Zētēsis, The International Journal for Fine Art, Philosophy and the Wild Sciences. , 2013
Zētēsis, No. 1 has both a booklet (uploaded separately as Vol 1.5) and a volume of writing (this ... more Zētēsis, No. 1 has both a booklet (uploaded separately as Vol 1.5) and a volume of writing (this uploaded version here). Please read both together!
From the Preface:
Preface
We Libidinal Economists! Daybreak, Version √2
With this debut volume of Zētēsis, the artists, philosophers, designers, technicians and scientists involved with this project and committed to an ‘old fashioned’ kind of research – that which is generated by a curiosity and deep commitment to know (the whatever) – declare a new Daybreak. It is one that intends to take as a given, complexity and the irrational / imaginary in art and the sciences, physics and metaphysics, culture and its economies, skin and the pleasures of the flesh. It steps to the atonal rhythms of the mimetic patterns of camouflage and the flâneur. It aligns itself with the history of those who were (and remain) willing to ask and act upon this basic question: Supposing it could be otherwise, what would this otherwise look like, become, be, now? We want to say that however it would look, be, become (now), the journey to find out must be fuelled by experiment, rigour, and a willingness to risk.
We owe a strong debt of thanks to our past and present-day interlocutors, from the genealogists, libidinal economists, feminists and queer theory / practitioners to those dancing in, on, and with this new field of ‘wild science’ and its very welcome co-collaborator, the sensual. We also owe a strong debt of thanks to those who were and remain willing to take a (financial) punt on this possibly awkward, possibly bruised, blue-sky thinking endeavour: The Birmingham School of Art in particular and its wider platform, The Birmingham Institute for Art and Design at bCu along with the staff and student artists, designers, philosophers, technicians, web aficionados, research fellows and scientists who gave generously of their time, despite wider pressures cascading onto their already overworked work schedules.
This is not a perfunctory acknowledgment to the School of Art at Margaret Street. For the academic, dare we say, intellectual world – and the universities that nourish its diversity, strident intelligence, playfulness and rigour —seems to have lost its way. This world, our world, challenged as it has been for the last decade or so with profound cuts in the arts & humanities, alongside a gluttonous appetite for all things STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), and topped with a seemingly wilful misreading of what constitutes experimentation, thinking, practice, indeed research itself, especially when it comes to art, philosophy, social science, culture, needs a bit of TLC (Tender Loving Care).
So the journal and its future offspring, comes with a warning: be prepared to think outside the proverbial box, and to do so, slowly and with care, as if approaching an untamed but curious beast. As an aid memoire, we dedicate this, the first volume, no. 1 to questioning The Cruelty of the Classical Canon. Each intervention / contribution / design decision has been peer-reviewed with members from an internationally and discipline-diverse advisory board. Some of the selected pieces support the classical canon; others reject it outright; still others try to strike a delicate balance between outright rejection and the appeal of its tried and tested repertoire. All have something to do with Nietzsche’s seminal text, Daybreak, Lyotard’s shout (demand), We Libidinal Economists! and the first discovered imaginary number,√2. It is up to you to decide which is which, and why.
Welcome to Zētēsis: a re-search generated by curiosity.
From the Preface:
Wet ⇌ Dry ⇌ Thick ⇌ Thin ⇌ (Getting Beyond the Raw and the Cooked)
I... more From the Preface:
Wet ⇌ Dry ⇌ Thick ⇌ Thin ⇌ (Getting Beyond the Raw and the Cooked)
In the now famous move led by Lévi Strauss to awaken the humanities and social sciences to the minutiae of life and the way in which one might be able to access this minutiae, quite a strange, diverse and oddly “old fashioned” approach (read by this: scientistic, possibly sexist, homophobic, racist, classist, anti-art – the usual culprits) seem to have been quietly creeping back into both theory and practice. Nowhere is this more clear than in the current research environs, where that which is seen to be rigorous and objective manages at the same time to strip out the complex, the messy, the “that which does not fit in” in order to support a logic which itself admits only a problematic and seemingly privileged set of actors to its boardroom metrics and budgetary arrangements.
An international call was thus initiated, with the result that this current set of responses takes up the vital theme(s) of materiality, but this time from the very arena so often relegated to a second class status: the senses. This is not done in contradistinction or binaric divide from, or privilege over, “reason.” Quite the reverse. The focus on the senses (perhaps we could say, echoing Deleuze, on the logic of sense) is to remind all who may need reminding (including ourselves) that intellectual rigour can never be siphoned from the very blood poetics to which it is attached.
