Inspiration Items

The following items of inspiration are shared by Workshop participants (you!) over the past couple of months in a glorious email thread. The media/articles have been embedded on this page for easy access, but you can also review the email thread in it’s entirety here.

From Josephine Mills

Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill & Wang, 2015 [DOWNLOAD PRECIS]

From Tree to Shining Tree on Radiolab

A forest can feel like a place of great stillness and quiet. But if you dig a little deeper, there’s a hidden world beneath your feet as busy and complicated as a city at rush hour.

In this story, a dog introduces us to a strange creature that burrows beneath forests, building an underground network where deals are made and lives are saved (and lost) in a complex web of friendships, rivalries, and business relations. It’s a network that scientists are only just beginning to untangle and map, and it’s not only turning our understanding of forests upside down, it’s leading some researchers to rethink what it means to be intelligent.

From Donald Lawrence

… Drawing upon the term “anarchéology” (first introduced by Rudi Visker in “discussing Foucault’s concept of an archaeology of knowledge”) Ziegfried Zielinski, in Deep Time and the Media: Toward an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing (MIT, 2006), considers the way in which:

Magical, scientific, and technical praxis do not follow in chronological sequence for anarchéology; on the contrary, they combine at particular moments in time, collide with each other, provoke one another, and, in this way, maintain tension and movement within developing processes.

– Siegfried Zielinsky. Deep Time and the Media: Toward an Archeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. (258)

“Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painleve” (Eds. Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall, MIT Press, 2000) (night time screening at Coutts?)

1914-1916 J.E. Williamson began creating apparatus for underwater filmography, including his “photosphere,” filming fish and such around that time in the Bahamas

By the 1930s his fish photos were complemented by a mechanized octopus.

Verne’s 1870 publication of 20,000 Leagues is itself interesting for (among other things) its woodcuts, many of which are a hybrid mixing of fiction, science and a taxonomy of marine life as understood in Victorian Times

From Ed Pien

Dragon Cat, 2016 – Shuvinai Ashoonba

Memory and Forgetting – On Radiolab

Remembering is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process–it’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated, and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7-second memory.

Kronos Quartet & Tanya Tagaq – A String Quartet In Her Throat

Article:

“What Does It Mean to Be Black and Look at This?” A Scholar Reflects on the Dana Schutz Controversy, by Christina Sharpe

From Jennifer Wanner

Jean Painlevé – Filmmaker and scientist, documented underwater life-forms in the 1930’s. Predecessor of Jacques Cousteau.

Film by Jean Painlevé, “Le Vampire”, 1945

“Science is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé”, DVD set, by The Criterion Collection.

From Tiffany Muller Myrdahl

Richa Nagar, “Muddying the Waters”, 2014

Review of Richa Nagar, “Muddying the Waters”, 2016

El Kilombo Intergalactico about solidarity:

The notion of “solidarity” that still pervades much of the Left in the U.S. has continually served an intensely conservative political agenda that dresses itself in the radical rhetoric of the latest rebellion in the “darker nations” while carefully maintaining political action at a distance from our own daily lives, thus producing a political subject (the solidarity provider) that more closely resembles a spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of others) than a participant or active agent, while simultaneously working to reduce the solidarity recipient to a mere object (of our pity and mismatched socks). At both ends of this relationship, the process of solidarity ensures that subjects and political action never meet; in this way it serves to make change an a priori impossibility. In other words, this practice of solidarity urges us to participate in its perverse logic by accepting the narrative that power tells us about itself: that those who could make change don’t need it and that those who need change can’t make it.

– Tuck and Wang, “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal”