Obdurate Love: Towards a Metaphysics of Intimacy by Andrew Benjamin
What is assumed to be constant within considerations concerning the ethical is the centrality of its constitutive elements: i.e. self and action. Moreover, that constancy pertains, it is argued, even if what is of concern is the private or the public realm. The project here is to begin to trouble the way these assumptions work. This involves a twofold move. In the first instance it is to begin with the way the assumed distinction between the public and the private is positioned. The end point is to be able to argue that the public is far more than the having become public of that which is initially private. This will occur by working through the consequences of the formulation of that distinction in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The second, and major part of the project, will be to develop an element of the self that could not be incorporated into either the public or the private. Such an occurrence would have its greatest acuity when the non-incorporable element is not merely a contingent aspect of selfhood but one which constitutes an essential element of self. There is, it will be argued, a moment that fissures the clear divisions, lines and domains that are taken to construct the self and which would ground both action and its subsequent evaluation or judgment. That moment is the presence of intimacy.
Complex Urbanism by Andrew Benjamin
What would it mean to have drawn? To draw – present both as a question and as an act. With drawing, within drawing, as drawing – thus drawing as procedure and material act – paper is marked.
Philosophy after Drawing by Andrew Benjamin
What would it mean to have drawn? To draw – present both as a question and as an act. With drawing, within drawing, as drawing – thus drawing as procedure and material act – paper is marked.
The dream was of a perfect line by Andrew Benjamin
The dream was of a perfect line. Not an imaginary line perfect because it had not been drawn. The dream was different. A line had not been drawn. As the dream deepened the possibility of such a line, of its being drawn, acquired a different reality. In the dream it was this eventuality that began to emerge. Beginning to appear, though from what could not be discerned. Another sense of the real was being drawn into play. Neither line nor background had any distinct form, nor was there a blurred presence. In the dream, presence took on a complexity denied elsewhere. The line’s perfection sought that demand. Struggling in the dream, both in terms of comprehension, and in that which pertained, directly, to the line’s opening, there was a sense of possibility. Both the struggle to comprehend and the one marking an emergent opening were there, both were allowed, each one brought presence with it, though it was in the dream. Being in the dream, but seen from where? Again, the question, both in and as the dream. An irresistible doubling was at work stealing from the dream the edge of fantasy.
Writing Within the Map by Jeremy Hight
Why not be able to search a place for its stories, its poetry, and its metaphors and why not be able to select what you desire as well as be able to create such things specifically for this place itself?
The Disappearance of Signs in a Landscape of Deceptions by Lanfranco Aceti
The artwork A Dream Came Through started as an idea in 2006 and was developed in 2008 before the current capitalistic crisis and temporary rebirth of a social conscience in the Western World. 2006 was a time when a critique of the capitalist models of production of riches and their lack of distribution was neither fashionable nor intellectually sensible.
The focus of the artwork is on the interpretations and re-interpretations of the roles of the migrant and the politics of labor. The performative element of the project also challenges and questions the structural frameworks of labor by highlighting a condition of commodification and exploitation that is globally enforced.
Thoughts on Participatory Art by Yiannis Colakides & Helene Black
Bouncing off the discussion from this May on “Critical Spatial Movement,” we were struck by how the digital traces of 0s and 1s allow for traces of movement, interaction, and networking to exist or live on through various vehicles such as the web or other virtual spaces such as Second Life. We were also thinking about current trends in the international art world that extend practice into the areas of social networks by engaging the participation of the viewer. Participatory Art converges with such areas as the social sciences, activism, politics, ecology and sustainability, genetics and science, and even food. How might digital traces of artistic corporeal and cyber configurations of embodiment empower participatory artistic practice and collaboration? And how might we understand the “after image” or “after life” of live participatory interventions when they live on morph into digital, spectral traces?
Locative Media and Spatial Narratives by Martin Rieser
This paper explores the debates around past and present locative practice and sets them against such models drawn from a broad range of cultural artefacts and their potential lessons for contemporary locative media art and interactive public art practice. Specifically examined are issues of architecture and ritual space, and the spatialisation of narrative, including Aboriginal Australian, Amerindian, Celtic, Hindu and Christian sacred architectures and land art.
Rhizomatic Cartography: Modulated Mapping and the spatial net by Jeremy Hight
Mapping, or cartography to use the fancier term, is simply a tool that answers the question: where are we? This tool’s face and structure has only shown signs of fluidity in terms of name changes and borders, but deeper and subtler signs of fluidity and both physical and cultural evolution have yet to change the map’s nature until now with such technology as GIS and GPS. However, mapping in tools used is no longer static. We are in a time, arguably, that is the greatest cultural return to cartography and, in tandem, progression of mapping and related tools in several hundred years. GPS units in cars and in phones are now ubiquitous and continually progressing in interface design and functionality. Locative media in several areas from art to modes of annotation of spaces are also evolving at a rapid rate. A confluence with increasingly sophisticated modes of social networking and data insemination of mapping and spatial augmentation, needs to occur.
Delaying Demolition by Aristide Antonas
“Despite all the destruction,” the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi wrote of the Parthenon in 1667, “no other mosque known to us can open up shining paths in the soul of man. Every time you visit, you discover more and more new masterpieces, which-during previous visits-escaped your notice.” He also admired the sixty pure white “marble columns” that “attained a height of twenty-five cubits,” he also admired the “reliefs and the decorations” but mainly, he admired the four columns made of ruby red marble, which could “reflect even the shade of one’ face,” the “gold-plated dome,” the “four pillars of green marble near the minbar… decorated with elaborate flowers,” “the colours and the stones on the doors and the walls that resemble eyes, of cats and of fish, etc.”
IMCA