Tag: Amsterdam

Out Now and Free! Special Issue: Blurring Digital Media Culture. Launch event

There is a blurry launch event at the University of Amsterdam on 25th May. We’ll be there in-person and online all afternoon. Full programme will be announced soon.

MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory

Special Issue: Blurring Digital Media Culture

Edited by Tony D. Sampson and Jernej Markelj

Vol. 4 | No. 1 | April 2023

The entire issue, along with individual articles, is now available for free download on MAST’s website at: https://www.mast-journal.org/vol-4-no-1-2023.

“The focus of this special issue—the potentials of the concept of the blur—might seem counterintuitive. Surely, there is a need to rethink how our perception of fact can be sharpened as a tool against the fake. Yet, we have asked media arts practitioners and theorists to consider the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological usefulness and application of the blur in the study of digital media culture. This is because we are interested in exploring the various ways in which porous boundaries and zones of indistinction can be creatively employed for dealing with the often dangerous intricacies of our networked existence, challenging rigid political, aesthetic, and technological categorizations. This does not mean that we necessarily reject the idea of making clear distinctions, but we are nonetheless keen to investigate different modes of empowering entanglements and blurrings that might surprisingly bring reality back into the mix without the baggage of categorical separability.”

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR BRAIN? — ART & LIFE IN TIMES OF COGNITIVE AUTOMATION. 8th Feb 2017

In January, February and March 2017, through talks, performances, film screenings, a reading group, Brainstorms, an exhibition of student works and a conference-festival at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Studium Generale Rietveld Academie & Rietveld Uncut are collaborating on an extensive, artistic research trajectory.

8th Feb 2017

Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Tony D Sampson

Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Trauma and Disentanglement as a Neural Possibility

A process of traumatic barbarianism seems to be underway: politics is unable to stop it, as it has stepped beyond the point of no return. The global civil war is proceeding together with a process of automation of cognitive activity. The trauma will not be a mere cultural breakdown, but it will possibly evolve into a neurogenetic transformation whose forms and meaning may be shaped by therapeutic and aesthetic action. As the trauma is going to transform the relation between emotional and cognitive in the neurosphere, will it be the condition for autonomy of knowledge and communist solidarity of cognitive workers?

Franco Berardi Bifo is a contemporary writer, media theorist and activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). In the ’70 and ’80s he worked with Felix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis. His last book is AND. Phenomenology of the End (Semiotexte, 2015

Tony D Sampson: The Assemblage Brain

In his new book, The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (Minnesota, 2017), Tony D. Sampson unravels the conventional image of thought that underpins many scientific and philosophical accounts of how sense is assumed to be produced inside the brain. In this talk he uses his assemblage brain thesis to draw specific attention to the politics of neuroculture, looking at capitalism and the neurosciences endeavour to colonize the brain and the potential for brains to be free.

Tony D. Sampson is reader in digital culture and communications at the University of East London. He is coeditor of The Spam Book (Hampton, 2009), author of Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (Minnesota, 2012) and The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (Minnesota, 2017). Tony is also the organizer of the Affect and Social Media annual conference in East London. He is currently coediting a new book (Affect and Social Media) for the Radical Cultural Studies series (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2018). Academic Profile: https://www.uel.ac.uk/Staff/s/tony-sampson. Blog: https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/. New book: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-assemblage-brain

canvas

| Studium Generale 2017 | Open calls!

In January, February and March 2017, through talks, performances, film screenings, a reading group*, Brainstorms**, an exhibition of student works and a conference-festival at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Studium Generale Rietveld Academie & Rietveld Uncut*** are collaborating on an extensive, artistic research trajectory.

Studium Generale Rietveld Academie & Rietveld Uncut will dive into current concepts and fantasies of and about the brain. 


The brain is not ahistorical, fixed, or atemporal. (…) the brain is always situated in a body and self, and thus in social relations, in family, community, in culture and the economy, in the local and the global, in history. (From Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s NeuroCultures Manifesto, 2012) 


Culture and brain form complex systems of influence, control and resistance. The present brain seems to have been invaded by technology: machines increasingly perform the previously human tasks of language, memory, and imagination, with our learning processes taken up by automated and algorithmic procedures. What are the philosophical, social and political implications of this cognitive automation for our brains and bodies? What is happening to our subjectivity, identity and free will? What about the artist’s brain?


Keywords: AI, algorithmic cultures, bio-politics, body, brainstorm, cognitive capitalism, machine, memory, mind, mindreading, neurocentrism, neurocultures, neuro-power, noo-politics, neuro-emancipation, neuro-plasticity, neurol engineering neuro-markelting, neuro-aesthetics, attention economy, brain hacking, bushwhacking, datamining, blockchain, deep storage, designer brains, bio genomics, cognitive automation, free will, neohuman, Google Brain, machine intelligence, theory of mind, collective head, general intellect, deep mind, embodied mind, ‘embrained’ body, self…


Talks, readings, presentations, performances, screenings:
Tomas Adolfs, Tarja Szaraniec, Stephan Schleim, Patricia Pisters, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Antonia Majaca, Fiona Kearney, Marcos Lutyens, Franco Berardi, Tony Sampson, Bassam el Baroni, Michele Rizzo, Amelia Groom, Yuk Hui, Flora Lysen, Lancel/Maat, Frederik de Wilde, Erik Rietveld, Janneke van Leeuwen, Tanne van Bree, Henri Snel, Melanie Gilligan, Warren Neidich, André Lepecki and many others.


Open Call Rietveld Uncut: In collaboration with Studium Generale and parallel to the conference-festival in March, Rietveld Uncut will present an exhibition and performance program at  the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. If you are interested in participating with a project, please send an email to rietveld.uncut@gmail.com before January 14. Mention your name, department and vakjaar. Do not send in a proposal yet; your mail will be replied with additional information about practicalities, the procedure and an application form that you have to return before January 18.


*
Open Call PLASTIC: A Reading Group Focused on Brains,
Bodies and Plasticities. Writer and theorist Amelia Groom hosts PLASTIC, a reading group for Studium Generale held in the Rietveld library after each Wednesday lecture program. With texts by Judith Butler, Paul B. Preciado, Jean-Luc Nancy, Catherine Malabou, Janani Balasubramanian and others, the reading group will be focused on ‘brains, bodies and plasticities’. PLASTIC is open to all Rietveld students – to sign up and receive the reading material please email studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl 


**
Open Call BRAINSTORMS: Learning more about the topics of the Studium Generale program by discussing them afterwards and relating them to practice. Three groups of 10-15 students will be hosted and moderated by participants of the Sandberg’s Critical Studies Department from 16:00-17:00 on 5 Wednesday afternoons. (January 18; February 1, 15; March 1, 15) BA and MA Rietveld students can sign up and commit to a series of Brainstorm gatherings. Hosts: François Girard-Meunier/Callum Copley, Stefanie Rau/Aidan Wall, Ionna Girakidi. To sign up please email studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl


*** 
Rietveld Uncut
‏is an annual joint presentation by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Within the Rietveld the process of making, from concept to work, is an important element throughout the whole study. This process often stays invisible to the outside world; Rietveld Uncut aims to shed a light on this unique, dynamic and experimental part of the academy and reveals this process to the public. Departments and individual students contribute to Rietveld Uncut with projects evolving around a collective content, topic or title.


Studium Generale Rietveld Academie
‏is a rambling theory program that addresses students and faculty across all departments and disciplines at the academy, as well as the general public. It wants to understand how art and design are entangled with other domains (from the personal to the political, from the vernacular to the academic), how ‘now’ is linked with past and future, ‘here’ with ‘elsewhere’. Studium Generale invites you to join it’s annually settled, slightly unruly, but always relevant research trajectories where knowledge, imagination and reflection are put to work together in a critical and unorthodox way.


Preliminary program: 
January 11, 18; February 1, 8, 15; March 1, 8, 15


Conference-festival and Uncut
March 22, 23, 24



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