Platform for Thought in Motion

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The Reading Room #44 - Predicting Your Self with Andy Clark

Predicting your Self The Reading Room #44

guest reader: Andy Clark texts by: Lisa Feldman Barrett and Anil K. Seth

Sunday, April 24 2022 13:00-16:00 GMT Rose Hill, Brighton United Kingdom

Admission is free, but you must RSVP a spot in advance to attend. Register for the reading group via this form: https://forms.gle/Qe4aqoDBteGimX4GA --------------------------

The theory that the human brain is a "prediction machine" has enjoyed growing support from neuroscience research communities in recent years, with some going so far as to describe conscious experience as a "deception" or "hallucination" driven by our learned expectations of what's coming next.

Extending this idea to the full sensory world containing not only predictions of what we expect to see and hear, but also predictions of the hidden, visceral signals that allow our bodies to self-regulate, one could say that the entire experience of owning a body and being a self is part of a such a false reality.

But how much of what you experience is truth and how much of it is based on your learned expectations and biases? Metaphors like "deception" and "hallucination" can be deceptive themselves. What does it really mean to say that the brain "predicts" your self into being?

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In this reading group we'll try to tackle some of these questions by reading two texts by leading neuroscientists whose work supports the "prediction machine" hypothesis. We will also be joined by a special guest, philosopher of cognition Andy Clark, who will help us to work our way through these complex ideas as we discuss.

This event is free but has limited spots due to the intimate discussion environment we try to create.

Please register to reserve your spot using the registration link above. Once we receive your registration we will email you pdfs of the reading materials.

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Guest Reader

Andy Clark is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex. He is the author of several books including Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press, 2016), Mindware (Oxford University Press, Second Edition 2014), Supersizing the Mind (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Being There: Putting Brain, Body And World Together Again (MIT Press, 1997). Academic interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, and computational neuroscience. From 2017-2021 he was PI on a European Research Council Advanced Grant: Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience. He is currently PI on an ERC Synergy Grant, XScape. Material Minds: Exploring the Interactions between Predictive Brains, Cultural Artifacts, and Embodied Visual Search.

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Reading Room #42 — Reading and Repairing with Varia

Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2021

Two sessions: 14:30-16:30 / 17:00-19:00 (CET)

Location: Online

Page Not Found and The Reading Room are happy to invite you to a two-part online reading session around the theme of ‘repair’, with Cristina Cochior, amy pickles and Joana Chicau of Varia.

In this Reading Room session we will consider the modes in which our bodies interact with, are perceived by and operate through everyday communication technologies. This collective work will be carried out on an Etherpad, an open-source, web-based collaborative editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document and see all of the participants’ edits in real-time. What intimate relations are bound within our screens and machines? What does our body learn while flowing in these zones?

As a group we will look into practices of annotating text. We will make digital annotations as we read, digesting the words while we highlight, underline, write in the margin, look up meanings and take notes, making the text more accessible to the next person who encounters it. By creating new modes of accessing and encountering text, reading together becomes a continuous re-reading.

The thoughts central to this reparative reading session are formed by scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In the essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You”, Sedgwick tells us that rearranging what we read can be a form of sustenance. Through sharing our differences in what is nourishing, we hope to recognise the limits of what can be read and what can be repaired.

NOTE: This online session takes place in two parts: the first part from 14:30-16:30 and the second part from 17:00-19:00. Participants can choose to attend one or both parts of the session. While a small introduction will be held over Zoom, the session itself does not take place through video-call but through the interactive Etherpad document.

Texts for this session will be provided in the moment and there is no need for reading in advance. Please confirm your attendance for one or both parts of the session by sending an email to [email protected].

ABOUT OUR GUESTS

Varia (NL) is a Rotterdam based initiative focused on working with, on and through everyday technology. At its core the initiative aims to be a social infrastructure from which to collaboratively facilitate critical understandings on the technologies that surround us. The initiative is a membership-based organisation striving to become a space for questions, opinions, modifications, help and action.

Cristina Cochior is a Rotterdam-based researcher and designer. Her work revolves around situated feminist software, affective archival interfaces, digital infrapunctures, vernacular language processing and digital knowledge organisation and transmission. Together with other members of Varia, she works on collective, non-extractive digital infrastructures.

amy pickles is an artist and loosely formed educator. In her work, she experiments with ways to hold onto, and consider, pervasive colonial infrastructures we are a part of. In our work, redistribution (of knowledge, tools, finances) and collaboration are methodologies to refuse individual ownership.

Joana Chicau is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance — currently based in London. In her practice she interweaves web programming languages and environments with choreography. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism.

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The Reading Room + Sensation and Perception to Awareness present

Optimal Brain Damage

with guest reader Johannes Bruder

Tuesday 30th November, 2021  @  13:00-15:00 (GMT, UK)

Location: Online on Zoom https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/j/98287914083

Guest Reader: Johannes Bruder, Director of the Critical Media Lab & Head of Research, Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, FHNW Academy of Art and Design

Optimal Brain Damage

“The assumption that connectivity is always a good thing is for me so naïve,” neuroscientist Karl Friston told his interlocutor in an interview on his approach to modeling the spread of the Covid-19 in the UK. “From the point of view of that delicate self-organization that enables these Markov blankets that constitute ourselves, or a society, or an ecosystem to survive, connectivity is the killer.” A remarkable, and politically momentous statement at a time when comprehensive connectivity seemed to be all there is, whether we think of global logistics, social media or more generally, the internet in times of “the cloud”. Yet, what critics were more concerned about was the use of theories and tools developed to study cognition in the brain for the purpose of analyzing the spread of Covid-19, moving almost seamlessly from populations of neurons to populations of humans. 

In this hybrid event, Dr Johannes Bruder will give a short talk, showing that such "epistemological slippages" have a history, and continue to influence how we think of human and non-human intelligence in the era of modern AI. The talk will be followed by a more in-depth, reading group and discussion around the provided essay "The Algorithms of Mindfulness". We appreciate it if you come to the talk having read some of the essay beforehand; however, anyone is invited to attend whether they have read the essay or not. Those unable to stay for the full reading-discussion portion will be given the opportunity to step out gracefully after the first hour.

NOTE: Please RSVP for this event via this link, we will send you the readings directly by email.

Reading: "The Algorithms of Mindfulness" by Johannes Bruder

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Dr. Johannes Bruder is a trained sociologist with an affinity to media studies. He studies the history and present of decision-making systems, and how these encode psychological categories, sociological models, artistic practices and speculative designs. His first book “Cognitive Code. Post-Anthropocentric Intelligence and the Infrastructural Brain” (MQUP, 2019) is based on fieldwork in neuroscience laboratories and provides deep insights into the bio-politics of computational neuroscience and machine learning. Johannes has a strong interest in experimenting with research methods, knowledge practices, alternative pedagogies and publication formats that unsettle disciplinary paradigms and render research in the humanities operational in real-world contexts. He’s currently the Head of the Critical Media Lab Basel (criticalmedialab.ch) and Head of Research at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, FHNW Academy of Art and Design.

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ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

The Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme 'From sensation and perception to awareness' directed by Professor Jamie Ward and Professor Anil Seth, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, brings together researchers and doctoral students from across neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, robotics, and the arts, with the goal of advancing our understanding of interactions between sensation, perception, as well as awareness in humans, animals, and machines.

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/sensation/

  THE READING ROOM is a nomadic event series dedicated to creating a community-oriented, public platform for encounters with contemporary ideas on art and society. At its core, The Reading Room series revolves around the reading of texts provided by invited guests – artists, scientists, scholars and curators – who join our diverse community in an open discussion while providing context and perspective.

The series stems from a belief that keeping a close connection between disciplinary boundaries in the arts and sciences, through historical and emerging theories on art and culture is invaluable to developing a grounded practice. Especially in the 21st century, where theory, practice and social engagement seem to merge ever more seamlessly.

The Reading Room is organized across different times and geographies by artist-researchers Sissel Marie Tonn, Jonathan Reus and Flora Reznik, and was originally supported through generous financial assistance from the artist initiative iii and Stroom Den Haag, both based in The Hague.

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Reading Room #40 with The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest — There is no Software, there are just Services   

For this Reading Room session, Seda Gürses and Femke Snelting from The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest join us to read and discuss the introduction to ”There is no Software, there are just Services” by Irina Kaldrack and Martina Leeker.

Please RSVP to participate in this reading session by sending an email to [email protected] with subject ‘Reading Room’. You will receive the introduction to ”There is no Software, there are just Services”, which should be read in preparation.

As a rare critical account of radical changes in software production with huge implications, this text written in 2015 lucidly details a transformation long in the making. As became increasingly clear during lockdowns, public institutions such as hospitals, schools, local libraries and cultural institutions have by now almost without exception outsourced their digital infrastructures to a small handful of Big Tech companies. By allowing them to provide the administration, facilitation and optimisation regimes to keep business running “as usual”, they ceded control both over their operations and the possibility for offering localised services. As Kaldrack and Leeker write, this “corresponds to a process in which any kind of aid or help, personal service or favour– our normal, everyday practices– can be subjected to the law of the economical”.  Interjected by readings from pamphlets, manifestos and zines from critical tech-collectives proposing solidary, queer, non-coercive computational practices, this Reading Room Session will be stretching readers’ technical and social imaginaries.