The artists, scientists, philosophers, designers, mystics and archivists whose work constitutes this volume of Zētēsis have set out to reconfigure materiality/ies by taking seriously art, including the arts, humanities and sciences, in all their excremental, messy and oddly slippery sensualities. No longer do we have to ask the endlessly annoying question “can artists work with scientists?” (yes); no longer do we have to ignore the political implications of “objectivity” and “neutrality”. This is to say, further, that no longer does materiality itself remains wedded to a Universal reason, dialectically historical, speculative, realist or otherwise. Instead, it is made manifest, becomes “present”, through an iterative and immersive expenditure steeped in the immediate terrain of multiversal logics. Instead, this neither-nor ana-materialism marks out the oddly cathected feed-back loops of the raw and the cooked, ones that form radically discontinuous economies (libidinal or otherwise) and therewith, establishes the limits (of meaning, identity, carnality, hunger, smell) without so much as leaving a trace.
Welcome to Zētēsis: research generated by curiosity. A provocation – if ever there was one – to dare to be rigorous in all our possible uncertainties and practical romanticisms. It’s a delicate game we are playing after all – one not just for fools and horses.
Erratic Scores was a live experimental event, merging visual arts and poetry in the form a series... more Erratic Scores was a live experimental event, merging visual arts and poetry in the form a series of improvised performance, held at the Vortex Jazz Club, Dalston. My contribution consisted of a collaboration with an assigned poet. I created visual work in real-time, while the poet responded with spoken words. Event description: During the first part of the evening, poets performed written responses to artist Aurelie Freoua’s vibrant abstract paintings. The event then proceeded to pair visual artists with poets to create spontaneous poetry performances in response to live visual art. Throughout this improvised section the visual element was projected live, creating a full audiovisual experience which allowed the audience to witness all stages of this unique creative process. Visual artists, paired with poets, created spontaneous poetry performances in response to the live visual art. The event concluded with an audiovisual performance by Uran Apak! This event featured the poets Elliot Koubis, Lavinia Singer, Hannah Gordon and Marika Josef as well as improvising poets Antosh Wojcik, Jonathan Catherall, Allan Struthers and Jonathan Mann, and artists Alix Marie Pauline Grs, Sheena Calvert and Alexander Allen
As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out in his paper on the last work of Gilles Deleuze: Im... more As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out in his paper on the last work of Gilles Deleuze: Immanence: A Life…(1995), the relationship between philosophy and punctuation is relatively unexamined, except by a few thinkers such as Adorno (1956). Following Agamben’s line of argument, this paper highlights some of the instances where this relationship might be glimpsed, and tentatively points towards further evidence that punctuation sometimes supports philosophical thought in a deeper way than assumed. The proposition is that we should look more closely, along with these philosophers, at the ways in which such representation of thoughts/ideas, happens within philosophy itself, at the level of the individual marks and gestures which make that thought ‘visible’. This has been called a ‘punctology’ (D’Hoest and Lewis, 2016); bringing together punctuation and ontology in creating a new expression of being; one embedded within the material marks of punctuation as a system of signs
Concept by Sheena Calvert, Shaun Borstrock. Developed/produced by Mark Bloomfield and Pete Brownh... more Concept by Sheena Calvert, Shaun Borstrock. Developed/produced by Mark Bloomfield and Pete Brownhill. Traditional printing processes allowed the book to flourish as reproduction processes became distributed and accessible. Now, technology enables objects to be created and reproduced through a variety of 3D Printing techniques. These creative freedoms give the opportunity to redefine existing and understood forms; heralding a renaissance in three dimensional design. However a persistent desire to use these techniques in a traditionally understood context results in printed objects that mimic their predecessors. This 3D Printed book shows how the technology is able to duplicate existing forms but how it struggles to replicate the qualities of existing materials. The 3D data file that describes this object can be easily distributed, the text changed and new content added but in order for 3D Printing technology to rewrite the book, the very essence of ‘the book’ needs to be re-imagined, re-engineered and re-written
Paper given at the 'Face Forward' typographic conference at the Dublin Institute of Techn... more Paper given at the 'Face Forward' typographic conference at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT)
As language (both writing/speech) rapidly changes due to on-going developments in speech recognit... more As language (both writing/speech) rapidly changes due to on-going developments in speech recognition systems, text-to-speech and chat bots, this paper focuses on the various attempts to synthesize, and mechanize language over time: to submit it to the logical, rational, and mechanical: to atomize and/or render it as pure code. This involves looking afresh at the kinds of philosophical questions these developments raise with respect to language – as a ”˜human’ phenomenon – which is increasingly being mediated by technology. The question – what is language when it is made by a machine? – touches upon ethical concerns; the notion of linguistic agency, and the shifting relationship between language and thought. While attempts at synthesising speech can be traced back as far as Roger Bacon (1200s) and Christian Kratzenstein, (1770s) more recent attempts to mechanize speech include early 20th c. mechanisms for encoding speech, such as the 1939 World’s Fair ”˜Parallel Bandpass Vocoder’ and...
