Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Numerogram

The infamous numerogram from CCRU - recently resurrected from cthulhian cyber-mortis!  

Monday, February 20, 2012

Spaces of Transformation: Spatialised Immunity

Sooo excited about: (text from Tate site)


Spaces of Transformation: Spatialised Immunity

Saturday 16 June 2012, 14.00–16.30

Peter Sloterdijk in conversation with Nigel Thrift.

Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophico-morphological theory is based on an understanding of the history of culture as spatialisations of forms. The world in which we live now requires us to design new types of ‘spatialised immunity’. More broadly, the concept of a spherical logic of space – a polymorphologic of form, order and thinking – is explicated in Spheres, his three-volume archaeology of the human attempt to dwell within spaces, from womb to globe. The Spheres project (Bubbles, Globe, Foam) is a significant topological turn in the field of contemporary philosophy, ‘a super-workout for communicative energies capable of finding contact throughout the entire world.’

Peter Sloterdijk is one of the best known and widely read German intellectuals writing today. His 1983 publication of Critique of Cynical Reason (published in English in 1988) became the bestselling German book of philosophy since World War II. He became president of the State Academy of Design at the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2001 where he is also Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics. He received the Ernst Robert Curtius literary award in 1993. He has been co-host of a discussion program, Das Philosophische Quartett (Philosophical Quartet) on German television since 2002. English translations include Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism (1989), Theory of the Post-War Periods: Observations on Franco-German relations since 1945 (2008), God's Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms (2009), Derrida, an Egyptian (2009), Terror from the Air (2009), Rage and Time (2010) and Neither Sun nor Death(2011). Spheres, his three-volume magnum opus is forthcoming in English translation from Semiotext(e).

Nigel Thrift is one of the world’s leading human geographers and social scientists. He has been the recipient of a number of distinguished academic awards, including the Royal Geographical Society Victoria Medal and Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 2007. He is an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences and was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. Nigel Thrift is in the top five of the most-cited geographers in the world, and is co-author, author or co-editor of over 35 books. His current research spans a broad range of interests, including international finance; cities and political life; non-representational theory; affective politics; and the history of time. Professor Thrift is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick since July 2006. Thrift sits on a number of advisory committees for the UK Government. His work on time, language, power, representations and the body have been influential and it has been suggested that Thrift's career reflects and in some cases spurred the substantial intellectual changes in Human Geography in the 1980s and '90s. Thrift can most readily be associated with poststructuralism through his attention to subjectivity, representation, identity and practice. Most recently he has written on 'non-representational theory', which stresses performative and embodied knowledges. Thrift has claimed that non-representational theory addresses the 'unprocessual' nature of much of social and cultural theory. Major themes within non-representational theory include subjectification; space as a verb; technologies of being; embodiment; and play and excess. Non-representational theory has provoked substantial debate within the field of Human Geography around the limits of the mediation of our world through language and how we might see, sense and communicate beyond it.

This keynote conversation is followed by a performance by Rubedo in the Starr Auditorium starting at 19.00.

Closing performance by Rubedo – Diodicity
Spaces of Transformation will incarnate through performance, an intensive non-ordinary moment of space-time, a closing celebration that will give shape and meaning to the entirety – changing, shifting and integrating. A dynamic paradoxically entangled topological logic, with future-anterior foldings into and out of other heterogeneous space-times in relational processes of becoming.

Rubedo is an art practice and a think-tank founded in 2005 by Laurent-Paul Robert and Dr Vesna Petresin Robert, who have worked together since 1994. Rubedo explore relations between aesthetics, complex geometry, acoustics and synaesthesia, through performance, installation and artefact. The work integrates sound, space, moving image and narrative using customised digital and analogue tools and trans-disciplinary methods. Rubedo has recently featured at Tate Modern, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Festival Hall, the Venice Biennale, the Beijing Biennale of Architecture, the Critic’s Selection at Cannes International Film Festival and the World Architecture Festival.

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Managed to get a ticket this time round! Here's half a Klein Bottle!



Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Diagrams

Diagrams from Time Drills:


There are loads of very interesting blogs out there concerning diagrammatic enquiries.... here's a quick list:

Diagram Workshop
Thinking Enterprise
Diagrammatic Praxis + Overview of Research Interests

I'm sure there are more but have a mooch around and if you find any please post some more (if you'd like a log in please email me - or comment!).

