Monday, September 28, 2015

Στο Όνομα του Le Corbusier

Στο Όνομα του Le Corbusier

Το όνομα του Le Corbusier, αν και σαφώς ‘κύριο’, ταυτολογικός χαρακτηρισμός του υποκείμενου στο όνομα Charles-Édouard Jeanneret Μοντέρνου αρχιτέκτονα, φαίνεται πως πορεύτηκε στη μετά θάνατο κατάστασή του και ως όνομα ‘κοινό’. Αποκλειστικά τεκμήρια δεν υπάρχουν. Κινήθηκε πλάι αλλά κυρίως πάνω στο μοντέρνο, λέξη που με τη σειρά της βρέθηκε να υψώνει κάποτε το πρώτο γράμμα από ‘μ’ σε ‘Μ’. Αν κτίστηκαν οι απαραίτητες συλλογικές υποδηλώσεις για μία κοινή μετάφραση της αρχιτεκτονικής ‘modernité’ παίζεται. Η φαντασία πάντως άρχισε να επιλέγει σταδιακά τα δικά της ερμηνευτικά συμπληρώματα για τον όρο στο άκουσμα και μόνο του ονόματος του κυρίου Jeanneret ως Corbusier μέσα στη διαδικασία αναζήτησης μίας αξίας γενικής.
Εδώ, η ομαδική έκθεση ‘Στο όνομα του Le Corbusier’ προσκαλεί δημιουργούς που υποθέτουμε πως άκουσαν το όνομά του να αντηχεί επαναλαμβανόμενο στους διαδρόμους των αρχιτεκτονικών σχολών όπου κάποτε βρέθηκαν – σπουδάζοντας ή διδάσκοντας- να στήσουν ένα διάλογο πάνω στο ερώτημα ‘ποιος είναι τελικά ο Le Corbusier;’ Τα έργα θα φιλοξενηθούν στην οικία Σπητέρη της οδού Κυκλάδων που σχεδίασε ο αρχιτέκτονας Αριστομένης Προβελέγγιος, συνεργάτης του Le Corbusier και εντεταλμένος εκπρόσωπος της ελληνικής κοινότητας των αρχιτεκτόνων στην κηδεία του.


Κ. Βελώνης & Λ. Λυκουριώτη, Φ. Γιαννίση & Ζ. Κοτιώνης, Γ. Γρηγοριάδης, Γ. Γυπαράκης, Θ. Ιωαννίδου, Π. Κούρος, Β. Ξένου, Μ. Παπαδημητρίου, Α. Ψυχούλης.
Επιμέλεια: Παναγιώτης Τουρνικιώτης, Φάνης Καφαντάρης.
Συνδιοργάνωση:Workshop-S Διονύσης Σοτοβίκη

Οικία Σπητέρη/Προβελέγγιου, οδός Κυκλάδων 6, Κυψέλη

6 Οκτωβρίου – 8 Νοεμβρίου 2015
Παράλληλες εκδηλώσεις στο χώρο της έκθεσης:
Πέμπτη 15 Οκτωβρίου
Ο Κώστας Τσιαμπάος προσκαλεί τους αρχιτέκτονες Διονύση Σοτοβίκη και Γιώργο Τζιρτζιλάκη σε μία ανοιχτή συζήτηση αφιερωμένη στον Αριστομένη Προβελέγγιο, το έργο του, τη σχέση του με το Le Corbusier και τη σχέση τους με την Κυψέλη.

