Pomp, Circumstance, and the Performance of Politics: Acting 'Politically Correct' in the Ancient World

Pomp, Circumstance, and the Performance of Politics:  Acting 'Politically Correct' in the Ancient World

When we imagine ancient political life, we think of powerful rulers and awe-inspiring monuments, not grassroots movements. But if the cacophony of our modern political discourse can teach us anything, it's that negotiating power and legitimacy is an ongoing conversation, not a monologue. This conference investigates moments and spaces in the premodern world where audiences had the opportunity to weigh in on the messages their leaders were sending. How did ordinary people experience and contribute to their political realities, and what strategies did rulers use to gain support?

Bringing together scholars working in a wide variety of disciplines and time periods, from prehispanic Mesoamerica and early historic India to the Assyrian Empire and papal Rome, this conference takes a bottom-up approach to evaluating the risks and rewards of acting 'politically correct'—or incorrect!—in the ancient world.

March 7–8, 2019

The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

Organized by Kathryn R. Morgan,
Postdoctoral Fellow

https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/symposia/2019.html

"Λυπημένες μέρες πια ποτέ δεν θ' ανατείλουν..." 

https://www.tanea.gr/print/2019/03/04/lifearts/lypimenes-meres-pia-pote-den-th-anateiloun/

 

Voyage around my Room

Voyage around my Room

The particular exhibition embarks from Virginia Woolf’s legendary essay “A Room of One’s Own”, written in 1926, and its relevance to newly introduced sociological and political concepts like digital feminism and the #metoo movement. The room (ma chambre), personal space as described in Xavier de Maistre's classic book "Voyage Autour de Ma Chambre" (1794), where the title derives from, as well as concepts such as privacy, autonomy and self-expression are key points of reference to the exhibition works created by international contemporary artists and writers. The exhibition attempts to initiate a new discourse on the notion of room and personal space in continuation to the discussion that originated in classic essays and works of literature.

How to guarantee conditions of contemplation to the older feline population, 2006, wood, 310 x 165 x 52 cm

Participating artists: Sophia Al Maria, Theodoros Chiotis, Dora Economou, Philomena Epps, Jeanne Graff, Juliana Huxtable, Dimitris Ioannou, Sharon Kivland, Sylvere Lotringer, Jonas Mekas, Maro Michalakakos, Eva Stefani, Amalia Ulman, Kostis Velonis 

Exhibition curator: Kika Kyriakakou

Duration: March 18 – April 21, 2019
Location: Athens Municipality Art Center

Athens World Book Capital 2018 City of Athens, of which major donor is Stavros Niarchos Foundation, organizes the group exhibition “Voyage around my Room” in partnership with the City of Athens Cultural, Sport & Youth Organization (OPANDA).

Ο Αναξίμανδρος στη Φουκουσίμα_ Γενεαλογίες της Τεχνικής

Στις απαρχές του τεχνικού πολιτισμού κάνει την εμφάνισή της η ανθρωπόκαινος εποχή. Η σύγχρονη ιδέα ότι η ανθρώπινη δραστηριότητα επηρεάζει και διαμορφώνει τη γεωλογική συγκρότηση και την εξέλιξη της γής, ενυπάρχει ήδη στα θραύσματα των προσωκρατικών κοσμολογιών. Στίς θεωρητικές υποθέσεις του Αναξίμανδρου ανευρίσκεται η σύλληψη του κόσμου ως τεχνικού κατασκευάσματος, όπως είναι μια κυλινδρική κολόνα ή ένας μεταλλευτικός κλίβανος.

Ο Αναξίμανδρος στη Φουκουσίμα είναι ταυτόχρονα εικαστική εγκατάσταση και ποιητικό δοκίμιο. Αφηγείται πρακτικές περιπλανήσεων, καταγραφών, ανοικτών αναγνώσεων των προσωκρατικών φιλοσόφων και γενεαλογήσεις εδαφικών ευρημάτων. Η επιτόπια περιπλάνηση γίνεται κάποτε ταξίδι στην οικουμενική γεωγραφία και ταξίδι μέχρι την σύγχρονη ιστορία, από τα παράλια της Μεσογείου ως τα παράλια της Ιαπωνίας. Οι αστοχήσαντες πυρηνικοί αντιδραστήρες της Φουκουσίμα είναι τεχνολογικές μεταμορφώσεις του αναξιμάνδρειου κλιβάνου.