Monday, January 16, 2012

Sigh (from Nietzsche, 'The Gay Science')

Had this feeling about my essay....

"Sigh. - I caught this insight on the wing and quickly took the nearest shoddy words to fasten it lest it fly away from me. And now it has died of these barren words and hangs and flaps in them - and I hardly know any more, when I look at it, how I could have felt so happy when I caught this bird." (Nietzsche, 2001, pp. 169)




Friedrich Nietzsche, 2001. Nietzsche: The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Edition. Cambridge University Press

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Topology talk at Tate

This maybe of interest:

Saturday 3 March 2012, 14.00–16.30

Artist Olafur Eliasson in conversation with Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel.
‘Three dimensional space is not a given but the result of a long history through which the spatial characters of a very specific historical definition of what it is to be ‘in the world’ has been entrenched in common sense. Those characters are largely coming from the visual techniques of a highly specific body of paintings and, from there, have been extended to philosophy of science, to technical drawing, to design and to architecture. But this does not mean that organisms do reside in res extensa. It means that it has become difficult for them to follow the thread of experience – including visual experience as demonstrated by Gibson. The interesting question is to check if the general turn to ecology allows one to regain the sense of experience and to redefine space along the lines proposed by Peter Sloterdijk as an artificial envelope.’ Bruno Latour, Space is aContested Territory
‘Graph Theory is the newest branch of topology, which allows us not only to understand the construction and transformation of spaces, but also above all to understand behaviour in space and the unfolding of spatial parameters. According to Darwin the tree of life is the coral of life. But what Darwin describes as evolution could be seen as a special case of Graph Theory. Topology is therefore a new mathematical tool to better understand the concepts of evolution as spaces of transformation. Newton described the laws of mechanics as the space ruled by the laws of gravity. Lagrange gave us a mathematical model of Newton’s space. Einstein and Quantum Theory redefined the absolute space of Newton as relativistic space-time continuum. Graph Theory as topology continues the work of Lagrange and Einstein into the digital age.’ Peter Weibel, Graph Theory as Topology

This keynote conversation will be followed by a seminar led by Bernard Burgoyne on Saturday 10 March

Olafur Eliasson is a contemporary visual artist. He attended the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen from 1989 to 1995. He has participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide and his work is represented in public and private collections including the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Deste Foundation, Athens and Tate Modern where he created The Weather Project as part of the Unilever Series. Recently he has had major solo exhibitions at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and ZKM (Centre for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe and represented Denmark in the 52nd Venice Biennale. In 1995 he started Studio Olafur Eliasson where a team of people, from craftsmen and specialised technicians, to philosophers, architects, artists, archivists and art historians, cooks, and administrators work with Eliasson to experiment, develop, produce, and install artworks, projects, and exhibitions, as well as archiving, communicating, and contextualising his work.

Bruno Latour is a French Sociologist and anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). He is Professor at Sciences Po (Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris) where he is also the Vice-President for Research. From 1982 to 2006, he has been Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l'Innovation at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting Professor at UCSD, at the London School of Economics and in the History of Science Department of Harvard University. He has written many books including Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), Science in Action(1987), The Pasteurization of France (1988), We Have Never been Modern (1993), Aramis or the Love of Technology (1996), Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies (1999), andPolitics of Nature (2004). He has curated two major international exhibitions at the ZKM with Peter Weibel: Iconoclash and Making Things Public.

Peter Weibel is an artist, curator and theoretician. Since 1966 he has produced conceptual photo-literature as well as audio pieces, texts, objects and actions. At the end of the 1960s, he worked in the field of Expanded Cinema, Action art, performances and film together with his partner VALIE EXPORT. His interdisciplinary activities comprise scientific, artistic as well as literary, photographic, graphic, plastic, and digital works. He was curator of the Neue Galerie, Graz, and Professor at the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, as well as the commissioner for the Austrian Pavillon at the Venice Biennale (1993–99). Since 1999 he is chairman of the ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe. Peter Weibel lives and works in Karlsruhe.


Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium

£15 (£12 concessions)

Spinoza Ethics PDF

Thought I'd start a blog for Thinking the Sensuous, to start here is something useful: Spinoza 'Ethics' PDF, over the next few days I'll ad you all as contributors/administrators so you can post and add links etc.. For lengthier dialogues face book is a bit limited I feel.