Κ. Βελώνης & Λ. Λυκουριώτη, Found Something in the Hills (2nd Crows Debate ), 2105


Η έκθεση εντάσσεται στη δέσμη εκδηλώσεων και άλλων δράσεων με γενικό τίτλο «Αναφορά στον Ελ/Le Corbusier» που οργανώνονται από το Φθινόπωρο 2015 ως το Καλοκαίρι 2016 με πρωτοβουλία της Σχολής Αρχιτεκτόνων Ε.Μ.Π. και τη στήριξη του Ιδρύματος Le Corbusier με αφορμή τα 50 χρόνια από τον θάνατο του Le Corbusier. Οι εκδηλώσεις συνδιοργανώνονται ή στηρίζονται στο σύνολο ή κατά περίπτωση από το Γαλλικό Ινστιτούτο, την Ελβετική Πρεσβεία, το Ελληνικό Ινστιτούτο Αρχιτεκτονικής, το Ελληνικό Docomomo, το Κέντρο Αρχιτεκτονικής της Μεσογείου, και άλλους πολιτιστικούς και επιστημονικούς φορείς

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

This Is Your Brain On Climate Change


We spend vast amounts of time and personal energy trying to calculate the most urgent threats posed by climate change. Washington, D.C. psychiatrist and climate activist Lise Van Susteren, however, says the most insidious danger may already be upon us. She’s not talking about heat, drought, floods, severe storms, or rising seas. She’s focused on the psychological risks posed by global warming.
Van Susteren has co-authored a report on the psychological effects of climate change that predicts Americans will suffer “depressive and anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, substance abuse, suicides, and widespread outbreaks of violence,” in the face of rising temperatures, extreme weather, and scarce resources. Van Susteren and her co-author Kevin Coyle write that counselors and first responders “are not even close to being prepared to handle the scale and intensity of impacts that will arise from the harsher conditions and disasters that global warming will unleash.”
There is currently no organized discipline for the study of the psychological risks of climate change, yet it is already taking a toll on many people who tackle this issue. Surprisingly susceptible are those who might seem to be immune.
The climate deniers? I always say they‘re really too stressed to hear the truth,” said Van Susteren. “We see this kind of thing in my work all the time, where people who aren’t ready to hear the truth about something will simply say it doesn’t exist.”
Text by Jeremy Deaton

Homage to Pudlo Pudlat


 
Drawing by Pudlo Pudlat 

At its heart, this conversation is centered on encounters, from the artist Arvo Leo’s chance discovery of a book about one of the most prolific, yet little known artists in Canada, to Pudlo Pudlat’s own drawings, over 4000 renderings that reveal the Arctic landscape as a site of transition, a region that from 1940s onward, was inundated with new technologies, new religion, and ideas that radically changed the way of life for those in the far north. Looking critically at the conditions of production, the conversation will provide a background on the development of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in the 1950s. In a place where paper currency was a relatively recent introduction, the program introduced art-making as a means to replace incomes lost after the collapse of the fur trade. Collectively, Pudlat’s drawings reveal a cosmology. In them, fish pull airplanes, humans ride muskox, and seals have the ability to teleport to the sky. Arvo Leo's encounters in Cape Dorset extend these readings of Pudlo's world as drawings transfigure into a fresh interrogation of landforms, community practices and the rhythm of Inuktitut songs. By way of acoustically and visually engaging with scenes of daily life, human-animal relations and intricate contingencies of the Canadian Arctic in a time of ecological shift, Fish Plane, Heart Clock unravels an organic correspondence between the camera and the drawing. Candice Hopkins and Natasha Ginwala
Candice Hopkins and Natasha Ginwala discuss the work of Arvo Leo and Pudlo Pudlat.
27/09/2015 3 pm
La Loge, Brussels

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Bird House Play


Bird House Play, 2015,
wood, chipboard, paint
143 x 113 x 10 cm

Institutions, Politics, Performance


The conference “Institutions, Politics, Performance” seeks to bring together interdisciplinary theoretical discourses on politics and artistic production that explicitly negotiate with institutions through experimental praxes from within and beyond them. The conference will take place in occupied Green Park space in Athens, Greece and presentations will explore the theme through conventional and non-conventional investigations. This conference will include paper presentations, lecture-performances, workshops, dialogues, round-table discussions as well as less conventional informal discussions and events, performative acts, city walks and screenings.
The conference will take place in Athens, Greece where, currently, the ongoing economic and social crises as well as recent governmental shifts make the question of institutions particularly pertinent. We seek to bring together into conversation diverse approaches and methodologies of institutional critique, past and present, as well as propositions for new forms and alternative practices.
Keynote Speakers: Athena Athanasiou, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Stefano Harney, Alexandros Kioupkiolis, Bojana Kunst, Isabel Lorey, Alan Read, Gerald Raunig, Vassilis Tsianos