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) is a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated by Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting. Together we convene communities to hold computational infrastructures to account and to create spaces for articulating what technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making. We develop tools from feminisms, queer theory, computation, intersectionality, anti-coloniality, disability studies, historical materialism and artistic practice to generate currently inexistant vocabularies, imaginaries and methodologies. TITiPI functions as an infrastructure to intensify these practices and to establish new ways in which policy making around technology is organized in the public interest.

The session runs from 19:00 to 21:30 with a break in the middle.

Please note: for seated events we kindly ask you to show a valid proof of vaccination, recovery or negative test result at the entrance, as Page Not Found follows the COVID-19 regulations of the Dutch government. For further information, please visit this website.

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Reading Room #39 with Ethel Baraona Pohl — A book for all readers 

Page Not Found and the Reading Room are happy to invite you to a session with writer Ethel Baraona Pohl.

Lending your books or reading out loud to friends are forms of intimate care and political comradeship. Instead of discussing one text as a whole, this time we will delve into “A book for all readers”: a folder full of fragments and media, which centers the pleasure of reading. Embracing alternative modes of discourse and expression, we’ll share personal insights that are found in the interstices. You are not required to read all of the fragments, but invited to navigate them as you please, perhaps focusing on those bits that catch your attention.

In this session we will inhabit books as collaborative spaces of encounter. Heterogeneous ways of publishing and reading between fiction, poetry and critical theory, allow for the configuration of new kinds of spaces, where empathy and alterity are stronger than ideology. We ask you to listen to each other, to intermingle and to explore unconventional relations to text. Ethel likes to smell books. They don’t like vanilla ice cream… but those grassy notes with a hint of vanilla and mustiness are irresistible to them. Since a youngster they have been smelling printed pages. Sniffing one page after the other, while researching artistic and urban practices, they have learnt about the political and social impact of books; how can reading be a tool for taking action?

Ethel Baraona Pohl is a critic, writer and curator. They are a co-founder of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona, which operates in the fields of architecture, political theory and the social milieu.

Starts at 18:00. Reserve your free ticket here.

Please note: for events we kindly ask you to show a valid proof of vaccination, recovery or negative test result at the entrance, as Page Not Found follows the COVID-19 regulations of the Dutch government. For further information, please visit this website.

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Reading Room #38: Tommy Ventevogel  – Activist Sci-Fi Writing   

Page Not Found and The Reading Room invite you to our first post-lockdown session! The Reading Room is a series of reading sessions revolving around short texts provided by invited guests — contemporary researchers, cultural theorists, philosophers and artists — who join the session to provide insight and context to the topics at hand. The Reading Room is curated by Sissel Marie Tonn, Jonathan Reus and Flora Reznik.

For the 38th session of the Reading Room, we will delve with Tommy Ventevogel into sci-fi writing with an activist twist. We will discuss a scene from “The Dispossessed” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and zoom into utopian anarchism as presented in this soft sci-fi novel with social engagement, but also as a political ideology. We will complement this read with a short and beautiful essay by the same author called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, to ask ourselves what storytelling in general can be.

Tommy Ventevogel is a playwright and theatre-maker based in Rotterdam. Tommy also teaches sci-fi writing, text and image-techniques and has developed a course in activist writing.

There are a limited number of spaces available for this event. As this is a discussion, you are expected to have read the provided texts before attending. We will provide you with a copy of the texts once you have RSVP’d. Due to the current pandemic situation, we ask you to wear a mask and to observe physical distance during the session.

Starts at 16:00. Reserve your free ticket here.

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Reading into Things: Queer Phenomenology in Everyday Life 

“Theory does not only mean reading dense academic texts. Theory can be lived, held, shared.” Lola Olufemi, “Feminism Interrupted”

Page Not Found and The Reading Room are delighted to invite you to participate in our new program. The Reading Room is a series of reading sessions revolving around short texts provided by invited guests — contemporary researchers, cultural theorists, philosophers and artists — who join the session to provide insight and context to the topics at hand. The Reading Room is curated by Sissel Marie Tonn, Jonathan Reus and Flora Reznik.

The guest of this session is Shailoh Phillips, who chose an article by Sara Ahmed entitled “Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology”. Shailoh Phillips will invite us to consider how we orient ourselves towards a text and to the complex world we part of. Through various embodiment exercises we will reconsider the materiality of a text as well as the possibility of reading into the world around us. Sometimes it can be difficult to find the concentration and motivation to really digest a text. We will explore different ways of working with text as material, breaking it down and reading it against the grain. We will try to understand Ahmed’s text through embodied explorations of its themes, and explore what it really means to “read together”. We will also practice reading other surfaces, images and everyday objects – from stars, to coffee grounds, to tables, faces and streets.