Framed by a context of increasing media anxiety over the volume of usage and the nature of social... more Framed by a context of increasing media anxiety over the volume of usage and the nature of social networking websites (Greenfield 2009), this panel will broadly explore the roots of this fear and the role of digital media and social development, specifically interrogating practices of social identity and contemporary experiences of reality/ fiction.
History of Illustration provides a global overview of illustration practices from before the deve... more History of Illustration provides a global overview of illustration practices from before the development of written language to the digital age. As the first textbook on the topic, it fills significant gaps in the history of art and visual culture, and in the education of illustrators. Created by a team of educators, scholars, curators, and professional illustrators, each chapter has been written, edited, and reviewed by numerous experts. History of Illustration is a survey that introduces the student to a variety of international illustration traditions, theories of the visual, and reference material that provide a foundation for further research and study. In addition to the chronologies of subjects and of general print history and artists, Theme Boxes in each chapter offer succinct presentations of printing technology, cultural phenomena, and critical theory relevant to illustration. My contribution included theme boxes on numerous subjects, including Derrida, Berger, Foucault, K...
This article proposes that difference, not identity, is the primary quality of language. This dif... more This article proposes that difference, not identity, is the primary quality of language. This difference is initially argued to be an “[un]common sense;” one which does not emerge from a ground, origin, or operate within a dialectic of essence/appearance, but which consists of an economy of acoustic surfaces/timings/spatialities: diffuse, interpenetrative, and unclassifiable: a “sensual” logic. Traditional philosophies of language tend to flatten out and simplify the space/time/material relations of language, in favour of a stable, timeless, fixed identity, which makes logical thought possible, through fixed, linear, disciplinary forms. This paper seeks instead to extend and complicate categories of logic, to include doubt, paradox, infinity and “[un]disciplined” forms of understanding, as evidence of difference as the primary quality of language: a “mimetologic” as Lacoue-Labarthe has termed it, formed of a wildly [un]disciplined set of (re-)marks and gestures.
An examination and rationalisation of the typographic and philosophical decisions undertaken when... more An examination and rationalisation of the typographic and philosophical decisions undertaken when designing the approach to the new philosophy/art/wild sciences journal Zetesis (ARTicle Press/BIAD). Abstract: Design is the paradigmatic space of encounter between form and function, rationality and sensuality, objectivity and subjectivity. To design a book or a journal which includes text and image, without privileging one over the other, or without relinquishing any of those concerns requires an especially subtle choreography between all these attributes, in addition to re-staging research as an expression of risk. One could say every design is ‘an event’, one which allows each aspect to play its part and for each to be acknowledged and seen as important. As the chains of equivalence and points of divergence between and amongst these aspects is not always exposed or evident, these remarks are intended as an expose of the process and decisions undertaken in the course of the design at...
As a common part of everyday speech, the meaning of the word ‘luxury’ has been eroded and devalue... more As a common part of everyday speech, the meaning of the word ‘luxury’ has been eroded and devalued over time. Nonetheless, it continues to have impact as an element of luxury branding through its deployment across various media, due to its historical associations with wealth, exclusivity and status. Accordingly, the word ‘luxury’, has been employed/deployed both historically and in contemporary contexts, as part of an economic system, including its use in advertising campaigns, point of sale and in everyday parlance, to denote ideas of intrinsic value (whether existent or not). Meanwhile as this short article will propose, beyond these pragmatic applications, language itself might be thought of as a form of ‘luxury’; something with a worth that surpasses any functional need: something excess or surplus; something unnecessary, but desirable. This notion of luxury can be found in language as a medium, one which we often use indiscriminately, and without regard for its beauty, scarcity...
Zētēsis, The International Journal for Fine Art, Philosophy and the Wild Sciences. , 2013
Zētēsis, No. 1 has both a booklet (uploaded separately as Vol 1.5) and a volume of writing (this ... more Zētēsis, No. 1 has both a booklet (uploaded separately as Vol 1.5) and a volume of writing (this uploaded version here). Please read both together!
