New term – SPA ongoing!

while the wonderful spa is still oozing soothing vibes and good karma (and so wonderfully put together by everyone too!) –  people are falling apart or from the skies or just being smashed to pieces and that smell of burning crashes is drifting –
lets hope we will live through the summer without further accidents and accelerated violence
because after all you and I and everyone have to survive
for the new term if for no other reason
and these reasons are good, man.
 
The new term
Tblisi 1.-10.10
yep, blithely wasting all that nail paint income in Soviet era high rise buildings and the wine is terrific too. Contextual lectures offered by prodigious local volunteers. On 9th a screening and lecture programme at literature museum curated by Gago, I will come moderate or hold up slides or sthg. I also suggested a Hayastan Sharakian celebration excursion – lets see how this works out.
14.10 we can do elevator bitches and I have to say hello to new class members and exchange students and everyone + + + + +
On 24. 10 we are in Essen. We will probably be able to ship a lot of people on the fee you guys are getting and the ppl there are looking for accomodations. Gago, as soon as he recovers, hopefully, sort of, from Rundgang marathon will sort the programme and we´ll let you know further plans. Be there in the afternoon too if you can.
2.12, 13.1, 10.2 will be class meeting days morning to evening.
8 slots per day, book soon, I´ll be there.
14.10,28.10,11.11,25.11,9.12,20.1,3.2,24.2 selforganised tutorials. Kamil said he would moderate some of these, Gago and Boaz also. Volunteers to moderate sessions requested pls. Put your names down all dates on wiki.
In paralell to start of research project  “Language of Things” about alternate webs, material and infrastructural configurations we will have this wonderful weekly seminar hosted by Ana Texeiro Pinto, dates tbc. location 115.
Things that Talk* – Media, gender and fiction in contemporary art
We are at the verge of a new (the second) industrial revolution, which will equip daily objects and household appliances with virtual representations linked together into a network structure. By 2020 there will be nearly 26 billion devices on the Internet of Things. Will technology render us post-human by collapsing the distinction between “increasingly inert human bodies and increasingly energetic and inventive machines?”
Animation, as in computer graphics and 3D animation has been an ubiquitous tool in contemporary art (from Pierre  Huyghe and Philippe Parreno to Ed Atkins et al), but its meaning and genealogy seldom gets addressed outside of the narrow frame of media studies  –one would have to reach for the work of film theorists to be able to sketch a genealogy of animation as it is conspicuously absent from the writings of contemporary critics. In a sense one could see object oriented philosophy and speculative realism as unwittingly announcing this new ontology, but the dialectical entanglement between automation and animation has been there since the beginning of the industrial era, each representing a partial truth, a gendered concept and a political subject.
Techno-utopias are based on the belief that social progress is predicated on scientific and technological advancement; that technological innovation alone will suffice to bring an end to scarcity and social ills. But technology is a product of science as well as a product of fiction.
Cyborgs, clones or drones are technical devices as well as recurring cultural tropes, which produce and perpetuate gender identity and social difference. The irrational and the imaginary are not spontaneous, nor dissociated from the process of socialization. As Donna Haraway put it– “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.”
The present seminar will address media and technology from the perspective of science fiction, employing gothic horror, Afrofuturism or technoscience as tools for examining conceptions of gender and subjectivation across media and disciplines.
Preliminary Bibliography:
-Barbrook, Richard and Cameron, Andy The Californian Ideology, Mute, Issue n° 3, Autumn 1995
-Hayles, N. Catherine How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
-Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto – Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature New York; Routledge, (1991), pp.149-181.
-Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, The MIT Press (2006)
-Galison, Peter The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Autumn, 1994), 228-266.
-Shaviro, Stephen, Post Cinematic Affect, Zero Books (2010)
* “Things that Talk” is a reference to Lorraine Dalston’s book by the same name.
Also two workshops by hopefully soon to be hired and disclosed staff of research project on mesh webs and bitcoin for beginners. Think Freedom Tower and Ethereum, do we want to be governed by algorithm and how to scale alternets kind of thing.
Expect further surprises, hopefully not of the gut wrenching and soul wrecking kind again.
I have some nice ones for you anyways.
Esme and I waving bye bye.