Programme / Spring 25
February 06
Combine & Recombine
Rounds of introductions: The Making of Concepts
Groups : What if? Seeing what’s not there
> where do you see a need (in society) — here or elsewhere?
> what do you think is missing?
> what do you want to happen ?
February 13
Frame & Reframe
Together with KUNO participants
Hybrid / Online > Meet in TV Studio
Second rounds of introductions: The Making of Concepts II
What is a Creative Act
From the Man of Action to the many actions of the multitude
February 20
Narrate & Re-narrate
Together with KUNO participants
Hybrid / Online > Meet in TV Studio
Groups: Creating new combinations—in which field would you like to reach out? Where you do see a necessity and interesting combinations, in relation to your background?
Guests Creating Concepts:
Joe Lockwood on Cheese and Decentralising
My work spans the interface of creative industries, higher-education and government from founding creative enterprises, contributing to policy development and co-creating pioneering initiatives with public and private partners. Co-founder of LAB Genalguacil, The Innovation School and The Creative Campus at The Glasgow School of Art, fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, my grandmother was born in Genalguacil and her stories inspired me to have the courage and confidence to change things!
Chuma Anagbado on Collaborating & Combining;
A Nigerian artist and designer, he co-founded Aziza Design in 2014 and Mbari Uno in 2018. He creates pyrography art by using industrial laser technology to etch his digital drawings on physical surfaces, resulting in a ‘phygital’ artform – combining traditional and digital techniques. Chuma’s Uli Art styled spirited drawings are centred on Identity, illustrating themes from material and non-material aspects of Igbo culture, both past and present. He has created bodies of work with reclaimed wood and is currently working with plexiglass and integrating his work into architecture.
Moses März on Mapping & Community;
is an independent researcher, writer, and mapmaker based in Berlin. After studying political science at Free University Berlin, and African Studies at the University of Cape Town he joined the editorial team of the Chimurenga Chronic in Cape Town in 2014. In 2018 he co-founded the independent publication project Mittel und Zweck (MUZ) in Berlin together with Philipp Hege. He received a PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2021 for a dissertation titled “Édouard Glissant’s Politics of Relation: Mapping an Intellectual Movement of Marronage.” His research maps were first exhibited in Chimurenga publications and library installations.
Groups: Think about what would you like to further explore in the course, as a collaborative project?
March 06
In Between Reflection
Opportunity to continue or begin projects/collaborations in groups, discuss what happened so far and prepare what will come.
March 17
Bring one Example to the Table
Everyone presents a project, a company, a cooperative, an (artistic) undertaking—something you find admirable and always wanted to know how this actually "works". Why do you find it interesting (bring arguments), in what way is it successful, what could be learned from? Find out more about, which organisational form does it have? Connect your example with one or more concepts. Think about combinations—what does your example combine. Great to have examples from a variety of places, they can come from the present but also from the past. Extended Example Map from 2024.
March 18
Rurals—Microcosms of Complexity
What if the urgencies and complexities of the present demand new approaches and concepts of innovation, in that we need to move beyond the binaries of urban, rural, nature, culture, art, science, past and future? What if innovation was where we least expect it, hidden in everyday life, located in rural areas, where small microcosms of complexity become ‘understandable’?
From the South of Spain to the middle of Norway and back again — with Esther Breslin, Marius Reed & Joe Lockwood. Leading into a problem solving game exercise.
March 19
Why we map? What game do we play?
Make people see the conditions within which they are living and working. Increase the scope of knowledge, of what is considered valuable. There might be no new ideas, but new moments and opportunities to make use and make sense of old ideas in new ways. A map can also portray a new kind of knowing. A knowing without knowing, where not everything has to be understood. The interplay between proximity and distance, between detail and structure, can make us see relations and a structure we haven't noticed, hidden in plain sight. Drawing the lines, connecting the dots can make us understand our own agency within context.
An introduction into map making leading into making maps with Moses März.
March 20
A map becoming a story
Mapping as storytelling, storytelling as mapping. What story do we want to fabricate by connecting pieces of information and ideas, and by speculating how and why these matter, what might happen in between and where they could lead us. A workshop with Mohammad Bayesteh.
In parallel: Time to further develop a game, a map, a story—what do you want to focus on?
March 21
Elements falling into Place
Presentations and final discussions
>> TEMPORAL CONCEPT MESH-UPS
Concepts --- Mapping --- Gaming
Gilles Deleuze, What is a creative act?
Tuesday lecture at the film school in Paris, March 17, 1987
"Any concept is bound to be a paradox"
Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Raymond Bellour: On Philosophy, 1988.
Raymond Williams: Keywords
Nature—is perhaps the most complex word in the language.
Keywords Journal
New Keywords—A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society
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Mapping together with Moses März:
https://12.berlinbiennale.de/artists/moses-marz/
Founding a relational magazine: Mittel & Zweck
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The Anti-Capitalist Origins of the Monopoly Man
An interview with documentary filmmaker Stephen Ives about the history of a board game
Reading, Listening, Viewing, Material
Useful Knowledge: A toolbox
Grants, Application Writing, Residencies, Project Development and more
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The making of theory as reading against the grain:
Michael Hardt & Antionio Negri: Entrepreneurship of the Multitude
> for further context & material
Joseph Schumpeter: The Creative Response in Economic History, 1947
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Entangled Worlds: Art & Capitalism
Bahar Noorizadeh: Skill Futures | Free to Choose (Opera Lecture & Artist Talk)
Bahar Noorizadeh(founder): Weird Economies
Bahar Noorizadeh looks at the relationship between art and capitalism. In her practice as an artist, writer and filmmaker, she examines the conflictual and contradictory notions of imagination and speculation as they suffuse one another.
"Free to Choose" is an operatic financial sci-fi (fi-fi), narrated by Milton Friedman, in which we encounter the credit banking system as a time travelling machine. In 1997, in post economic crash Hong Kong, Philip Tose, ex-race car driver and CEO of an insolvent company travels to the future to borrow a lump sum from his older self to rescue his business. Hong Kong in 2047 turns out not to be very different from the Hong Kong of “One Country, Two systems”: centralisation has not eradicated nepotism, and activism has become rating activism: young people advocating for free time travel for everyone, including the untrustworthy and the discredited of a corrupt credit system. // Recording/Documentation of the Free to choose Opera| Bahar Noorizadeh + Waste Paper Opera + Rudá Babau | OpenLAB#03 — Medialab Matadero, Madrid.
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Publishing Strategies:
is a lending library and media archive for new digital materials across the art, architecture, design, philosophy, media studies, moving image, sound and visual culture fields. The collection includes eBooks, podcasts, journals, experimental fonts, software, exhibition materials, and artist writings that are not indexed in other databases or catalogs. Library Stack is also a publisher of its own eBooks, essays, videos and digital ephemera.
Through a publishing practice grounded in collective, transdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations, Archive is invested in un-weaving repressive narratives and reclaiming the archive itself as a tool which no longer categorizes but rather continuously un-fixes, de-archives and re-archives through non-hegemonic models.
presents, develops and supports artistic strategies of independent publishing. Founded in 2003 as a travelling and growing collection of artist publications, PrintRoom is currently based in Rotterdam where it hosts exhibitions, conversations, book launches, performances and workshops for a diverse audience.
is an independent publishing platform based in Helsinki. It publishes Rab-Rab: journal of political and formal inquiries in art and books combining experimental art and leftist politics with scholarly rigour and punk attitude. Initiated in 2014, Rab-Rab Press is run by Sezgin Boynik.
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Decentralised (Artistic) Tech Strategies:
CSNI_Centre for the Study of the Networked Image
is a research group based in the School of Arts and Social Science at London South Bank University (and is closely associated with the Digital x Data Research Centre). It brings together researchers from cultural studies, software studies, art, media and performance practice, who seek knowledge and understanding of how network culture and computation transforms the production and circulation of images.