From the Preface:
Preface
We Libidinal Economists! Daybreak, Version √2
With this debut volume of Zētēsis, the artists, philosophers, designers, technicians and scientists involved with this project and committed to an ‘old fashioned’ kind of research – that which is generated by a curiosity and deep commitment to know (the whatever) – declare a new Daybreak. It is one that intends to take as a given, complexity and the irrational / imaginary in art and the sciences, physics and metaphysics, culture and its economies, skin and the pleasures of the flesh. It steps to the atonal rhythms of the mimetic patterns of camouflage and the flâneur. It aligns itself with the history of those who were (and remain) willing to ask and act upon this basic question: Supposing it could be otherwise, what would this otherwise look like, become, be, now? We want to say that however it would look, be, become (now), the journey to find out must be fuelled by experiment, rigour, and a willingness to risk.
We owe a strong debt of thanks to our past and present-day interlocutors, from the genealogists, libidinal economists, feminists and queer theory / practitioners to those dancing in, on, and with this new field of ‘wild science’ and its very welcome co-collaborator, the sensual. We also owe a strong debt of thanks to those who were and remain willing to take a (financial) punt on this possibly awkward, possibly bruised, blue-sky thinking endeavour: The Birmingham School of Art in particular and its wider platform, The Birmingham Institute for Art and Design at bCu along with the staff and student artists, designers, philosophers, technicians, web aficionados, research fellows and scientists who gave generously of their time, despite wider pressures cascading onto their already overworked work schedules.
This is not a perfunctory acknowledgment to the School of Art at Margaret Street. For the academic, dare we say, intellectual world – and the universities that nourish its diversity, strident intelligence, playfulness and rigour —seems to have lost its way. This world, our world, challenged as it has been for the last decade or so with profound cuts in the arts & humanities, alongside a gluttonous appetite for all things STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), and topped with a seemingly wilful misreading of what constitutes experimentation, thinking, practice, indeed research itself, especially when it comes to art, philosophy, social science, culture, needs a bit of TLC (Tender Loving Care).
So the journal and its future offspring, comes with a warning: be prepared to think outside the proverbial box, and to do so, slowly and with care, as if approaching an untamed but curious beast. As an aid memoire, we dedicate this, the first volume, no. 1 to questioning The Cruelty of the Classical Canon. Each intervention / contribution / design decision has been peer-reviewed with members from an internationally and discipline-diverse advisory board. Some of the selected pieces support the classical canon; others reject it outright; still others try to strike a delicate balance between outright rejection and the appeal of its tried and tested repertoire. All have something to do with Nietzsche’s seminal text, Daybreak, Lyotard’s shout (demand), We Libidinal Economists! and the first discovered imaginary number,√2. It is up to you to decide which is which, and why.
Welcome to Zētēsis: a re-search generated by curiosity.
From the Preface:
Wet ⇌ Dry ⇌ Thick ⇌ Thin ⇌ (Getting Beyond the Raw and the Cooked)
I... more From the Preface:
Wet ⇌ Dry ⇌ Thick ⇌ Thin ⇌ (Getting Beyond the Raw and the Cooked)
In the now famous move led by Lévi Strauss to awaken the humanities and social sciences to the minutiae of life and the way in which one might be able to access this minutiae, quite a strange, diverse and oddly “old fashioned” approach (read by this: scientistic, possibly sexist, homophobic, racist, classist, anti-art – the usual culprits) seem to have been quietly creeping back into both theory and practice. Nowhere is this more clear than in the current research environs, where that which is seen to be rigorous and objective manages at the same time to strip out the complex, the messy, the “that which does not fit in” in order to support a logic which itself admits only a problematic and seemingly privileged set of actors to its boardroom metrics and budgetary arrangements.
An international call was thus initiated, with the result that this current set of responses takes up the vital theme(s) of materiality, but this time from the very arena so often relegated to a second class status: the senses. This is not done in contradistinction or binaric divide from, or privilege over, “reason.” Quite the reverse. The focus on the senses (perhaps we could say, echoing Deleuze, on the logic of sense) is to remind all who may need reminding (including ourselves) that intellectual rigour can never be siphoned from the very blood poetics to which it is attached.
The artists, scientists, philosophers, designers, mystics and archivists whose work constitutes this volume of Zētēsis have set out to reconfigure materiality/ies by taking seriously art, including the arts, humanities and sciences, in all their excremental, messy and oddly slippery sensualities. No longer do we have to ask the endlessly annoying question “can artists work with scientists?” (yes); no longer do we have to ignore the political implications of “objectivity” and “neutrality”. This is to say, further, that no longer does materiality itself remains wedded to a Universal reason, dialectically historical, speculative, realist or otherwise. Instead, it is made manifest, becomes “present”, through an iterative and immersive expenditure steeped in the immediate terrain of multiversal logics. Instead, this neither-nor ana-materialism marks out the oddly cathected feed-back loops of the raw and the cooked, ones that form radically discontinuous economies (libidinal or otherwise) and therewith, establishes the limits (of meaning, identity, carnality, hunger, smell) without so much as leaving a trace.
