Imagined Communities

A nice visualization of some of our imaginary borders >>>

Koolhaas Junkspace

Rem Koolhaas’s essay on Junkspace is a highly enjoyable (it was for me at least) rant on many of today’s preposterous architectural developments and fits nicely with our experiences at Northpoint Mall.

Reading Group on Science Fiction and Futurology

(Michael T, Jane Doe, …)

I like Stanislav Lem when it comes to Sci/Fi-Futurology:

The Cyberiad (http://amzn.to/QKG80j)

I always wanted to read:

The Bladerunner (http://amzn.to/QALaZV)

This sounds like an interesting book, thinking alien life and alien/human relation:

Dawn (http://amzn.to/P8l9FU)

Screening Group 2 – Readings

Here are some suggested readings on Relational Film:

Relational Filmmaking – a Manifesto - Julie Perini

The Artist as Ethnographer – Hal Foster

I am also attaching a PDF of an article on Perini’s manifesto from Afterimage Magazine. Let me know if you can’t download it and I will send it to you directly.
AI_384_Perini

Screening Group 2 – Relational Film, Ethnographic Film

Films and readings for your consideration for Screening Group 2

A 16mm film print screening in collaboration with the student group lead by Marika Borgeson (TS/YB)
We Live In Public – Ondi Timoner (LM)
O’er the Land – Deborah Stratman (TS/YB)
maybe – Forest of Bliss – Robert Gardner (TS/YB)
Please post any additional ideas up above.

Readings:

Relational Film Manifesto (? Laurenn has this info) (LM)

“The Artist As Ethnographer”  Hal Foster (LM)

“For A Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” and “Notes On Composing In Film” Hollis Frampton, from On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters (TS/YB)

Please post your own suggestions above.

More to come-

Post here any proposed meeting times/screening dates.

I’ll be out of state for most of this week, so it will be difficult for an intitial meeting, but happy to join in after I return.

-Talena

XCO Reading Group: Psychology

Suggestions by PL:

Questions about “Communities”

Hi y’all,

After class today a few of us started talking about “communities” and it helped to articulate some blocs I’ve been having, so I figured I’d open the conversation to the group.  In order to be clear I will organize the following thoughts that came up around four questions:

What, communities?

Who, communities?

Why, communities?  and,

How, communities?

What’s maybe not surprising here is that the seemingly more straightforward term, namely communities (vs. experimental), has turned out to be more demanding terrain, at least for me.

If any of you feel inclined I would love to brainstorm some of these basic questions that we don’t always have time to talk about in class. I’ll also offer my thoughts where I have some.

I. WHAT, communities?

What are we each referring to when we say communities/community? Do we have different standards for the term? Where do these understandings come from?

Do we count “a sense of community” as our objective for the class, or are we reserving the term for something more formal? More organized? More lasting? More materially productive? Can communities occur between two people? Can communities be anonymous? What duration do/must communities have to be communities?

Can we come up with a list of different kinds of communities? A few of us already discussed at least these:

a) Intentional Communities:
-not given but chosen, with links of affinity around shared and intended goals
-sometimes requiring a element of privilege, necessary for the members to exit their given situation and pursue a preferential alternative

b) Identity based communities
- the convergence of peoples around given and/or chosen materially-based similarities of subjugation (lifestyle, race, class, profession, gender, sexuality, etc.)
- identity is maintained as a force of convergence by way of exclusion: I am this, not that. Or, I am not that, and thus this—an identification of self and/vs. other. Agency is thus provided by the solidarity of sameness and self-sameness (I AM this thing), while also threatening to reduce subjects to one-dimensional or injured states of constitution.

c) Family
-institutionally codified bonds of kinship that support projects of nation-state, survival, and inheritance
-the unit liable for responsibilities of production and reproduction in a neo-liberal, capitalist state
-a model capable of being “queered” through non-kinship bonds of affinity, non-coupled forms of intimacy and care, non-gender-based divisions of labor, and/or communal consumption practices.

More…?

II. WHO, communities?

As hinted at by the above examples, the question arises of who is able to be a part of what kinds of communities, who is positioned in what kinds of communities, and who may benefit from what kinds of communities. What meaningful distinctions might we want to make about community that one is rendered a part of through structural oppression, i.e. through a sort of negativity of the conditions of removed of agency, vs. a community that one enters into as a way of seeking the production of some life-world, i.e. an additive or positive form of agency? Is it useful to think in terms of communities of privilege and oppression, of choice and subjugation?  Is this a productive paradigm for our intents/projects?

Further, are there people for whom community- regardless of whether it is chosen or given or necessary- is not available? Or, not even desirable?

Isolation has been historically reveal as a technology for rendering structural oppression opaque; in the case of the gender division of labor, for example, 2^nd wave feminists harnessed the Marxist analysis of false-consciousness and proletariat revolution through consciousness-raising groups which worked by way of simply coming together and sharing personal experiences in order to reveal larger political structures. However, I would want to wonder about people for whom solitude either provides some sort of agency- some safe space, or who are radically incapable of communality- say those suffering from PTSD or “the insane.” In other words, while there are high stakes in resisting the cult of the individual that many theorists would agree is the engine of our late-capitalist, neo-liberal state, the capacity to function in community, i.e. sociality, also operates as a highly normalizing prescriptive.  Which brings me to the next question:

III. WHY, communities?

I’ll be brief here, since many of the concerns are involved in the above already.

- community as (political) resistance to individualist consumption and responsibility?
- community as agency/strength in numbers?
- community as visibility and intelligibility? (I am thinking here of both ACT UP and OCCUPY…)
- community as a human necessity: care, concern, security, material support?
- community in order to provide a safe space? A space of affirmation?
- community as a space for becoming? (How, for example, is the development of sexuality dependent on being with others? How is the stylization of comportment flourished upon and fine-tuned in the bodily company of other and for others?)

More…?

and finally,

IV. HOW, communities?

By this I mean two things:

a)    How might we engage the topic in our class and in the context of art?

b)   How do communities emerge, or what are their conditions of possibility?

4a) To be reductive, we could, in the least, engage community as:
- the topic that our project is taking up, i.e. communities in general or specific communities
- Are there artists y’all like that work with communities in this way?

Or

- the media or method of our work, i.e. engaging a gesture of creating communities or a communal situation
- Are there artists y’all like that create (experimental) communities in this way?

4b) How do communities form? What creates a sense of community? What qualities do we associate with community (e.g. trust?, concern?, affinity?, convergence?, exchange?, support?, touch?), and how are these fostered?

Further, would it be possible to engage the topic of communities at this third level of what I might call techniques or technologies of community, within the scope of our class intentions?

XCO READINGS: Castells / Rise of the Network Society

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405196866.html

This first book in Castells’ groundbreaking trilogy, with a substantial new preface, highlights the economic and social dynamics of the information age and shows how the network society has now fully risen on a global scale.

Manuel Castells is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. He is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at M.I.T., and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University. He is the recipient of numerous academic awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, C. Wright Mills Award, the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association, and the Ithiel de Sola Pool Award from the American Political Science Association. He is a Fellow of the European Academy, a Fellow of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He has received 14 honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He has authored 22 books, among which is the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, first published by Blackwell in 1996–8, and translated into 20 languages.

XCO READINGS: DeCerteau / The Practice of Everyday Life

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520271456

In this incisive book, Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Preface

General Introduction

PART I: A VERY ORDINARY CULTURE
I. A Common Place: Ordinary Language
II. Popular Cultures: Ordinary Language
III. Making Do: Uses and Tactics

PART II: THEORIES OF THE ART OF PRACTICE
IV. Foucault and Bourdieu
V. The Arts of Theory
VI. Story Time

PART III: SPATIAL PRACTICES
VII. Walking in the City
VIII. Railway Navigation and Incarceration
IX. Spatial Stories

PART IV: Uses of Language
X. The Scriptural Economy
XI. Quotations of Voices
XII. Reading as Poaching

PART V: WAYS OF BELIEVING
XIII. Believing and Making People Believe
XIV. The Unnamable

XCO READINGS: Barabasi / Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. Penguin, 2003.

Book overview found at:
http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780452284395,00.html?strSrchSql=barabasi/Linked_Albert-Laszlo_Barabasi

A cocktail party.? A terrorist cell.? Ancient bacteria.? An international conglomerate.

All are networks, and all are a part of a surprising scientific revolution. Albert-László Barabási, the nation’s foremost expert in the new science of networks, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously thought. Grasping a full understanding of network science will someday allow us to design blue-chip businesses, stop the outbreak of deadly diseases, and influence the exchange of ideas and information. Just as James Gleick brought the discovery of chaos theory to the general public, Linked tells the story of the true science of the future.

Barabasi’s Page at Physics, Notre Dame:
http://www.nd.edu/~alb/