Το βιβλίο απευθύνεται περισσότερο σε εκείνες και εκείνους που θέλουν να αδράξουν, μέσα από την “τοπο-στιγμή” τη γενικότητα, το βάθος της ιστορίας και την έκταση των “φυσικοπολιτισμών”. Να αδράξουν τη γενεαλογία της τεχνικής ως βίωμα και προσωπική ανάμνηση, μέσα στην βαρετή συνήθως αλλά καμιά φορά συναρπαστική διεθνή συζήτηση για τη γαία και το μέλλον του παρόντος της.

Παρουσίαση και συζήτηση για το έργο εν προόδω και το βιβλίο του Ζήση Κοτιώνη. Η εκδήλωση θα γίνει στο περιβάλλον μιας προσωρινής εγκατάστασης, η οποία συμπεριλαμβάνει προβολές βίντεο, αντικείμενα και επιτελεστική διάλεξη του συγγραφέα.

Ομιλητές:

Κωστής Βελώνης, Εικαστικός
Fabiano Micocci, Δρ. αρχιτέκτων, διδάσκων στο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλίας
Γιώργος Ξηροπαϊδης, Καθηγητής ΑΣΚΤ
Θεόφιλος Τραμπούλης, Ανεξάρτητος Επιμελητής
Γιώργος Τζιρτζιλάκης, Καθηγητής Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλίας
Εκ μέρους του Μουσείου Μπενάκη θα χαιρετήσει η Πολύνα Κοσμαδάκη, επιμελήτρια.

Επιτελεστική διάλεξη με απόσπασμα από το βιβλίο θα πραγματοποιήσουν ο συγγραφέας με τον Γιάννη Ισιδώρου, εικαστικό.

Η εκδήλωση θα πραγματοποιηθεί στο Αίθριο του Μουσείου Μπενάκη, Κεντρικό Κτήριο, στην οδό Κουμπάρη 1 και Βασιλίσσης Σοφίας, από τις 7:30 έως τις 9:30μμ, την Τρίτη 26 Φεβρουαρίου.

‘Migrations’ series continues exploration of peoples, cultures and borders

Jacques Callot, French, 1592–1635. Bohemians on the March: The Rear Guard, 1621. Etching and engraving. Princeton University Art Museum

In the spring term, Princeton University is launching its second year of a three-year public program around the theme of migrations through “Global Migration: The Humanities and Social Sciences in Dialogue.” A full list of events is available online.

Through lectures, conferences, performances and panel discussions, the public is invited to learn more about the movement of peoples over time and the consequences of those shifts.

“If migration has been a major human experience throughout history, it is taking on dramatic new dimensions in our own era of globalization,” said Sandra Bermann, the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities and professor of comparative literature at Princeton. “It is essential to understand it better. Our aim is to bring global, national and local migration issues to the forefront.”

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2019/02/19/migrations-series-continues-exploration-peoples-cultures-and-borders

Threadsuns

     Threadsuns

     above the grayblack wastes.

     A tree-

     high thought

     grasps the light-tone: there are

     still songs to sing beyond

     mankind.

Paul Celan 

Q&A Goes Horribly Wrong

Q&A Goes Horribly Wrong

Classicists engage in frequent debate about whether the field is “too white,” whether Western civilization is a manufactured idea and what new lines of inquiry will ensure classics’ continued relevance -- or even its survival.

But at an annual gathering of classicists this weekend in San Diego, that debate crossed the line from professional to personal, from real inquiry to racism.

The incident involved an attack on Dan-el Padilla Peralta, an assistant professor of classics at Princeton University, by an independent scholar named Mary Frances Williams. It happened during a question-and-answer period at a panel on the future of classics Saturday at a Society for Classical Studies conference.

Panelists included Peralta, who spoke about an alleged incident of racial profiling at the conference site, in which two classicists of color were stopped and asked for identification. He also cited classics journal publication data showing that authors are largely white, and pushed for diversification of the field. Another speaker was Sarah Bond, an associate professor of classics at the University of Iowa whose research and public outreach often focuses on the idea that our notions of race in the classical world are much more informed by Eurocentric Renaissance views than historical reality.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/01/07/racist-comments-directed-classics-scholar-disciplinary-meeting-floor-classicists

Scott Jaschik contributed to this article

The Breath of the Olive Tree

Hiva Panahi

Rethinking Repair

Rethinking Repair 

 “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen, Anthem

What world does contemporary information technology inhabit? Is it the imaginary nineteenth-century world of progress and advance, novelty and invention, open frontiers and endless development? Or the twenty-first- century world of risk and uncertainty, growth and decay, and fragmentation, dissolution, and breakdown? 