“The lines that direct us, as lines of thought as well as lines of motion, are in this way performative: they depend on the repetition of norms and conventions, of routes and paths taken, but they are also created as an effect of this repetition. To say that lines are performative is to say that we find our way, we know which direction we face, only as an effect of work, which is often hidden from view. So in following the directions, I arrive, as if by magic.”

In Queer Phenemonology, Sara Ahmed extends an invitation to explore what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. Tables, chairs, windows, light – we can take the embodied nature of reading quite literally. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.

This is the first of two collaborations with Shailoh, where she introduces her practices of what she calls “reading against the grain” – following is a session on the relationship on reading and drawing, which will be programmed in early 2021.

Shailoh Phillips (1979, USA) is a polymash media artist /   researcher / educator. Her practice revolves around fostering playful   forms of resistance, seeking out pressure points to act in the face of   social inequalities and unfolding ecological disasters. Her practice is based in Studio Babel in Amsterdam, where she runs a community-based   library of books and materials on the top floor of the former squat and autonomous collective Kostgewonnen. Before going independent, she worked in the cultural field  in multiple roles — as a game designer, screenwriter for television  (VPRO), as the Media Lab manager at the Rijksmuseum and in digital arts  educational institutions. Over the past decade, she has been cultivating  a practice of constructive troublemaking and community organizing. She  was trained in cultural anthropology, philosophy and cultural analysis  and later went back for a MA degree in MA Education in Arts and Design  at Piet Zwart Institute. For the past years, her practice has mainly  been dedicated to developing critical pedagogies in the context of arts,  design and technology education.

She is co-founder of Salwa Foundation, a platform and  critical space for supporting artists who have recently arrived in the  Netherlands. Previous collaborations include the international Tools for  Action artist group, working with inflatable sculptures in  collaboration with protest movements. She also works with interactive  installations, video, animation, photography and re-purposed machines.  She teaches at Willem de Kooning Academy and in the MA Photography and  Society at the Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague (KABK). She never  really stops learning, which is part of why she has a passion for  creating a stimulating learning environment.

Note from the curators

There are a limited number of spaces available for this  event. As this is a discussion, you are expected to have read the  provided texts before attending. Please follow the link to Eventbrite to  book your free ticket. We will provide you with a copy of the texts  once you have RSVP’d.             Due to the current pandemic situation, we ask you to bring  your own snacks and observe physical distance. We will provide masks.

Starts at 19:00. Get your free ticket

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Page Not Found and The Reading Room are delighted to invite you to participate in our new program. The Reading Room is a series of reading sessions revolving around short texts provided by invited guests — contemporary researchers, cultural theorists, philosophers and artists — who join us to provide insight and context to the topics at hand. The Reading Room is curated by Sissel Marie Tonn, Jonathan Reus and Flora Reznik.

For this 36th session, Rebekka Kiesewetter joins The Reading Room in an effort to navigate Hamid Dabashi’s text “Can Europeans Read?” (2015). We will understand reading as an interventionist, performative and collaborative way of engaging with a text. We will look at the questions Dabashi raises, consider his ideas around the urgency of thinking “beyond postcoloniality”, and his claim that Europeans will indeed be unable to read anything besides themselves until they “join the rest of humanity in their common quest for a level remapping of the world”. The ability to read will become a form of political engagement.

Taking Dabashi’s text as a point of departure we will enact Johanna Drucker’s concept of “performative materiality” that considers reading as a “constitutive act (…) that makes the text”. Through our engagement – that takes the form of a workshop – the text will lose its status as a fixed, static and authoritative entity, and become open(-ended), inherently relational, multi-temporal, and generative. Along with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney we treat text as a social space: “To say that [text is] a social space is to say that stuff is going on: people, things, are meeting there and interacting, rubbing of one another, brushing against one another – and you enter into that social space, to try to be part of it”.

Rebekka Kiesewetter studied art history, economics and modern history at the University of Zurich). She worked as a writer, editor and curator. She has been a Visiting Professor and Guest Lecturer at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, the University of the Arts Bern, and the Political Arts Experimentation Program (SPEAP) at Sciences Po (FR), among other institutions. Also, she is a founding member of DA Institut, a member and former co-director of Depot Basel. Currently she is a writing and thesis tutor at the Sandberg Academy Amsterdam and is doing her PhD at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK). Her work evolves on the intersections of experimental publishing, art, design, and the humanities. Her research interests are radical Open Access publishing, experimental publishing, the material, relational and performative dimension of publishing and publications, the philosophical and political dimensions of openness and accessibility, and feminist and intersectional critiques of knowledge production.

Note from the curators

Seating for this event is limited. Please reserve a spot by booking a free ticket below. We will provide you with a copy of the texts once your ticket is booked. As this is a discussion, you are expected to have read the provided texts before attending. Due to the current pandemic situation, we ask you to bring your own snacks and observe physical distance. We will provide masks. After the event, you are welcome to stay around for an informal chat/drink with us.

Starts at 19:00. Get your free ticket.

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Online Reading Room: Plastic Hypersea Session 2

8 May 2020 // 17:00 - 19:00

𝗚𝗨𝗘𝗦𝗧 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗘𝗥: Alexis Shotwell

𝗧𝗘𝗫𝗧: Excerpts from Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017) by Eli Clare and Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012) by Mel Y. Chen.

Framer Framed and the Nomadic Reading Room invite you to join our new online series of events, in the face of the COVID-19 lockdown. On Friday 8 May  we will host a second session of the online Reading Room: Plastic Hypersea co-curated and led by Sissel Marie Tonn and Alexis Shotwell.

During the first session, with guest reader Dani Admiss, we discussed the concept of purity politics from Shotwell’s recent book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. In this Reading Room, we will turn to think about toxicity, pollution, immune response, and the politics of ‘cure’. We’ll start with Eli Clare’s vital work on the contradictions of ‘cure’ – the deeply held and intertwined beliefs that some bodies, minds, and environments are damaged or broken and need to be fixed, alongside the fact that some transformations are not livable or desired. How can we fight environmental destruction without leveraging anti-disability rhetoric or practices? How can we focus on cure without aiming to eradicate that which cannot, or does not want to be, cured? We’ll then turn to a discussion of Mel Chen’s gorgeous considerations of ‘immunity nationalism’, toxicity, interdependence, chemical intimacy, fragility, and queerness. We’ll ask what space we might open as curators and artists for holding the contradictions and seductions of ontological multiplicities.

The title of the reading room refers to the concept by Mark and Dianna McMenamin called the ‘hypersea’, which is the vast mass of living cells interconnected across bodies and environments through water. This inner ocean is increasingly becoming polluted by microplastic particles, but the title also refers to plasticity as it is used in neuroscience – it is possible for us to change our habits, entrainments and cultural traditions. How can the concept of being connected e.g. through our shared hypersea give a new sense of embodied/ecological awareness?

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Online Reading Room: Plastic Hypersea

24 Apr 2020 // 17:00 - 19:00  

𝗚𝗨𝗘𝗦𝗧 𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗘𝗥: Dani Admiss

𝗧𝗘𝗫𝗧: Excerpts from Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell.

Framer Framed and the Nomadic Reading Room invite you to join our new online series of events, in the face of the COVID-19 lockdown. Our first online Reading Room: Plastic Hypersea is on 24th of April and hosted by artist Sissel Marie Tonn and Dr. Danielle-Maria Admiss is the guest speaker.

We depart from a question of whether our awareness of the virus has challenged our sense of embodiment. More than ever, we must come to terms with the fact that we are in constant interaction with invisible material entering and exiting our bodies. We are not sealed-off, discrete entities. Rather, we are leaky, co-contaminating, porous and deeply dependent upon one another and the environment we co-create.

On 24 April, Tonn and Admiss will discuss Alexis Shotwell’s generative and timely concept of ‘purity politics’ taken from her most recent book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. From air purifiers and water filters to chemical-free cleaning products and personal toxicity-testing, purity politics can be thought of as a form of doing and thinking that promotes individual acts of purification, cleansing and healthism. The intention is to separate us from the impurities of the world. However, as Shotwell convincingly demonstrates, toxicity is already here. It is in human and multispecies bodies; embedded in landscapes and it is interconnected to the past, present and future ways in which we live and exist within capitalist modes of production. Importantly, it is also differentially distributed across race, class and multispecies—harming some bodies over others. Together, the reading group will unpack the harmful subtexts of purity politics and consider ways of rethinking toxicity and accounting for the unequal distribution of harm in interconnected toxic worlds. How can we—as collective individuals—engage these methods and values in our own toxic surroundings?

The title of the reading room refers to the concept by Mark and Dianna McMenamin called the “hypersea”, which is the vast mass of living cells interconnected across bodies and environments through water. This inner ocean is increasingly becoming polluted by microplastic particles, but the title also refers to plasticity as it is used in neuroscience – it is possible for us to change our habits, entrainments and cultural traditions. How can the concept of being connected e.g. through our shared hypersea give a new sense of embodied/ecological awareness?