Institut of Network Cultures (INC)
The Institute of Network Cultures (INC) analyzes and shapes the terrain of network cultures through events, publications, and online dialogue. Our projects evolve around urgent publishing, alternative revenue models, critical design and making, digital counter culture and much more.
Free to share code. Code to share freedom.
Dyne.org is a digital community and free software foundry. We share tools, practices and narratives that empower artists, creatives and citizens in the digital age.
Featuring the amount of VHS tapes actually required to record all of the contents of a platform such as Netflix, this low-tech infrastructure uses a VHS Farm of networked recorders to “fix” streaming media, reverse-extracting them off the networks. This “unclouding” of cinematic heritage remediates the material limits of streaming media platforms, which are shown to depend on a model of automated scarcity and material confinement rather than freedom of choice and an abundance of content.
Alice Noujaim: The Death and the Death of Orkut
From 2004 to 2010, Orkut reigned supreme in Brazil where it had its main user base. Brazilians were so dominant on Orkut that Orkut’s management was offi- cially transferred to Google Brazil in 2008. And then came Facebook. Though launched only a month after Orkut—in January and February of 2004—it was only at the turn of the decade that Facebook gained traction in Brazil.
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Rurals: Microcosms of Complexity
What if the urgencies and complexities of the present demand new approaches and concepts of innovation, in that we need to move beyond the binaries of urban, rural, nature, culture, art,
science, past and future? What if innovation was where we least expect it, hidden in everyday life, located in rural areas, where small microcosms of complexity become ‘understandable’?
From the South of Spain to the Middle of Norway: Genalguacil & Tynset
(> Innovation in One Shot & Rooftop Screening in Genalguacil)
Elke Marhöfer and Mikhail Lylov: No-Future Farmers
A year ago we moved to an abandoned farmhouse in the Sicilian mountains. After years of reading, writing and talking about the fabulous things animals, plants and matter are capable of, we felt they were demanding a response from us, an intervention that our artistic practice and theoretical attempts weren’t capable to submit....
Raymond Williams:
European Union: Rural Vision
The long-term vision for the EU’s rural areas is a European Commission initiative to develop a common European vision for 2040. It recognises the diversity of rural territories across Europe while identifying common challenges and opportunities. In shaping this long-term vision, the Commission gathered the views of rural communities and businesses via public consultations and stakeholder-led events. Through this collaborative process, the Commission created a wide-ranging vision and a comprehensive rural action plan to help rural communities and businesses reach their full potential in the coming decades.
Kristin Ross. The Ecological Face of the Commune Form - Critical and Visual Studies Symposium // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVEnZOercsg
Notes
Session 01 / February 06
List of Concepts: Multitude, Opportunity, Work, Collective, (Self)Discipline, Maintenance, Innovation, Freedom, Sharing, Growth, Autopoesis, Conceptualisation, Framing, Knowledge, Community, Responsibility
Additional Words/Notes: Specialised (too specialised), global < > local (think global act local), worldmaking, independent < > interdependent < > dependent, company - cooperation - collective - community, user -- experience based, risk & experimentation, uncertainty -- unknown, scared & fearless, mutual aid & mutualism, equity, scale - scaling - multiplying
What is missing: collective ways of thinking, organising & acting, everything is too individualised, the grand narrative is missing
Session 02 / February 13
Extended List of Concepts: Connection, Seeds, Experimentation, Money, Necessity, Resistance, Proxy ....
The larger framework and an excursus into social/political movements
there must be a way to recognise a defeat without being defeated
not being defeated as a moment of innovative force
innovation as a shift of a political terrain
Excerpt from: Michael Hardt and Alberto Toscano about the life and legacy of Antonio Negri entitled "Prison, Revolution, & Counter-Revolution: the Communism of Antonio Negri."
For further listerning: Antonio Negri and Bernard E. Harcourt discuss what it means to be an activist philosopher.