This chapter is an exercise in broken world thinking. It asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media. Broken world thinking is both normative and ontological, in the sense that it makes claims about the nature of technology and its relationship to broader social worlds, some of which may differ from deep rooted cultural assumptions. But it is also empirical and methodological, an argument and provocation toward doing new and different kinds of research, and new and different kinds of politics, in media and technology studies today. 

 Text by Steven J. Jackson 

https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/RethinkingRepairPROOFS%28reduced%29Aug2013.pdf

You're all around me but you may not be there

You're all around me but you may not be there, 2018

acrylic, oil, pencil and oil pastel on canvas

150 x 150 cm

Childhood's End The digital revolution isn’t over but has turned into something else

Childhood's End

The digital revolution isn’t over but has turned into something else

All revolutions come to an end, whether they succeed or fail.

The digital revolution began when stored-program computers broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things. Numbers that do things now rule the world. But who rules over the machines?Once it was simple: programmers wrote the instructions that were supplied to the machines. Since the machines were controlled by these instructions, those who wrote the instructions controlled the machines.

Two things then happened. As computers proliferated, the humans providing instructions could no longer keep up with the insatiable appetite of the machines. Codes became self-replicating, and machines began supplying instructions to other machines. Vast fortunes were made by those who had a hand in this. A small number of people and companies who helped spawn self-replicating codes became some of the richest and most powerful individuals and organizations in the world.

Then something changed. There is now more code than ever, but it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who has their hands on the wheel. Individual agency is on the wane. Most of us, most of the time, are following instructions delivered to us by computers rather than the other way around. The digital revolution has come full circle and the next revolution, an analog revolution, has begun. None dare speak its name.Childhood’s End was Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, published in 1953, chronicling the arrival of benevolent Overlords who bring many of the same conveniences now delivered by the Keepers of the Internet to Earth. It does not end well.

Text by George Dyson

https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-childhoods-end

Painted Stone

Andrea Büttner, Painted Stone, 2017 

Cosmology Blues

Robert Daseler

The Art of Transcribing a Sunset

The Art of Transcribing a Sunset 

Text by Rebekah Rutkoff

http://labos.ulg.ac.be/cipa/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2015/07/70_rutkoff.pdf 

Salvador

Pierre Verger, Salvador, Brazil 1946-50

Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

Growing awareness and concern about the pervasive and advancing scope of global environmental crises have in recent years prompted a new area of interdisciplinary research: the environmental humanities. Efforts have coalesced around the fields of anthropology, philosophy, history, literature, and now art history, as scholars seek to enlarge upon the traditional anthropocentrism of the humanities and embrace
a more expansive consideration of nature, ecology, and changing understandings of them. “Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective” engages this vital new trajectory, bringing together seventeen speakers from a variety of perspectives to explore environmental dimensions of artistic expression across a range of periods and cultures. The symposium is convened in connection with the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, which reinterprets American art over three centuries in relation to environmental history and evolving ecological perception. “Picture Ecology” extends the exhibition’s focus and approach to the visual cultures of diverse times and places, offering compelling ecocritical analysis of a broad spectrum of artists and objects. 

Organized by exhibition co-curator Karl Kusserow.

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/calendar/2018-12/symposium-picturing-ecology-art-and-ecocriticism-planetary-perspective

http://artimage.princeton.edu/files/ProductionPdfs/2018_NN_Ecology.pdf

Hyperion Has Stumbled

Hyperion Has Stumbled (detail), 2018 

When you daydream while walking—and, with your eyes set on the sky, you find that evidently you are not Hyperion, celebrated by Hölderlin in his writings, who lingers above earth—it is easy to stumble. Yet the daydreamer’s clash with reality is from another perspective a creative or even an insightful encounter, and one of the ideal media that causes people to fall over obstacles is sculpture. In this lecture, I will argue for a conceptual shift from the celebrated dexterity of the hand to the despised clumsiness of the leg. I will share samples of my work that stick to and never leave the ground. These works confirm the close dependency of sculpture on an onerous and yet surprisingly generative reality.

Location: Scheide Caldwell House
Title: Hyperion Has Stumbled
Speaker: Kostis Velonis (Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow)
Respondent: Mitra Abbaspour, (Princeton University Art Museum)
Time: 1:30 p.m.

December 7 at Princeton University

Measuring the Distance to the Goal

Measuring the Distance to the Goal, 2018 

Wood, concrete, acrylic 

123 x 26 x 16 cm 

The Fox

Katerina Iliopoulou, The Fox