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The Reading Room#33: The Rights of Future Generations

5th of January, 14:00-16:00, at Framer Framed Gallery, Amsterdam NL

Guest Reader: Laura Burgers

Texts by: Mihnea Tanasescu: Rethinking representation: The challenge of non-humans.

Inigo Gonzalez-Ricoy, Felipe Rey: Enfranchising the future: Climate justice and the representation of future generations.

“On the assumption that present generations have obligations to future ones, climate change poses a formidable challenge to most existing accounts of intergenerational justice, such that, if unabated, it would entail an unfair overburdening of future generations by present ones.” (Gonzales-Ricoy; Rey, 2018). In this edition of The Reading Room artist Sissel Marie Tonn has invited jurist and writer Laura Burgers, who is currently a PhD candidate at the European Centre for the Study of European Contract Law, as guest-reader. The event will take place in the installation “Water-thieves and time-givers”, Sissel’s contribution to the exhibition “Elsewheres Within Here” at gallery Framer Framed. The work explores issues of PFOA contamination of bodies and environments in The Netherlands, which will likely affect generations to come. Departing from this we will reflect on the concept of the representation of future generations in climate justice of the present, as well as explore the possibility of advocating for the “rights of nature”. What challenges and possibilities do these concepts offer activists and law-makers in this current state of climate emergency? And what current examples from around the world might help us grasp the complexity of these concepts?

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The Reading Room #32: Hydrofeminism

11th of December 2019, 17-19:30, Framer Framed

Guest Reader: the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology

Texts by: Astrida Neimanis 

“We are all bodies of water. To think embodiment as watery belies the understanding of bodies that we have inherited from the dominant Western metaphysical tradition” writes philosopher Astrida Neimanis in her essay “Hydrofeminism: Or, on becoming a body of water”. In this text she traces the reciprocal relationship between the constellation of matter and forces, which we call our bodies, and its surrounding environment through the connecting qualities of all the watery exchanges we have with the world. In so doing she asks us to consider the “outline” of the body as a membrane that is much more elastic and malleable, trans-corporeal, porous and leaky than we might at first imagine. For this event artist Sissel Marie Tonn has invited curator Miriam Wistreich to co-lead a reading group on Neimani’s text, in her installation “Water-thieves and time-givers” in the exhibition “Elsewheres within Here” at Framer Framed. The curatorial platform and micro publisher Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology has translated and published the text in Denmark, as well as curated and arranged events around the theme of Hydrofeminism. Together they invite participants to co-read and reflect on Neimani’s text in relation to the themes of water contamination of bodies and environments stretching over unimaginable timespans, which is being explored in the work “Water-thieves and time-givers”.

Download reading here: https://www.academia.edu/1970757/_Hydrofeminism_Or_On_Becoming_a_Body_of_Water._

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THE READING ROOM #31: THINKING WITH STRING FIGURES

17 NOV, 2019 17:30

iii workspace: Willem Dreespark 312, 2531 sx The Hague, Netherlands

On the occasion of the screening of “Worlds of Ursula K. Leguin”, Sissel Marie Tonn will be leading a discussion on Donna Haraway’s “Tentacular Thinking – Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”. “It matters what stories tell stories”, writes Donna Haraway in her essay ” Tentacular Thinking – Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene”. In this work she questions the language we use, and the stories we tell, in a present time of ecological urgency. She has a bone to pick with the “unthinkability of apocalypse, this self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myth of the anthroposcene”, because, in this urgent time “think we must”. For Haraway the stories we tell, the practices we engage in, the multi-species worlds we inhabit, can be tools for discovering ways of caring and thinking, across living beings. It is a way of countering the logic of capitalist progress that has produced the current multi-species genocide that we are living. In this pre-screening gathering we will be discussing this text, while engaging in a playful practice introduced in the text, that of making string figures. Following tutorials and passing string figures from hands to hands, we will unpack the way in which Haraway uses concepts under the moniker “SF” (which encompasses science fiction, speculative feminism, string figures etc) as carriers for thinking other collaborative practices, modes of action and ways of relating across species. Instructions for attending: If you would like to attend this event you should read the text ” Tentacular Thinking – Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene” by Donna Haraway, which you can find by clicking the link below. This event is not a lecture, but a reading/discussion group among interested peers. To kickstart the discussion you should think of 2-3 questions that you have to the text, which you would like to unpack with the group. Please also bring your own copy of the text. Reading download link: http://universitywithoutconditions.ac.nz/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ch2-haraway-staying-with-trouble.pdf String and string figure instructions will be provided by the organizers! More information about the evening screening of Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/2263281210464136/

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FILM SCREENING: WORLDS OF URSULA K. LE GUIN