Welcome to Zētēsis: research generated by curiosity. A provocation – if ever there was one – to dare to be rigorous in all our possible uncertainties and practical romanticisms. It’s a delicate game we are playing after all – one not just for fools and horses.
Erratic Scores was a live experimental event, merging visual arts and poetry in the form a series... more Erratic Scores was a live experimental event, merging visual arts and poetry in the form a series of improvised performance, held at the Vortex Jazz Club, Dalston. My contribution consisted of a collaboration with an assigned poet. I created visual work in real-time, while the poet responded with spoken words. Event description: During the first part of the evening, poets performed written responses to artist Aurelie Freoua’s vibrant abstract paintings. The event then proceeded to pair visual artists with poets to create spontaneous poetry performances in response to live visual art. Throughout this improvised section the visual element was projected live, creating a full audiovisual experience which allowed the audience to witness all stages of this unique creative process. Visual artists, paired with poets, created spontaneous poetry performances in response to the live visual art. The event concluded with an audiovisual performance by Uran Apak! This event featured the poets Elliot Koubis, Lavinia Singer, Hannah Gordon and Marika Josef as well as improvising poets Antosh Wojcik, Jonathan Catherall, Allan Struthers and Jonathan Mann, and artists Alix Marie Pauline Grs, Sheena Calvert and Alexander Allen
As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out in his paper on the last work of Gilles Deleuze: Im... more As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben points out in his paper on the last work of Gilles Deleuze: Immanence: A Life…(1995), the relationship between philosophy and punctuation is relatively unexamined, except by a few thinkers such as Adorno (1956). Following Agamben’s line of argument, this paper highlights some of the instances where this relationship might be glimpsed, and tentatively points towards further evidence that punctuation sometimes supports philosophical thought in a deeper way than assumed. The proposition is that we should look more closely, along with these philosophers, at the ways in which such representation of thoughts/ideas, happens within philosophy itself, at the level of the individual marks and gestures which make that thought ‘visible’. This has been called a ‘punctology’ (D’Hoest and Lewis, 2016); bringing together punctuation and ontology in creating a new expression of being; one embedded within the material marks of punctuation as a system of signs
Concept by Sheena Calvert, Shaun Borstrock. Developed/produced by Mark Bloomfield and Pete Brownh... more Concept by Sheena Calvert, Shaun Borstrock. Developed/produced by Mark Bloomfield and Pete Brownhill. Traditional printing processes allowed the book to flourish as reproduction processes became distributed and accessible. Now, technology enables objects to be created and reproduced through a variety of 3D Printing techniques. These creative freedoms give the opportunity to redefine existing and understood forms; heralding a renaissance in three dimensional design. However a persistent desire to use these techniques in a traditionally understood context results in printed objects that mimic their predecessors. This 3D Printed book shows how the technology is able to duplicate existing forms but how it struggles to replicate the qualities of existing materials. The 3D data file that describes this object can be easily distributed, the text changed and new content added but in order for 3D Printing technology to rewrite the book, the very essence of ‘the book’ needs to be re-imagined, re-engineered and re-written
Paper given at the 'Face Forward' typographic conference at the Dublin Institute of Techn... more Paper given at the 'Face Forward' typographic conference at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT)
As language (both writing/speech) rapidly changes due to on-going developments in speech recognit... more As language (both writing/speech) rapidly changes due to on-going developments in speech recognition systems, text-to-speech and chat bots, this paper focuses on the various attempts to synthesize, and mechanize language over time: to submit it to the logical, rational, and mechanical: to atomize and/or render it as pure code. This involves looking afresh at the kinds of philosophical questions these developments raise with respect to language – as a ”˜human’ phenomenon – which is increasingly being mediated by technology. The question – what is language when it is made by a machine? – touches upon ethical concerns; the notion of linguistic agency, and the shifting relationship between language and thought. While attempts at synthesising speech can be traced back as far as Roger Bacon (1200s) and Christian Kratzenstein, (1770s) more recent attempts to mechanize speech include early 20th c. mechanisms for encoding speech, such as the 1939 World’s Fair ”˜Parallel Bandpass Vocoder’ and...
Framed by a context of increasing media anxiety over the volume of usage and the nature of social... more Framed by a context of increasing media anxiety over the volume of usage and the nature of social networking websites (Greenfield 2009), this panel will broadly explore the roots of this fear and the role of digital media and social development, specifically interrogating practices of social identity and contemporary experiences of reality/ fiction.
History of Illustration provides a global overview of illustration practices from before the deve... more History of Illustration provides a global overview of illustration practices from before the development of written language to the digital age. As the first textbook on the topic, it fills significant gaps in the history of art and visual culture, and in the education of illustrators. Created by a team of educators, scholars, curators, and professional illustrators, each chapter has been written, edited, and reviewed by numerous experts. History of Illustration is a survey that introduces the student to a variety of international illustration traditions, theories of the visual, and reference material that provide a foundation for further research and study. In addition to the chronologies of subjects and of general print history and artists, Theme Boxes in each chapter offer succinct presentations of printing technology, cultural phenomena, and critical theory relevant to illustration. My contribution included theme boxes on numerous subjects, including Derrida, Berger, Foucault, K...
This article proposes that difference, not identity, is the primary quality of language. This dif... more This article proposes that difference, not identity, is the primary quality of language. This difference is initially argued to be an “[un]common sense;” one which does not emerge from a ground, origin, or operate within a dialectic of essence/appearance, but which consists of an economy of acoustic surfaces/timings/spatialities: diffuse, interpenetrative, and unclassifiable: a “sensual” logic. Traditional philosophies of language tend to flatten out and simplify the space/time/material relations of language, in favour of a stable, timeless, fixed identity, which makes logical thought possible, through fixed, linear, disciplinary forms. This paper seeks instead to extend and complicate categories of logic, to include doubt, paradox, infinity and “[un]disciplined” forms of understanding, as evidence of difference as the primary quality of language: a “mimetologic” as Lacoue-Labarthe has termed it, formed of a wildly [un]disciplined set of (re-)marks and gestures.
An examination and rationalisation of the typographic and philosophical decisions undertaken when... more An examination and rationalisation of the typographic and philosophical decisions undertaken when designing the approach to the new philosophy/art/wild sciences journal Zetesis (ARTicle Press/BIAD). Abstract: Design is the paradigmatic space of encounter between form and function, rationality and sensuality, objectivity and subjectivity. To design a book or a journal which includes text and image, without privileging one over the other, or without relinquishing any of those concerns requires an especially subtle choreography between all these attributes, in addition to re-staging research as an expression of risk. One could say every design is ‘an event’, one which allows each aspect to play its part and for each to be acknowledged and seen as important. As the chains of equivalence and points of divergence between and amongst these aspects is not always exposed or evident, these remarks are intended as an expose of the process and decisions undertaken in the course of the design at...
As a common part of everyday speech, the meaning of the word ‘luxury’ has been eroded and devalue... more As a common part of everyday speech, the meaning of the word ‘luxury’ has been eroded and devalued over time. Nonetheless, it continues to have impact as an element of luxury branding through its deployment across various media, due to its historical associations with wealth, exclusivity and status. Accordingly, the word ‘luxury’, has been employed/deployed both historically and in contemporary contexts, as part of an economic system, including its use in advertising campaigns, point of sale and in everyday parlance, to denote ideas of intrinsic value (whether existent or not). Meanwhile as this short article will propose, beyond these pragmatic applications, language itself might be thought of as a form of ‘luxury’; something with a worth that surpasses any functional need: something excess or surplus; something unnecessary, but desirable. This notion of luxury can be found in language as a medium, one which we often use indiscriminately, and without regard for its beauty, scarcity...
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From the Preface:
Preface
We Libidinal Economists! Daybreak, Version √2
With this debut volume of Zētēsis, the artists, philosophers, designers, technicians and scientists involved with this project and committed to an ‘old fashioned’ kind of research – that which is generated by a curiosity and deep commitment to know (the whatever) – declare a new Daybreak. It is one that intends to take as a given, complexity and the irrational / imaginary in art and the sciences, physics and metaphysics, culture and its economies, skin and the pleasures of the flesh. It steps to the atonal rhythms of the mimetic patterns of camouflage and the flâneur. It aligns itself with the history of those who were (and remain) willing to ask and act upon this basic question: Supposing it could be otherwise, what would this otherwise look like, become, be, now? We want to say that however it would look, be, become (now), the journey to find out must be fuelled by experiment, rigour, and a willingness to risk.
We owe a strong debt of thanks to our past and present-day interlocutors, from the genealogists, libidinal economists, feminists and queer theory / practitioners to those dancing in, on, and with this new field of ‘wild science’ and its very welcome co-collaborator, the sensual. We also owe a strong debt of thanks to those who were and remain willing to take a (financial) punt on this possibly awkward, possibly bruised, blue-sky thinking endeavour: The Birmingham School of Art in particular and its wider platform, The Birmingham Institute for Art and Design at bCu along with the staff and student artists, designers, philosophers, technicians, web aficionados, research fellows and scientists who gave generously of their time, despite wider pressures cascading onto their already overworked work schedules.
