ABSTRACT

Recherche-Création SLIDES

In 2005, at a symposium on Whitehead and Deleuze in Brussels, I ventured that what I was trying to do with poietic (and thus neither instrumental nor truth-deciding) mathematics was to find some articulations adequate to life. Stengers responded, only physics is adequate to life. Over the years, this comment has remained on my list of challenges to explore. It may be fruitful to interpret this term “physics” in Stengers’ sense of ecology of practices, and also to fashion a material, lower-case mathematics that is sympathetic to poetic expression. Stengers’ cosmopolitics provides a more ample space within which to articulate both.

In our atelier for “recherche-création,” the Topological Media Lab, a delicate, ungainly ecology of practices has grown up over the past five years that may bear some marks of the sort of cosmopolitical conversation of which Stengers has written. Its experiments constitute stammering empirical, ethico-aesthetic ventures into questions such as the spectra of intentional and accidental, or collective and solo corporeal movement, and the relation between movement and body-memory or room-memory. One implicit thread that this atelier has sustained over the decade is a topological, material, poetic, humane but non-anthropocentric approach to the question of novelty. I consider the cosmopolitical aspects of the amalgam of experiment and art.

WORKSHOP

Sha Xin Wei, with Jen Spiegel, PhD, Jesse White, and Morgan Sutherland, Topological Media Lab

August 3, 2:00 PM (with possible follow-ons as lightning interventions in subsequent days)

A two-part, hands-on creation workshop about augmented reality / alternate reality (AR), public space, and public action.

SLIDES

SUGGESTED READINGS

AIS Special Issue: Minor and Speculative Architecture

Ethico-Aesthetics in T* Performative Spaces in On Transient Realities and Their Generators, ed. Kuzmanovic and Tim Boykett. Maribor, Slovenia: Kibla, 2005, pp. 22-39. (PDF)

The TGarden Performance Research Project. Modern Drama, 48.3, Fall, Special Issue: Technology (2005): 585-608 (PDF with color images)

“Resistance Is Fertile: Gesture and Agency in the Field of Responsive Media,” in Makeover: Writing the Body into the Posthuman Technoscape, Two-Part Special Issue of Configurations, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, Part 2: Configurations, Vol 10, Number 3, Summer 2002. (PDF)

ADDITIONAL READINGS

“Whitehead’s Poetical Mathematics,” Configurations – Volume 13, Number 1, Winter 2005, pp. 77-94. (PDF)