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!