This is not a perfunctory acknowledgment to the School of Art at Margaret Street. For the academic, dare we say, intellectual world – and the universities that nourish its diversity, strident intelligence, playfulness and rigour —seems to have lost its way. This world, our world, challenged as it has been for the last decade or so with profound cuts in the arts & humanities, alongside a gluttonous appetite for all things STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), and topped with a seemingly wilful misreading of what constitutes experimentation, thinking, practice, indeed research itself, especially when it comes to art, philosophy, social science, culture, needs a bit of TLC (Tender Loving Care).
So the journal and its future offspring, comes with a warning: be prepared to think outside the proverbial box, and to do so, slowly and with care, as if approaching an untamed but curious beast. As an aid memoire, we dedicate this, the first volume, no. 1 to questioning The Cruelty of the Classical Canon. Each intervention / contribution / design decision has been peer-reviewed with members from an internationally and discipline-diverse advisory board. Some of the selected pieces support the classical canon; others reject it outright; still others try to strike a delicate balance between outright rejection and the appeal of its tried and tested repertoire. All have something to do with Nietzsche’s seminal text, Daybreak, Lyotard’s shout (demand), We Libidinal Economists! and the first discovered imaginary number,√2. It is up to you to decide which is which, and why.
Welcome to Zētēsis: a re-search generated by curiosity.
Johnny Golding Editor
Wet ⇌ Dry ⇌ Thick ⇌ Thin ⇌ (Getting Beyond the Raw and the Cooked)
In the now famous move led by Lévi Strauss to awaken the humanities and social sciences to the minutiae of life and the way in which one might be able to access this minutiae, quite a strange, diverse and oddly “old fashioned” approach (read by this: scientistic, possibly sexist, homophobic, racist, classist, anti-art – the usual culprits) seem to have been quietly creeping back into both theory and practice. Nowhere is this more clear than in the current research environs, where that which is seen to be rigorous and objective manages at the same time to strip out the complex, the messy, the “that which does not fit in” in order to support a logic which itself admits only a problematic and seemingly privileged set of actors to its boardroom metrics and budgetary arrangements.
An international call was thus initiated, with the result that this current set of responses takes up the vital theme(s) of materiality, but this time from the very arena so often relegated to a second class status: the senses. This is not done in contradistinction or binaric divide from, or privilege over, “reason.” Quite the reverse. The focus on the senses (perhaps we could say, echoing Deleuze, on the logic of sense) is to remind all who may need reminding (including ourselves) that intellectual rigour can never be siphoned from the very blood poetics to which it is attached.
The artists, scientists, philosophers, designers, mystics and archivists whose work constitutes this volume of Zētēsis have set out to reconfigure materiality/ies by taking seriously art, including the arts, humanities and sciences, in all their excremental, messy and oddly slippery sensualities. No longer do we have to ask the endlessly annoying question “can artists work with scientists?” (yes); no longer do we have to ignore the political implications of “objectivity” and “neutrality”. This is to say, further, that no longer does materiality itself remains wedded to a Universal reason, dialectically historical, speculative, realist or otherwise. Instead, it is made manifest, becomes “present”, through an iterative and immersive expenditure steeped in the immediate terrain of multiversal logics. Instead, this neither-nor ana-materialism marks out the oddly cathected feed-back loops of the raw and the cooked, ones that form radically discontinuous economies (libidinal or otherwise) and therewith, establishes the limits (of meaning, identity, carnality, hunger, smell) without so much as leaving a trace.
Welcome to Zētēsis: research generated by curiosity. A provocation – if ever there was one – to dare to be rigorous in all our possible uncertainties and practical romanticisms. It’s a delicate game we are playing after all – one not just for fools and horses.
Johnny Golding
The Editor
Papers by Sheena Calvert
From the Preface:
Preface
We Libidinal Economists! Daybreak, Version √2
With this debut volume of Zētēsis, the artists, philosophers, designers, technicians and scientists involved with this project and committed to an ‘old fashioned’ kind of research – that which is generated by a curiosity and deep commitment to know (the whatever) – declare a new Daybreak. It is one that intends to take as a given, complexity and the irrational / imaginary in art and the sciences, physics and metaphysics, culture and its economies, skin and the pleasures of the flesh. It steps to the atonal rhythms of the mimetic patterns of camouflage and the flâneur. It aligns itself with the history of those who were (and remain) willing to ask and act upon this basic question: Supposing it could be otherwise, what would this otherwise look like, become, be, now? We want to say that however it would look, be, become (now), the journey to find out must be fuelled by experiment, rigour, and a willingness to risk.