17 NOV 2019, 20:00

iii workspace: Willem Dreespark 312, 2531 sx The Hague, Netherlands

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a feature documentary created by Arwen Curry, exploring the remarkable life and legacy of the late feminist sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin. Best known for groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy works such as A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed, Le Guin defiantly held her ground on the margin of “respectable” literature until the sheer excellence of her work, at long last, forced the mainstream to embrace fantastic literature. Her fascinating story has never before been captured on film. Produced with Le Guin’s participation over the course of a decade, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a journey through the writer’s career and her worlds, both real and fantastic. Viewers will join the writer on an intimate journey of self-discovery as she comes into her own as a major feminist author, opening new doors for the imagination and inspiring generations of women and other marginalized writers along the way. The film features stunning animation and reflections by literary luminaries including Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Michael Chabon, and more. This screening is part of a three venue tour together with FIBER and LAB 111 (Amsterdam, Dec 11) and MU Artspace (Eindhoven, Jan 2020). More information about the pre-screening Reading Room activity with Sissel Marie Tonn can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/617102765483242/

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An Announcement from THE READING ROOM

21 JUNE 2019

You might have noticed that we haven’t announced any new events in  the last months. When we started The Reading Room in 2015 we were freshly graduated from art school and looking to create a platform for reading and learning within our community.

The series started  small, but always central to it was the spirit of bringing our local community into fruitful contact with new and exciting ideas. Since then  we have invited 33 artists, researchers, theorists and scientists from  the Netherlands and abroad to share their insights and passions with us in open-ended, intimate discussions.

We have organized an  amazing 30 (!) reading sessions and workshops in collaboration with our partners at STROOM Den Haag and iii. With topics as diverse as they were challenging; from ‘media archeology’ to ‘the edges of the  voice’. In 2017 we started an effort to trace the ephemeral exchanges taking  place in The Reading Room through a kind of informal interview/discussion process. This secondary project quickly took form as The Relay Conversations, which are now a significant body of 12 online micro-publications written in tandem with our guests.

We’ve decided that now is a good time to take a moment to reflect on what we’ve accomplished with this initiative and consider future momentums. For the moment we won’t be organizing The Reading Room as a regular series any longer. However the format, the community, and the ideas will continue onwards as The Reading Room itself becomes more nomadic and more dynamic.

For now, we end the formal series with thanks. Our thanks go to all those who have  participated in The Reading Room and have therefore helped to create the foundation for these beautiful encounters. We thank you for your ideas, your curiosity, your enthusiasm. We also want to thank the instrument inventors initiative, for  producing and making possible this amazing journey. A huge thank-you goes to our funders Stroom Den Haag and Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie for making it financially possible to bring so many guests to The Hague.  Finally, a special thanks to our guests: Eric Kluitenberg Sher Doruff Toni Pape Rick Dolphijn Iris van der Tuin Wybo Houkes Jamie Allen Will Schrimshaw Charlotte Farrell Thijs Witty Maciej Ożóg Marco Donnarumma ArchipelagoLab Yvonne Volkart Julia Bee Christoph Brunner Alanna Thain Nik Forrest Nishant Shah Lila Athenasladova Marcel Cobussen Andrej Radman Yvonne Förster Jaime del Val Warrick Roseboom Joel Ryan Raviv Ganchrow Douglas Kahn Cramer Florian Rebekka Kiesewetter Joana C-q Alessandro Ludovico Amelia Groom Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman

Until next time, The Reading Room facilitators Jonathan Reus, Sissel Marie Tonn & Flora Reznik https://instrumentinventors.org/the-reading-room-comes-to-a-close/

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The edges of the voice

8th and 9th of December, 2018

Guest Readers: Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman and Amelia Groom

Texts by: Anne Carson and Eduardo Kohn

In this cluster we will be delving into texts and practices that explore the limits and potentials of vocal expression. We will be looking at two texts that approach questions of voice and silence/ing through very different entry points; that of the non-human semiotic worlds of the rainforest, and that of the gendered politics inherent in determining how and whether voices are heard. Departing from their respective practices dealing with the question of the voice, Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman and Amelia Groom will guide us through experimental and in-depth discourses that may broaden our perceptions of where we hear voices, when we speak up, and when we deliberately deploy silence.

The second part of the cluster is a workshop led by artist/vocalist Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman, in which we will explore the texts and our many voices, by assembling an experimental “non-human choir”. Aurélie will guide us through physical and vocal exercises focusing on onomatopoeia, non-linguistic sounds, and the untapped possibilities within the repertoires of our non-adult and non-human voices (baby, animal, spirits, etc.). The workshop is suitable for complete beginners as well as professionals in the fields of vocal practice, and is open to participants of any age.

