dance-tech.net (New York/Geneva)
Jaime del Val, Independent Artist, Barcelona
Maria X (Maria Chatzichristodoulou), Lecturer, University of Hull

Th, Apr 21 | 7pm
Fri, Apr 22 | 8:30am–10pm
Sat, Apr 23 | 9am–10pm

*Open to the public. No registration required.

LITHIUM FERRUM  (2011)

Experimental music, dance and technology collaboration.

The Holy Mountain, The other side of oneself, Lithium, Ferrum.

Music: Joshua Cottam

Choreography/Concept/Visesthetics: Kate Pāvula  collab. Ali Brady

University Falmouth / Dartington College of Arts / 2011

LIVE STREAMING  :  Tonight, 8.30PM and 9PM (+00:00 GTM) (United Kingdom)



LIVE CHAT  : Ongoing Tonight, 8.30PM and 9PM (+00:00 GTM) (United Kingdom)

Adobe Museum of Digital Media

John Maeda: 
Atoms + Bits = 
the neue Craft (ABC)

The Adobe Museum of Digital Media (www.adobemuseum.com) announces its second exhibition, John Maeda: Atoms + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC), on view March 23–December 31, 2011. The exhibition is a digital representation of Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), leading an interactive lecture on how artists are connecting the worlds of digital creativity and analog (or handcrafted) creativity.  Titled Atoms + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC), the lecture underscores the mission of the AMDM to provide an interactive venue for presenting digital media works as well as providing a forum for expert commentary on how digital media influences culture and society. 

According to Maeda, "Computers let us imagine digitally what we once could only validate by handcraft in physical form—the infinite malleability and reusability of bits have forever changed the creative process. But just as it took Icarus to first imagine human flight by carefully observing how birds can fly, digital tools have relied on many of the original tools and media used by artists in the pre-digital world."  Maeda sees the thread that runs between the tools of physical art making—such as pens, brushes and pigment—and the way new media has co-opted many of the same tools to manipulate bits in digital art. Through the exhibition, he examines the history of linking analog and digital creativity within his own work and the works of others.

The exhibition takes the form of an interactive lecture, with a digital representation of Maeda speaking on a simple stage resembling his office at RISD.  Dynamic infographics, video content and audio remarks illustrate Maeda's talk. Scenes from RISD art studios, including wood, glass, metal, and paper workshops, demonstrate the richness of expression Maeda feels must be captured in digital art's next chapter.

About John Maeda
John Maeda is a world-renowned artist, graphic designer, computer scientist and educator whose career reflects his philosophy of humanizing technology. For more than a decade, he has worked to integrate technology, education and the arts into a 21st-century synthesis of creativity and innovation. A recipient of the National Design Award and represented in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Maeda became president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in June 2008.

A former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maeda taught media arts and sciences there for 12 years and served as associate director of research at the MIT Media Lab. Maeda's early work redefined the use of electronic media as a tool for expression by combining skilled computer programming with sensitivity to traditional artistic concerns. He has published four books including The Laws of Simplicity, now translated into 14 languages. His new book written with Becky Bermont, Redesigning Leadership, expands on his micro-posts on leadership and innovation as @johnmaeda on Twitter. In 2008 Maeda was named one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century by Esquire magazine and in 2010 he was called the "Steve Jobs of academia" by Forbes magazine.

A native of Seattle, Maeda earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT, followed by a PhD in Design Science from the University of Tsukuba Institute of Art and Design in Japan and a master's in business administration from Arizona State University.

About Adobe Museum of Digital Media (AMDM)
The Adobe Museum of Digital Media (www.adobemuseum.com) is a one-of-a-kind online museum and interactive venue designed to showcase and preserve groundbreaking digital media works and provide a forum for expert commentary on how digital media influences culture and society. The AMDM is open 24/7, 365 days a year, free of charge. Visitors are invited to sign up for free membership to enjoy special benefits including advance viewings of exhibits and exclusive events.

The AMDM launched in October 2010 with inaugural exhibition, The Valley, a specially commissioned work from renowned American artist Tony Oursler. Exhibitions are curated by leaders in art, technology and business, changing regularly throughout the year. A permanent exhibition archive remains indefinitely accessible at www.adobemuseum.com.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Dance, Politics, and Co-Immunity

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures

The international symposium “Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity“ is
dedicated to the question of how dance, both in its historical and in
its contemporary manifestations, is intricately linked to
conceptualisations of the political. Whereas in this context the term
“policy” means the reproduction of hegemonic power
relations within already existing institutional structures, politics
refers to those practices which question the space of policy as such by
inscribing that into its surface which has had no place before.
Thinking politics as the absent political within policy is therefore by
definition linked to the idea of choreography in the truest sense of
the word: The art of choreography consists in distributing bodies and
their relations in space. It is a distribution of parts that within the
field of the visible and the sayable allocates positions to specific
bodies. Yet in the confrontation between bodies and their relations, a
deframing and dislocating of positions may take place. This ongoing
distribution and reconfiguration of the sensible (Jacques
Rancière) which structures the body and its parts and links
it to the existing symbolic order of any given society can be
considered a site of resistance allowing for interventions into
hegemonic discourses, traditional distributions and fixed framings. In
the public space of theatre, whose characteristic feature is the
separation of stage and auditorium, dance may not only distribute its
bodies, but also split and to share that which is separated and yet
united: The community of bodies as well as their words and the objects
they produce.

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures



Over the past years the term “policy” has undergone
a renaissance in political philosophy. On the one hand there are those
who bemoan the disappearance of politics (Alain Badiou), on the other
hand others welcome its return and relational integration into
sociability (Nicolas Bourriaud). Inbetween these extremes there are
those who accuse political philosophy itself of playing into the hands
of the powers and of thereby sacrificing the idea of politics for a
universal process of administration (Colin Crouch, Chantal Mouffe,
Jacques Rancière). In the course of this discussion the
question of what constitutes a democracy becomes more and more virulent.
Recent developments in the world economy suggest that Michel
Foucault’s concept of “governmentality”
of self, other and society, which he developed in his lecture series
between 1977 and 1979, is more pertinent than ever.
Whereas the citizens of the one world have involuntarily become bearers
and sharers of incalculable risks, the frontiers to the other world are
protected more and more rigorously. Examples of this are the
overflowing refugee camps e.g. on the southern Italian shores as well
as international airports that resemble high security tracts searching
and registering masses of bodies in their microstructures with new
technological devices. While one part of the world population
deterritorialises itself voluntarily, the other part is forcibly
prevented from entering this space defined by its increasing mobility,
acceleration, and high speed communication highways. Neoliberal
dispositives of power are linked with technologies to secure and
enclose territories, discourses and bodies whose general health is
cared for while they are deprived of a possible shared way of life.

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures


The renaissance of the political goes together with the rebirth of a
long discredited term: That of community. In the German political
tradition of Ferdinand Tönnies, community - in a Romantic
understanding - opposed to society. In the works of Jean-Luc Nancy and
Roberto
Esposito, however, community no longer appears as a simple opposition
to political developments, but rather as a contested space of
discussion that risks community in a dialogue between equals. Although
contemporary developments in world politics and world economy establish
increasingly asymmetrical relationships between people, it is the idea
of a community of equals that may subvert these developments.

Viewed against this background, how did dance and how does dance, then,
do politics with the body in the public (theatrical) space? How can it
become political? The symposion looks for theoretical models,
historical constellations, contemporary experiments and practical
consequences that elucidate the relation between dance, politics and
policy – which, in Jacques Rancière's terms, might
be called ”police” as well. What does the
structuring and distribution of bodies and their parts look like in
historical formations of dance such as the court ballet of the 17th
century, the Romantic ballet of the 19th century or the German Dance
tradition of the Weimar Republic? What historical departures of dance
where linked with political contexts and how? Which political contexts
provoked dance as a critical intervention? Which contexts suppressed
dance or, contrary to that, teamed up with dance in order to change and
rearrange the distribution of bodies in the social and theatrical
arena? What does a critical bodily practice look like in the age of
genetic engineering and reproduction by the mass media? Does the
relation between body and text have to be redefined? Are there
choreographic practices that may subvert the dominant powers? How do
the artists themselves think about their aesthetic practice and how
does that influence the choices they make? What are the consequences of
these choices for their institutional working conditions and practices?

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures

Participants of the symposion are invited to think about the multiple
connections between politics, community, dance, and globalisation from
the perspective of Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and
Sociology. One focus of "Communications” will be the
discussion of recent developments in contemporary dance and the
production of new spaces for collaboration and exchange. In how far do
they help to reformulate what economists call the “becoming
immanent” of the world”? On an artistic level the
conference wants to look for possible answers by presenting pieces by
dance makers dealing explicitly with the issues raised here. Apart from
more established artists like Xavier Le Roy or Mette Ingvartsen a
younger generation of artists shall use the conference as their
platform. This is why the organisers are planning to draw on artists
and their work from institutions that have been supported by Tanzplan
Deutschland over the past years. They are invited to explore the
relation their work undergoes with social or political developments.
The title of the conference paraphrases on purpose a text by Roberto
Esposito. In his trilogy Communitas-Immunitas-Bios Esposito describes
the reciprocity of opening and closure of social systems and of bodies
alike. He tries to make this movement productive for a rethinking of
the political in terms of an interweaving of communitas and immunitas -
in a space where life is given a form in order to grant all bodies
survival.

Organized by Gerald Siegmund and Stefan Hölscher
www.dance-politics.de

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures


Thinking - Resisting - Reading the Political
What perspectives and methods does advanced cultural theory offer for our attempts to grasp political discourse and analyze aesthetic
treatments and performances of resistance? The international conference
THINKING – RESISTING – READING THE POLITICAL brings
together scholars from the fields of theatre, literature, art and media
studies, from cultural theory, sociology, and philosophy, to discuss
possibilities and limits of current models and attempt new approaches.
The deliberately ambiguous German title exemplifies the bidirectional
design: ‘widerständiges denken’ refers both to manners
of thinking resistance, and to the search for a quality of resistance
in manners of thought. Similarly, ‘politisches lesen’
intends both the search for a political element in dispositions towards
reading, and that for an adequate disposition to read for an element of
the political as understood in recent conceptions by Jacques
Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. The conference
assembles a set of thinkers from the fiels of theatre, literary, media
and art studies, from cultural theory, sociology and philosophy, to
discuss consequences that follow from these models: In what
theoretically describable forms of thought can resistance appear, and
how can resistance be thought of as an object of theory? How can the
political mark certain texts, and what procedures are available for a
reading that is marked by an appropriate sensibility for the contents
and orders of the political?

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures

In recent years, theory, art and feuilleton have all seen a recurrence
of notions hailing from ethics and politics, including the
controversial concept of an ‘ethical’ or ‘political
turn’, but also an increased interest in ethical evaluation and
political engagement, and new studies into social preconditions, as
well as into reflections of the juridical and legislative influence on
the shape of art’s production and reception. These movements join
a by now well-established discourse on topically related objects within
post-colonial and gender studies, and not least a renewed attention for
politically engaged positions of previous theoretical discourses, which
are now often read in new ways that are quite removed from their
original and immediate political intentions.

At the same time, we find – often in different places, contexts
and traditions – an increasing attention for far-reaching
conceptions that entertain new claims to universality or an autonomous
weltanschauung or agenda. What these contributions in the context of
radical democracy theories and recent philosophical interventions
concerning politics share despite their differences is an emphatic
valorization of concepts of the political, the event or of truth, taken
in the sense of a radical interruption and re-constitution of
historical aprioris; a tendency that recurs in as different a manner as
those of Badiou and Rancière, of Critchley and Esposito.

