Sougwen Chung
https://asu.zoom.us/j/83157469283?pwd=WjNLMkpMYkJHNHBTZmNLYXhZL1FJZz09
BIO
Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher considered a pioneer in human-machine collaboration – exploring the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding systems. Chung’s work MEMORY is part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and is the first AI Model to be collected by a major institution. Recently, Chung was recognized as a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, one of four recipients of the TIME100 Impact award, and named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Sougwen Chung
Seminar Videoconference Link: https://forms.gle/XyDoScDxvsYQR7M17
BIO
Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher considered a pioneer in human-machine collaboration – exploring the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding systems. Chung’s work MEMORY is part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and is the first AI Model to be collected by a major institution. Recently, Chung was recognized as a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, one of four recipients of the TIME100 Impact award, and named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Western anthropologists studying the indigenous cultures of Black Africans on the continent have, all too often, been intent upon searching for “old ways” that have persisted in spite of the “modern” history of the continent, hoping to gain insights into “pre-modern”
and “primitive” peoples. The reality is, however, that the cultural practices of indigenous Black Africans on the continent observed by these anthropologists have all been formed, to some degree, in response to one of the greatest sequences of geographic,
demographic, and historiographic catastrophes, from the Slave Trade, to the Colonial Scramble for Africa, to the Organized Abandonment and Underdevelopment of the Postcolonies.
Similarly, Western anthropologists examining aspects of continental Black African cultures that seemingly persist in diasporic Black African cultures have, all too often, imagined that they are observing “old ways” that have persisted in spite of the genocidal,
ethnocidal, and ecocidal machinations of racial capitalism. In reality, however, they are observing the dynamic play of homologous and analogous developments and recombinatory Trans-Atlantic crossings, back and forth, between the cultural ecologies of the
continent and the diaspora -- all being responses (and not simply reactions) to the apocalyptic events of the past six centuries on both sides of the Middle Passage.
Taking the above into consideration, this lecture will attempt to re-articulate the schism between the continent and the diaspora as an evolving object of philosophical study by re-appropriating and re-evaluating the psychoanalytic anthropologies and ethnographies
that informed Deleuze and Guattari’s Schizoanalysis, re-reading them alongside the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Fanon, George Jackson, Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, R.A. Judy, Fred Moten, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. In so doing, this
lecture will make the case for an Anti-Oedipal Blackness and an Afro-Schizoanalytics that runs counter to applications of Western psychoanalytics and schizoanalytics to anthropologies of continental and diasporic Black Africans.
BIO
Muindi Fanuel Muindi is a performance artist, philosopher, and poet, with Lacustrine Bantu roots in the Rift Forests of Eastern Congo and the Mara Wetlands in Tanzania. He is the author of six
books of experimental poetry and prose.
Muindi’s philosophical perspective, his “deconstructive empiricism”, is deeply affected by Bantu philosophies and by Western deconstruction and schizoanalysis, and it is subtly informed by figures, functions, and structures from comparative biology and measure
theory.
Muindi’s performances, his “philosophical gestures”, deploy dramatic devices to create sensuous experiences that deepen understandings of the metaphysical catastrophe of coloniality and that broaden the prospects of the Black Arts and Decolonial Sciences. Having
adopted the motto “more grit, less kit”, Muindi’s performance practice privileges high latency, low fidelity, and seamful designs and the use of TEK (Transformative Ecological Knowledges).
Muindi is co-founder of the Fyrthyr Institute for Unsettling Technologies, coordinator of the “Prototyping Social Forms” and “Alter-Eco”
research streams at the Synthesis Center, an organizer at the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, co-producer and audio engineer for the Forested Niches podcast, and a member of the “After School”, “Technologies
of Critical Conscientization”, and “Unwriting Nature” research communities at the Center for Art Design + Social Research.
Online Seminar
Sougwen Chung
to receive a zoom videoconference link
BIO
Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher considered a pioneer in human-machine collaboration – exploring the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding systems. Chung’s work MEMORY is part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum and is the first AI Model to be collected by a major institution. Recently, Chung was recognized as a Cultural Leader at the World Economic Forum, one of four recipients of the TIME100 Impact award, and named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI.
Experiment and Experience: A Polyphonic Seminar on the Dao of Indeterminacy and Play
Organized by:
Cécile Malaspina, Directrice de programme, Collège international de philosophie, Paris, Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and UWE
&
Sha Xin Wei, Director of Synthesis, and Professor in the School of Arts, Media + Engineering, and in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University
Seminar organised in partnership with Professor Patrick ffrench, King's College London, Dr Miguel Prado Casanova, University of the West of England and Professor Francesco Tava, University of the West of England
In An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies Steve Coutinho writes: “Interconnections build and shift as one develops familiarity with the verses, but the meaning never crystallises into a final form.” This seminar responds to the need to enlarge the concerns, vocabulary, and even the modes of articulation of philosophy, so as to address the transformative dynamics of the contemporary world. Because it imbricates local and planetary complexities, this work calls for greater openness towards philosophical legacies muted by the dominance of the Western tradition of philosophy, including alternative attitudes towards indeterminacy, as well as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We invite participants to bring plural, distinct personal and cultural genealogies of thought to bear on the theme of indeterminacy and play, as much to create a polyphonic family of generate interpretations of the theme as to showcase the richly disparate modes and concerns that animate these genealogies.
Alice Oswald, celebrated poet and gardener
Sha Xin Wei, Director of Synthesis and Professor School of Arts, Media + Engineering at Arizona State University
Muriel Mambrini-Doudet, 1st Research Director, French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, Doctoral program lead at the Learning Planet Institute
Brian MacCraith, Physicist, Senior Advisor to the President, Arizona State University (ASU); Chair, External Oversight Body of the Irish Defence Forces; Chair, Gaelic Players Association (GPA); Former President, Dublin City University (2010–2020)
Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, artists, educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice for the transformation of civic spaces and collective imaginaries
The meaning of ‘Home’ has become a paradox whether looking at it as a house, desperately settled by things of objects, through its architectural forms and functions [Figure II, III], or looking at it as an abstract space without shells, populated by humans and non-humans, opened and became habitable by objects [Figure IV]. As mentioned by Coccia, from now on, staying at home should simply mean “staying where you give life to everything and everything gives life to you”. He also examined home as a universal kitchen, a kind of shared laboratory in which we attempt to create ourselves, discover the right combination, and manufacture shared bliss. Within a bigger image, the new city could be seen as a massive chemical recipe in which humans strive to create an elixir of life by combining things and themselves with every existing object. Ultimately, envisioning the house and the city as the great kitchens means to get rid of patriarchal relationships and transform them into a space of care, not just in the form of nourishment. This can simply be rendered in the following sentence, “Home is only where there is care for something and someone”.
Daoism, Pluritemporality, Critique
Julia Ng
Goldsmiths, University of London
Thursday 14 March 2024
5:00 - 7:00 pm GMT
Link to register for online seminar: https://fb.me/e/1Z2LopgnC
Session 2 of Experiment and Experience: A Polyphonic Seminar on the Dao of Indeterminacy and Play
We hope you can join us to hear Julia Ng, our next speaker in the Polyphonic Seminar series on Indeterminacy organised by Cecile Malaspina and Sha Xin Wei on behalf of the Collège International de Philosophie and in partnership with the Department of French, King's Arts & Humanities, and the Department of Philosophy, UWE Philosophy Community.
Julia Ng is Reader in Critical Theory and founding Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has explored the links between modern mathematics and political thought, modern German-Jewish philosophy, and theories of history and language in the 20th century, particularly in the work of Walter Benjamin, whose essay “Toward the Critique of Violence” she recently translated for a critical edition she co-edited (with Peter Fenves) for Stanford UP (2021). Funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, Julia is currently completing a book on Daoism and Capitalism based around Benjamin and Weber’s respective images of China ancient and modern, which has also received support from the Leverhulme Trust, the Center for Jewish History (NYC), and the British Society for the History of Philosophy.I