Organised by: Gigi Argyropoulou & Hypatia Vourloumis
Green Park , 24-28 September 2015, Athens

Saturday, September 19, 2015

The Door in the Sky

The Truman Show” directed by Peter Weir and written by Andrew Niccol, 1998.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Response to R. Scott Bakker on transcendental phenomenology and BBT



There is nothing “outside” the natural order. In this sense, I am opposed to the transcendentalist’s move to remove Reason or the reflective understanding from physical reality. There is indeed a supernaturalist residue in much transcendental and phenomenological philosophy. This is why my project has always been to theorize “the natural order” as itself always already creative, aesthetic, interpretational, experiential (mine is a naturalized transcendental (Schelling’s “Nature is a priori”)). There is no “other” world from which the causal efficacy of our world derives. With our universe, the cause is internal to the effect, which is another way of saying our universe is primarily organic (with mechanism as a secondary appearance). This is why I follow Whitehead in the endeavor to construct an ontology of organism, wherein: 1) Physics is the study of the evolutionary development of particles, stars, galaxies, and other micro- and macro- organisms-in-ecologies; 2) Biology is the study of the evolutionary development of single cells, plants, and animals in their meso-cosmic ecologies; 3) Philosophy, anthropology, and theology are different aspects of the study of the evolutionary development of languages, myths, and ideas in their noetic ecologies. The organism-environment field becomes the metaphysical metaphor guiding our theorizing, rather than the machine.

Now, when I say “my project has always been to theorize…”, I should qualify that “theory” in the context of an open-ended, evolving cosmos such as ours can never pretend to certainty or finality. Theory is not the construction of a disinterested, reflective ego (at least, no valuable theory is). Theory always remains dependent on the speculative leap of some metaphor or another. Theory is imaginative construction requiring equal doses of aesthetic taste and logical clarity. Our theories are always as much science fiction as they are science fact.
I agree with Bakker than cognition of the real just isn’t possible. But we must distinguish between cognition on the one hand, and sensation, feeling, and intuition on the other. If an intuition of the real is our goal, using the reflective instrument is like shining a flashlight in search of darkness. Reflective cognition is like King Midas, turning everything it touches into noetic gold. It transforms everything not-I into food for itself, digesting the world and defecating whatever it can’t assimilate as waste. It does’t seem to me much of a stretch to say that modernity’s exclusive reliance on reflective cognition is one of the main factors leading to the ecological crisis.
Let me be clear that, while I defend transcendental phenomenology from Bakker’s eliminativist meta-critique, my own philosophical home base is process-relational ontologyI have major issues with transcendental phenomenology as a philosophical resting place. It remains too anthropocentric, too concerned with issues of human access and not attentive enough to solar nucleosynthesis, cellular mitosis, and atmospheric levels of CH4. But still, I just don’t understand how, having grasped the power of transcendental critique–as critique–one could fail to see eliminativist arguments like BBT as anything but dogmatic materialism (materialism has today become the new School Philosophy, though it pretends to be the ultimate critic of all metaphysics). Where I leave transcendentalism behind is in my pursuit of a constructive, cosmologically-rooted philosophy, something the phenomenological approach just cannot provide.

It is clear Bakker has done his philosophical homework. I don’t think it is fair of him to lump everyone into the same transcendentalist clown car, though. Phenomenology was born out of the intense debates between Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all of whom accused Kant of not having cleared his vision of dogmatist residues. They all recognized the possibility and the fact of neglect, and even of the neglect of neglect. But for these post-Kantians (with the possible exception of Hegel), the transcendental project was an infinite one by definition, meaning there would never be a point when the a priori structures were finally reached and could be clearly and distinctly spelled out once and for all. Fichte grounded the transcendental historically in the ethical development of humankind, describing philosophy as an attempt to asymptotically approach absolute metacognition as an ideal while never in fact being able to reach it. Schelling went further and grounded the transcendental in the creative developmental arc of the cosmos itself. For Schelling (and here he converges with Whitehead), not even God knows the a priori conditions of experiential reality: the divine is just as caught in the chaotic turmoil of historical becoming as any creature is. None of these thinkers, with the possible exception of Fichte when he is sloppy, thought that impersonal natural systems could be cognized in terms of their own 1st person experience.
Here is Schelling mulling over this exact problem, for ex.:
I could conceive of that being perhaps as something that, initially blind, struggles through every level of becoming toward consciousness, and humanity would then arise precisely at that moment, at that point in which the previously blind nature would reach self-consciousness. But this cannot be, since our self-consciousness is not at all the consciousness of that nature that permeates everything: it is just *our* consciousness and hardly encompasses within itself a science of becoming applicable to all things. This universal becoming remains just as foreign and opaque to us as if it had never had a bearing on us at all. Therefore, if this becoming has achieved any kind of purpose it is achieved only through humanity, but not for humanity; for the consciousness of humanity does not = equal the consciousness of nature” (The Grounding of Positive Philosophy, 1841).
In other words, 1st person reflective ego consciousness is largely a sham. It can tell us little if anything about the unconscious natural ground from which it emerges. Of course, Schelling (like Whitehead) argued that the field of experience extends beyond mere 1st person ego consciousness. My argument with Bakker has always been: why reduce the experiential field that is open to us to 1st person ego consciousness? Most of our daily and nightly experience is not egoic! Most of the time we are flowing through other experiential states more akin to animals, plants, and even minerals. So in a sense mine is also a post-human manifesto. We have never been human, if you want.

Text by Matthew David Segall


We Decide How we Reside



We decide how we reside | © SuperFuture

"We decide how we reside" invites artists, architects and residents from Berlin, Istanbul, and Marseilles to develop images and concepts for self-determined dwelling. The project was developed by HKW´s Education department in the framework of the interdisciplinary program “Wohnungsfrage” seeking to stimulate a practical and likewise radical discourse on housing by initiating collaborations among international and local players in the fields of architecture, urban planning, politics, arts, science and activism.

The project participants – the Kotti-Shop (Berlin), PASAJ (Istanbul), and La Folie Kilomètre (Marseilles) – are embedded in sociopolitical flashpoints of their respective cities and share a participatory methodology which understands knowledge production as a social process.
Input: Sandi Hilal, Campus in Camps, Bethlehem

Participating project partners: PASAJ (Istanbul), Kotti-Shop (Berlin), and La Folie Kilomètre (Marseille)
In cooperation with the Allianz Kulturstiftung

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

A Visit to the Art Gallery by Paul Hogan

“Mr Hogan, with all due respects, your knowledge of the arts is essentially pedestrian”
“Aw, thanks mate” I say, acceptin' the compliment”. 


Η χρήση του αρχείου στις εικαστικές πρακτικές ως «πορνογραφία της οργάνωσης»