We owe a strong debt of thanks to our past and present-day interlocutors, from the genealogists, libidinal economists, feminists and queer theory / practitioners to those dancing in, on, and with this new field of ‘wild science’ and its very welcome co-collaborator, the sensual. We also owe a strong debt of thanks to those who were and remain willing to take a (financial) punt on this possibly awkward, possibly bruised, blue-sky thinking endeavour: The Birmingham School of Art in particular and its wider platform, The Birmingham Institute for Art and Design at bCu along with the staff and student artists, designers, philosophers, technicians, web aficionados, research fellows and scientists who gave generously of their time, despite wider pressures cascading onto their already overworked work schedules.
This is not a perfunctory acknowledgment to the School of Art at Margaret Street. For the academic, dare we say, intellectual world – and the universities that nourish its diversity, strident intelligence, playfulness and rigour —seems to have lost its way. This world, our world, challenged as it has been for the last decade or so with profound cuts in the arts & humanities, alongside a gluttonous appetite for all things STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), and topped with a seemingly wilful misreading of what constitutes experimentation, thinking, practice, indeed research itself, especially when it comes to art, philosophy, social science, culture, needs a bit of TLC (Tender Loving Care).
So the journal and its future offspring, comes with a warning: be prepared to think outside the proverbial box, and to do so, slowly and with care, as if approaching an untamed but curious beast. As an aid memoire, we dedicate this, the first volume, no. 1 to questioning The Cruelty of the Classical Canon. Each intervention / contribution / design decision has been peer-reviewed with members from an internationally and discipline-diverse advisory board. Some of the selected pieces support the classical canon; others reject it outright; still others try to strike a delicate balance between outright rejection and the appeal of its tried and tested repertoire. All have something to do with Nietzsche’s seminal text, Daybreak, Lyotard’s shout (demand), We Libidinal Economists! and the first discovered imaginary number,√2. It is up to you to decide which is which, and why.
Welcome to Zētēsis: a re-search generated by curiosity.
Johnny Golding Editor
Wet ⇌ Dry ⇌ Thick ⇌ Thin ⇌ (Getting Beyond the Raw and the Cooked)
In the now famous move led by Lévi Strauss to awaken the humanities and social sciences to the minutiae of life and the way in which one might be able to access this minutiae, quite a strange, diverse and oddly “old fashioned” approach (read by this: scientistic, possibly sexist, homophobic, racist, classist, anti-art – the usual culprits) seem to have been quietly creeping back into both theory and practice. Nowhere is this more clear than in the current research environs, where that which is seen to be rigorous and objective manages at the same time to strip out the complex, the messy, the “that which does not fit in” in order to support a logic which itself admits only a problematic and seemingly privileged set of actors to its boardroom metrics and budgetary arrangements.
An international call was thus initiated, with the result that this current set of responses takes up the vital theme(s) of materiality, but this time from the very arena so often relegated to a second class status: the senses. This is not done in contradistinction or binaric divide from, or privilege over, “reason.” Quite the reverse. The focus on the senses (perhaps we could say, echoing Deleuze, on the logic of sense) is to remind all who may need reminding (including ourselves) that intellectual rigour can never be siphoned from the very blood poetics to which it is attached.
The artists, scientists, philosophers, designers, mystics and archivists whose work constitutes this volume of Zētēsis have set out to reconfigure materiality/ies by taking seriously art, including the arts, humanities and sciences, in all their excremental, messy and oddly slippery sensualities. No longer do we have to ask the endlessly annoying question “can artists work with scientists?” (yes); no longer do we have to ignore the political implications of “objectivity” and “neutrality”. This is to say, further, that no longer does materiality itself remains wedded to a Universal reason, dialectically historical, speculative, realist or otherwise. Instead, it is made manifest, becomes “present”, through an iterative and immersive expenditure steeped in the immediate terrain of multiversal logics. Instead, this neither-nor ana-materialism marks out the oddly cathected feed-back loops of the raw and the cooked, ones that form radically discontinuous economies (libidinal or otherwise) and therewith, establishes the limits (of meaning, identity, carnality, hunger, smell) without so much as leaving a trace.
Welcome to Zētēsis: research generated by curiosity. A provocation – if ever there was one – to dare to be rigorous in all our possible uncertainties and practical romanticisms. It’s a delicate game we are playing after all – one not just for fools and horses.
Johnny Golding
The Editor