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures


With an aim to better understand, clearly describe and critically
discuss such concepts of a political dimension in aesthetics, the talks
at this conference will look at those facets of the
‘political’ that are problematized in their discourses: At
phenomena, that is, that depend upon their fundamental
incommensurability with representations and institutions, with stable
notions of political order and uninterrupted political discourse. Such
interpretations distance themselves from a simple equation of political
reading with an interest in politically engaged, appellative texts and
literatures that support or accuse specific party politics or
revolutionary programs; nor does their focus rest on purely literary
treatments of categorical de- and re-differentiation in established
political discourse, as they are discussed in postcolonial, gender and
minority studies among others. Rather, following La Mouffe and Laclau,
the political is here intended as a complementary and opposing concept
to that of politics, confronting that incoherence that balances the
politics of coherent commonality and communicability in favor of
conflicting political autonomy and enouncement.

So far, the demands and possibilities of these concepts have rarely
been fulfilled or even systematically considered in cultural studies.
Faced with a large number of almost positivistically empirical studies
focusing on particular phenomena on the one hand, and ambitioned
speculative designs on the other, we find a vast array of possible
links, each of which has proven itself productive, and yet each of
which threatens to oversimplify the ‘application’ of single
terms and ideas taken from overarching theories by turning them into
tools for highly specialized disciplines. At the same time, it is the
political ambitions and presuppositions of many superficially adopted
theories that seem to be insufficiently reflected, sometimes even
hardly made aware, in such ‘applications’.

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures


We want to attack both deficits. Both, we suggest, are owed not least
to the difficulties engendered by the very idea of an
‘application’, a ‘use’ that is in itself often
foreign to the main tenets of the original discourses. A naïve
concept of method in the sense of established philosophy of science, or
even following traditionally hermeneutical, descriptive, e.g.
structuralist, and most poststructuralist approaches sometimes
misrepresents theory as a toolbox, its instruments readily separated
from their originating beliefs and turned to the screws and nails of
otherwise unconnected objects of culture and art. But this stand in
stark contrast to the central observation that political, social,
conceptual conditions and artistic practices are incontrovertibly
interlinked. Similarly unconvincing are those adoptions of radical
theory that avoid discussing any consequences from the positions they
adopt, omitting the necessary reflection of their own view of
scientific and scholarly practice in contemporary cultural studies.

Returning to an interest in the political, we thus propose to accompany
such interests with an intention towards theoretical conceptions, and
to openly examine if and how that intention might translate into
specific analytic or descriptive measures: The conference will discuss
the problematic ‘consequences in methodology’ attributed to
these theories from a number of different vantage points. The
interdisciplinary setup will hopefully provide opportunities to
productively discuss theories of various provenience and to grapple
with works of art and individual analyses, examining, defending or
rejecting the possibility of a methodology informed by advanced theory.
The conference will aim not only to continue a critical reflection upon
the proposals offered by current theories, but to constantly accompany
that reflection with a conscious question as to the specific
consequences that flow from these theories to the practice of cultural
study and the analysis of individual and concrete pieces of art; a
question that might well have to be answered in the negative, but
deserves an explicit answer nevertheless. Can there be methods for a
scholarly sound reading of the political? Is the activity of dealing
with always already elusive and thus doubly resistant categories at all
graspable in terms of methods or techniques? And whatever the answer
may be, can it in turn help us to better understand common suppositions
of methodology and contribute to a productive argument on what a method
is?

Organized by Anneka Esch-van Kan, Philipp Schulte, and Stephan Packard
www.thinking-resisting.de

Go to the complete video archive of the lectures

Mercat de les Flors, a venue   -located in Barcelona, Spain- devoted to the arts of dance and movement, celebrates its 25th anniversary this season. And the active participaticion of audiences play a fundamental role in this celebration. How? Recovering their memory and becoming participant and protagonist of the celebration:

BE PART OF THE MERCAT'S MEMORY. You have lived unforgettable moments in the Mercat... you have been in the best shows... you have been moved by artists and companies you met... Share your memories with the rest of the Mercat's audience, in video or in text. WE ALL ARE MERCAT.

To accomplish this, Mercat de les Flors has just launched a site that will bring together 25 years until the end of the season all the memories -in video and in writing- of those who have enjoyed the shows at the Mercat de les Flors and want to share them with the other spectators. These memories can be sent using the Mercat profiles on facebook and twitter, email, and also in the lobby of the venue, which also has installed a webcam platform to collect public testimony.

Do you also want to share your memories...?