Δημήτρης Ιωάννου, “CMYK Series: The Collection”, 1999-2013

Τα τελευταία χρόνια μαζί με τη χρήση της φωτογραφίας ως ένα αυτόνομο χειραγωγημένο καλλιτεχνικό μέσο έχει αυξηθεί η προοπτική της αρχειακής της ιδιότητας. Από τις συνεχείς εκθέσεις του Ινστιτούτου Σύγχρονης Ελληνικής Τέχνης που είναι βασισμένες στο αρχείο της μέχρι και τις καθαρά φωτογραφικές εκθέσεις, η χρήση της φωτογραφικής εικόνας συνεισφέρει στον προσδιορισμό ενός γνωσιολογικού πεδίου στα πλαίσια μιας ταξινόμησης. Παρόλα αυτά δεν ενδιαφέρομαι να επιδοθώ εδώ σε μια ιστορική αξιολόγηση ούτε και σε μια πρόσφατη αποτίμηση της αρχειακής πρακτικής όσο να θέσω κάποια ζητήματα που αφορούν τη ψυχολογία αυτής της πρακτικής. Φωτογράφοι που κινούνται στο χώρο των εικαστικών και εικαστικοί που δανείζονται το μέσο της φωτογραφίας με την προοπτική να αξιοποιήσουν τη ρεαλιστική ρητορική της μηχανικής αναπαραγωγής επαληθεύουν την εμμονή τους με την αρχειοθέτηση. Αυτή η πρακτική δεν μπορεί να εξαντληθεί στη φωτογραφία κατά τη γνώμη μου αλλά αποτελεί το παράδειγμα της  ταξινομητικής λογικής, ακόμη και όταν έχουμε να διαπραγματευτούμε με αντικείμενα ή κείμενα και όχι εικόνες[i].

Το κύριο σύμπτωμα της ιδεοψυχαναγκαστικής συμπεριφοράς είναι η συνεχής αναζήτηση της τάξης. Στο πλαίσιο μιας καλλιτεχνικής πρακτικής που βασίζεται στην αρχειακή της συγκρότηση, η λογική της επανάληψης ενός φωτογραφικού ή πολιτισμικού ντοκουμέντου ή η εμμονή της επιστροφής στο ίδιο θέμα και η φορμαλιστική ανάγκη για τη συμμετρικότητα δεν απέχουν από τη θεραπευτική διάγνωση του ψυχαναγκασμού. Ασφαλώς η καλλιτεχνική πρακτική δεν βασίζεται στον αποκλεισμό των παθογενειών, θα λέγαμε το αντίθετο. Όμως η δυνατότητα της αξιολόγησης μιας καλλιτεχνικής πρακτικής με τους όρους μιας θεωρίας του σχεδιασμού ή της οπτικής σύνταξης μπορεί να μας επιτρέψει να εξάγουμε ενδιαφέροντα συμπεράσματα για τις σύγχρονες πολιτισμικές τάσεις και τις συλλογικές  νευρώσεις.
Κωστής Βελωνης

Διαβάστε περισσότερα 
http://avgi-anagnoseis.blogspot.gr/2015/09/blog-post_13.html 

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Object Lesson


There are several strange elements in Andrew Cole’s recent polemic against speculative realism and object-oriented ontology [Artforum, Summer 2015]. First, in a piece written specifically for Artforum, Cole never bothers to address our views on art, choosing instead to treat the magazine’s readership to a long lesson on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Second, after trying to make us look disrespectful by likening us to vandals who spray-painted “Kant is a moron” on a house in Kaliningrad, Russia, Cole himself takes a crude and macabre dig at Kant’s personal life: “Yes, Kantian moral philosophy leaves something to be desired, as when the philosopher exemplifies the categorical imperative by asking readers to imagine having sex near the gallows—easy to say for a person who never got laid.” It’s also strange that while Cole only cites one of my publications (The Quadruple Object [2011]) by name, he laments unanswered questions that are addressed not only in other publications, but even in the one book that he seems to have read.
Forgetting for now these unsettling signals, let’s briefly consider Cole’s argument, which is really an attempted counterpoint of two separate arguments. The first is that we have either misunderstood Kant or deliberately distorted his ideas to conceal the fact that we have stolen most of our insights from him. The second—always a crowd-pleaser—is that object-oriented philosophy is hopelessly complicit with capitalism and the “commodity fetishism” that Marx linked with the capitalist system. Cole handles the second point more impressionistically than the first, and a similar argument was already made by his sometime collaborator Alexander R. Galloway in a widely read but dreadful 2013 Critical Inquiry article entitled “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism.” In what follows, I will therefore focus on Cole’s remarks on Kant.

Graham Harman

which includes Andrew Cole's reply




Those Obscure Objects of Desire


Over the past ten years, people in all manner of disciplines have turned to things: to matter, stuff, obdurate objects. Often loosely grouped under the rubric ―new materialisms,‖ these strains of thought have captured the imagination of artists and critics alike. The art world just can’t quit them, apparently—a perverse situation, since art and art history have, of course, already devoted hundreds of years to thinking precisely about objects as objects. But are things really as they seem? In the following pages, scholar Andrew Cole takes the measure of the two new-materialist philosophies that have come to dominate the art-world conversation, arguing that object-oriented ontology and speculative realism are beset by contradictions, misguided assumptions, and outright fallacies.


A brick house crumbles in the village of Veselovka, Russia, just a few miles from Kaliningrad. It’s said that Immanuel Kant had something to do with this house back when the region was part of Prussia (and when Kaliningrad was known as Königsberg), but what, exactly, is not clear. Ambiguities such as whether the philosopher really lived here didn’t stop someone from regarding the house as his and tagging it with the declaration КАНТ ЛОХ. These words, spray-painted in green and garnished with a groovy heart and a cute flower beneath, were translated in English-speaking media as ―Kant is a moron.‖
You rarely hear the words irony and Kant used in the same sentence, but what’s ironic about this vandalism is the fact that the house isn’t Kant’s—the existing structure dates from the nineteenth century. Only the foundations are contemporary with the philosopher, who lived in the area in the late 1740s. What we have here, I think, is a vivid illustration of how the critique of Kant—whether inscribed in graffiti or couched in academic prose—usually misses its mark. You will often hear contemporary critics say that Kant is a moron owing to this or that failing of his, but this assessment almost always involves a misreading—a misidentification, as it were—of his philosophy. In such cases, the foundations of Kant’s system remain untouched and solid as ever. You see, even in death Kant is the reigning All- Destroyer—Der Allzermalmende, as his friends called him, ribbing him for his annoying habit of exiting debates completely unscathed and triumphant.

Yes, Kantian moral philosophy leaves something to be desired, as when the philosopher exemplifies the categorical imperative by asking readers to imagine having sex near the gallows—easy to say for a person who never got laid. But Kant’s epistemology, in particular his insight into how we experience the world, remains foundational. He tells us that ours is a world of phenomena, the infinite array of objects and events we experience, and he says also that the world is composed of noumena we cannot experience, the equally infinite number of things that exist, and
processes that transpire, apart from our minds thinking them. These two domains are radically different but nonetheless linked, inasmuch as noumena are the basis for the phenomena. Of course, there’s far more to Kant’s ―critical philosophy‖ than that, as we’ll soon see. For example, we can’t ignore such famously unfraught topics as ―thinking the unthinkable.‖ But this is the gist, and enough to get us going.

Our interest here is in showing that Kant doesn’t crumble like his ersatz house (though props to the house for lasting this long). In fact, Kant’s ideas remain a crucial component of recent philosophies that try hard to vitiate his philosophy. Object-oriented ontology is one such philosophy, as is its cousin, speculative realism. What is object-oriented ontology, however? You might surmise that it’s a return to the object qua object—a renewed focus on the composition, vitality, materiality, autonomy, wonder, and durability of objects large and small, near and far. In this sense, you could say that any discipline or practice is ―object oriented,‖ including not only art history and criticism but also architecture, graphic design, museum studies, archaeology, science and the philosophy of science, book history, literary criticism and rhetoric, and the culinary arts—indeed, any field of study whose subject is objects. This crude understanding of object-oriented ontology also applies to speculative realism,which may explain why both have become irresistibly appealing to the art world.

Andrew Cole
Artforum, summer 2015, pp. 318-23