Note from the curators

There are a limited number of spaces available for this event. As this is a discussion, you are expected to have read the provided texts before attending. Please reserve a spot by sending an email to [email protected]. We will also provide you with a copy of the texts once you have RSVP’d.

The Reading Room is organised by Jonathan Reus, Sissel Marie Tonn and Flora Reznik. With thanks to support from Stroom Den Haag and the Dutch Creative Industries Fund, and our production partner the Instrument Inventors Initiative.

Invited Guests

Amelia Groom is a Berlin-based writer, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, where she is working on an art historical project about stones. Since 2014 she has taught on the Critical Studies MA at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, and she was also the theory tutor for the Master of Voice programme at the Sandberg (2016-2018).

Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman’s oeuvre balances between radio, installation, performance, vocal art and composition, with her extensive collection of unique field recordings and soundscapes from rural and urban East-Africa serving as the common denominator. Soundbite by soundbite she transforms and molds all those sounds into something she describes as “Afrique Concrète”. In addition to this, she constantly premieres new music by emerging young composers from around the globe in a multiplicity of styles. Lierman is a former radio maker and host at the national Belgian broadcasting corporation and co-created two Nurse With Wound albums.

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Post-digital Publishing

10th and 11th of September, 2018

Guest Readers: Florian Cramer, Rebekka Kiesewetter and Joana Chicau

Texts by: Silvio Lorusso, Florian Cramer and Johanna Drucker

Post-digital publishing

In this cluster we will explore the practice of publishing in relation to ‘the post-digital’, a notion that describes a condition in which we live in, a hybrid time in which distinctions of 'old' and 'new media' have become obsolete, and where any publishing practice is being acknowledged as a material practice. Materiality is no longer understood as a mere physical property but as something that is inherently political, an emergence that may occur between textual content, its manifestation as an artifact, the economies and practices, as well as the non-human and human agents determining a publication’s production and consumption. We will ask how is artistic practice, understood in a broad sense as a gesture of ‘going public’, affected by this? What strategies, formats and notions of authorship and public may emerge from this new sensibility?

The second session will be a workshop on publishing, called “Performing Interstices: Reading as Writing forward”. Here we will look at text not as a secluded work, but as a provocation that offers its possibilities as an event, inviting us to intervene. By applying choreographic protocols as a “code for bringing-into-relation”, we will explore how we are provoked physically and cognitively into reading and responding, and thus contributing to the creation of the text.

Note from the curators

There is a limited number of spaces available for this event. As this is a discussion, you are expected to have read the provided texts before attending. Please reserve a spot by sending an email to [email protected]. We will also provide you with a copy of the texts once you have RSVP’ed.

ABOUT THE READING ROOM The Reading Room is an event series dedicated to creating a community-oriented, public platform for encounters with contemporary ideas on art and society. At its core, The Reading Room series revolves around the reading of texts provided by invited guests – cultural theorists, philosophers and curators – who join our diverse community in an open discussion while providing context and perspective. The series stems from a belief that keeping a close connection to historical and emerging theories on art and culture is invaluable to artists. Especially in the 21st century, where theory, practice and social engagement in the arts seem to merge ever more seamlessly. The Reading Room’s is organized by Sissel Marie Tonn, Jonathan Reus and Flora Reznik. The program is produced by the Instrument Inventors Initiative and is hosted by Stroom Den Haag. Please sign up for our mailing list or join our facebook group to be notified of new events. https://platformtm.tumblr.com/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/readingroomdh/

Invited Guests

Rebekka Kiesewetter studied art history, economics and modern history, and is active as a writer, editor, lecturer, curator and researcher. Her works in critical theory, practice and making as critique evolve at the intersections of experimental publishing, socially engaged design and architecture, artistic research, humanities and cultural sciences.. She experiments with methods and formats of investigation, intervention, representation and publication that might generate understandings and potential for multiple iterations by means other than those academic and artistic research and creative composition typically afford.

Florian Cramer, reader in 21st Century Visual Culture/Autonomous Art & Design Practices at Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Recent publications include the YouTube lecture "Meme Wars: Internet culture and the 'alt right' ", the zine 'The Moral of the Xerox' (in collaboration with Clara Balaguer) and the book "Pattern Discrimination" (in collaboration with Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Hito Steyerl, forthcoming at Minnesota University Press). He also serves as a board member for De Player and PrintRoom, Rotterdam.

Joana Chicau is a designer, coder, researcher - with a background dance. Her transdisciplinary project interweaves media design and web environments with choreographic practices. Chicau has been researching the intersection of the body with the constructed, designed, programmed environment, aiming at in widening the ways in which digital sciences is presented and made accessible to the public. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism.