Movement, gesture, protocol, and choreography of specific bodies are continuous in language, politics, technology and other structures that signify and organize material
Date/Time: Feb 19 2018, 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm
Vancouver, Or Gallery
This semester of the Vancouver Institute of Social Research seeks to discuss ways in which the body and systems co-articulate each other and the inertias of power that attempt to frame them and the disruptions to various sovereignties that emerge. These discussions will take place also as a way to gesture towards the morphing forms of capture that are developing within the everyday hand-to-hand combat with apparatuses.
7 weeks on Monday nights at 7pm at the Or Gallery - February 19th - April 2nd
Feb. 19th - Sanem Güvenç-Salgırlı - Resisting Emergencies or the Time of the Idiots
Feb. 26th - Phanuel Antwi - TBA
March 5th – Lee Su-Feh - Wrestling for Autonomy: choreographic gestures
March 12th - Ray Hsu and Eyemole Collective - God Mode
March 19th - Hilda Fernandez - Will a Cyborg Steal My Jouissance? Unconscious Labour and the Enjoying Body of the Virtual.
March 26th - Denise Ferreira Da Silva –(TBA)
April 2nd - Closing Panel - Choreography, Politics, and the Movement of Bodies -Alana Gerecke, Sasha Kleinplatz, and Laura June. Moderated by Justine A. Chambers
Feb. 19th - Sanem Güvenç-Salgırlı
Resisting Emergencies or the Time of the Idiots
From climate change to mushrooming authoritarianisms, natural disasters to economic and humanitarian crises, contemporary ontology is overwhelmingly problematized as a multiplicity of emergencies, which calls for faster and swifter modes of action, and ostracizes any other engagement as regressive, reactionary, and unrealistic. This talk puts a question mark to the political imperative of conceptualizing social and political issues on the basis of emergencies. For that, it resuscitates Dostoevsky’s idiot. As a figure of uninitiation (a la Deleuze and Guattari), who constantly reminds us to slow down in whatever task we are undertaking (a la Isabelle Stengers), the idiot opens up the possibility of a different political engagement. Rejecting both nihilist and moralist alternatives, it instead offers the aleatory prospects of encounter in transitory spaces, and suggests to suspend time through the unknown of radical empiricism.
Sanem Güvenç-Salgırlı is a Vancouver-based scholar, who currently teaches science studies inspired social-political theory at Emily Carr University of Arts and Design. Before moving to Vancouver in 2016, she was an assistant professor of sociology at Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey; and before that a PhD student and an associate of the Fernand Braduel Center at Binghamton University. Lying at the intersection of science studies, political theory, and historical sociology, her most
recent work explores the concepts of the swarm and the cloud, and is particularly inspired by, and a product of the social movements of the post-2010 period. She has published articles and essays in academic, semi-academic, and activist journals in English and Turkish.
Feb. 26th - TBA
March 5th - Lee Su-Feh
Wrestling for Autonomy: choreographic gestures
How do I know my body and its pleasures are mine when they have developed under oppressive systems? If our conscious sense of self is a social construct, how do we discern between our autonomous self and our socially-obligated or machine-mediated self?
Lee Su-Feh will discuss how these questions drive her work and practice as a choreographer and teacher; and how they show up in her current work Dance Machine.
Dance Machine will be performed at the Anvil Centre the week following, starting March 12.
March 12th - Ray Hsu and Eyemole Collective
God Mode
God mode, a general purpose term for a cheat code in video games that makes a player invincible
Windows Master Control Panel shortcut, sometimes referred to as Windows God Mode
-- Wikipedia
In this hybrid talk/tech demo, we at the Eyemole art collective reflect on our interventions into late capitalism’s “God mode”: specifically, the future of futurities that Achille Mbembe describes as the “negative messianism” of “apocalyptic libertarianism.” We argue that a key articulation of Silicon Valley theology operates via intellectual property--specifically the patent--that lays the conceptual groundwork for monopoly capitalism's vision of the end time.
Behind its urgent walling off of the intellectual commons lies the fields of Virtual Reality and Neurotechnology. These two technologies promise, alongside techno-utopian dreams of ultimate liberal humanist empathy, ever new heights of panoptic control over every aspect of everyday life via sensation (VR) and volition (Neurotechnology), abetting all the while the complicit handover of data to the state or simply opening such data to hacker attack, state-sponsored and otherwise.
Via guerrilla hacks and golem-like creations, we aim to seize control of a fiery spark from the heights of contemporary techno-capitalism and formulate a new critical dystopian praxis offering redemption beyond the apocalypse.
March 19th - Hilda Fernandez
Will a Cyborg Steal My Jouissance? Unconscious Labour and the Enjoying Body of the Virtual.
Jouissance, understood as a sort of pleasurable pain, expressing an excessive tension of psychical nature, coded in the body, consumptive, and inaccessible to the symbolic order, is a universal characteristic of the human subject as bestowed by psychoanalysis. Based on the premise that jouissance and the body share interrelated yet separate spaces, as the latter is always displaced in an imagined other, in this talk I approach the virtual enjoyment dominating our current times to inquire the interrelation between the body, the unconscious labour and jouissance.
I will engage with Alfie Bown’s report on videogames “The Playstation Dreamworld” (2017), Jon Raffman’s recent work “Dream Journal” (2017) and some examples from HBO TV Series “Western World” (2016) and Netflix’s “Black Mirror” (2011-2017) to read the unconscious labour, firstly, as an investment in the virtual space, via our dreams, fantasies and even symptoms (techno-addiction). And secondly, this same unconscious labour it is the subject’s jouissance-ingrained production, and as such, it involves an undecidable and paradoxical loss and a gain (surplus jouissance), which I aim to locate it with regards to the body (individual and social).
With the concept of surplus enjoyment, which Lacan assumes to be parallel to surplus value, I argue that the enjoyment of the subject, via its disembodiment in the virtual space, has resulted in a larger social disembodiment which Tomsic explains as a “self fetishisation” of capitalism. I try to articulate it as a radical shift in subjectivity, where the temporal spatial conditions of embodiment are ever more reliant on mediation and where the lack is unbearable, unless the proliferating world of virtual images mediates it.
At the dawn of artificial intelligence and the consolidation of virtual spaces, what relation can be thought between our bodies, the unconscious labour power and our enjoyment? Will our enjoying bodies, the last frontier of our imaginary property, turn out to be stolen goods by a cyborg in servitude of wealth accumulation of big data corporations who have algorithmically manufactured our desires?
March 26th - Denise Ferreira Da Silva –(TBA)
April 2nd - Closing Panel - Choreography, Politics, and the Movement of Bodies
Alana Gerecke, Sasha Kleinplatz, and Laura June. Moderated by Justine A. Chambers
In this panel that closes off the VISR semester, ideas and issues around creative movement practices and their relationship to both aesthetics of activism and political protocols that move bodies will be discussed. Differentiations between metaphor, reality, and analogous relationships between these often-siloed practices, and politics as a form of choreography are of interest to the panel.
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