Based at The New School in New York and generously supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, GIDEST incubates transdisciplinary ethnographic research at the intersection of social theory, art, and design, and fosters wide-ranging dialogue on related themes across the university.
Year: 2016 – 2022
Runtime: 4′ – 10′ x 28
Director: Orfeas Skutelis
Editing: Zlatko Zlatković
Camera: Orfeas Skutelis
Sarah Oppenheimer – Dynamic Equilibrium
A visual artist based in New York City, Sarah Oppenheimer creates work that spans the disciplinary boundaries between sculpture and architecture, performing architectural interventions in order to examine social constructions in the built environment and play with perceptions of space. Her sculptural interventions disrupt the architecture of the exhibition space by physically displacing the conventions of the built environment. Her calculated excisions of prototyped building planes — walls, floors, and ceilings — challenge our understanding of architectural space. Oppenheimer’s work both disorients and clarifies our physical and perceptual experience of the architecture that surrounds us.
Sarah Oppenheimer’s numerous solo exhibitions include MASS MoCA (upcoming 2019), the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, Annely Juda Fine Art, London, Mudam Luxembourg, the Perez Art Museum, Miami, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Von Bartha Garage. Basel, Baltimore Museum of Art, P.P.O.W. New York, Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, TX., Art Unlimited @ Art Basel, Duve Berlin, the St. Louis Art Museum, Youkobo Art Space. Tokyo, Queens Museum of Art, NY, and at The Drawing Center, New York. She has been the recipient of many awards, including the 2013 Anonymous Was A Woman Award; a 2010–11 Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome; a 2011 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant; a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship; a 2007 Guggenheim Fellowship; a 2007 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art; and a 2003 Rema Hort Mann Fellowship. In 2014-15, she was Artist in Residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH.
Soyoung Yoon – The Facticity of the Voice
Appropriating the form of mysterious short wave radio stations known as numbers stations, Mendi + Keith Obadike perform a charged erotics of data in their incantatory recitation of numbers from slave ship manifests, lynching statistics, and Stop-and-Frisk data. The crux of Soyoung Yoon’s inquiry is the contradictory nature of these numbers-as-documents: the irreconcilable gap between the abstraction of the numbers and the histories of violence that would account for the accumulation of these bodies: a gap that both separates and binds. As Ian Baucom argues in his analysis of the insurance contract for the slave ship Zong — as the privileged document of the 1781 massacre, the captain’s drowning of 132 slaves to claim compensation for these “goods” under the salvage cause of the ship’s insurance policy — the numbers of the contract are haunted not only by the specter of slavery but also by the specter of financial protocol, the practice of converting history into bookkeeping, of substituting “evidence” for the imaginary, speculative knowledge of “credit.”
Soyoung Yoon poses the problem of a doubling of violence: how to speak to the violence not only in the content of the history but in the form of its telling, the story that is told but through a litany of numbers? How to give form to this abstraction as a “silence” that also functions as an index, a document, of the very process of accumulation through which persons became a people, a population, a race, the object of a particular regime of knowledge and system of exchange? How is the silence “heard”?
Soyoung is Program Director and Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School. She is also Visiting Faculty at the Whitney ISP. Her current research focuses on the re-definition of the “document” and the shift in its claims to the real from the post-WWII period to the present.
Tanya Kalmanovitch – The Tar Sands Songbook
In her documentary play The Tar Sands Songbook, musician, ethnomusicologist, and 2017-18 GIDEST fellow, Tanya Kalmanovitch uses strategies from the creative and performing arts, ethnography, and design to invite participants into an imaginative, critical process of unnerving the intricate relationship of oil to modernity. This work reflects Kalmanovitch’s substantive, transdisciplinary engagement in the social sciences and creative practice, and poses a model for an artistic practice reflecting deep political, social, theoretical and historical engagements.
Bill Morrison – Beyond Zero
Sourced from original 35mm nitrate footage shot during the first World War, the work pieces together a unique visual exploration from footage never before viewed by modern audiences, and never to be be seen again outside of this film. Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov created the score, commissioned and performed by the Kronos Quartet.
Bill Morrison‘s films are instantly recognizable for their meticulous combination of rare archival material and commissioned contemporary music. With his detailed meditations on impermanence, visuality, sound, and often on film itself, he is producing one of the most distinctively coherent bodies of work in contemporary American cinema.
Among his most notable works, Decasia (67 min, 2002), a collaboration with the composer Michael Gordon, was added to the US Library of Congress’ 2013 National Film Registry; Spark of Being (68 min, 2010), a collaboration with trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas, won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Best Independent Film of 2011; The Miners’ Hymns (52 min, 2011), a collaboration with Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, was described as one of “the best and most beautiful films of the year” by the Huffington Post; The Great Flood (78 min, 2013), a collaboration with guitarist/composer Bill Frisell, won the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award of 2014 for historical scholarship; and the recently-released Dawson City: Frozen Time was described as “an instantaneously recognizable masterpiece” in The New York Times.
Recently honored with a mid-career retrospective at MoMA, Bill is a Guggenheim fellow who has received the Alpert Award for the Arts, an NEA Creativity Grant, a Creative Capital Grant, and a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. His theatrical projection design has been recognized with two Bessie awards and an Obie.
Ricardo Montez – Cities of Night
Ricardo Montez is Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Chair of Liberal Arts in the Bachelors Program/Schools of Public Engagement. His book Keith Haring’s Line: Race and the Performance of Desire (Duke University Press, 2020) considers the drawn and painted line that was at the center of Keith Haring’s art, exploring the artist’s cross-racial desire and its relationship to the Black and Latinx artists with whom he collaborated. Montez has contributed essays to museum publications, including Keith Haring/Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines (National Gallery of Victoria 2019), Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum, 2020), and Marx Collection: 40 Works (Nationalgalerie-Staatliche Museum Berlin, 2019). His writing also appeared in ASAP/Journal, Atlántica: Journal of Art and Thought, GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay studies, Social Text, and Theatre Journal.
Montez is working on a second book project titled, Cities of Night: Queer Structures of Feeling and Experiments in Form. Taking its title from John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Night, the project thinks through Rechy’s conjuring of night as a structure of feeling—a field of sexual practices, geographies, and affects in solution that will later come to cohere under, and be obscured by, post-Stonewall definitions of gay subculture, a subculture defined by fixed terms of political visibility and equally static conceptions of space. Examining the work of contemporary artists who manipulate the evidence of queer life, the project thinks through Rechy’s aesthetic sensibility and how his illumination of night resonates with the ways artists not only reveal structures of feeling but also potentially restore documentary material to a state of solution, performatively conjuring the emergent quality of cultural formation through unsettling fields of emotion.
David Gissen – The Architecture of Disability
David Gissen is a 2021-22 GIDEST Faculty Fellow who works at the intersection of architecture, history, and experimental design. In this seminar, David will explore a methodological question, raised in a recent book and exhibition project: How can those of us with significant impairments produce knowledge through our disabilities rather than despite them?
David is Professor of Architecture and Urban History at the Parsons School of Design. He was Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architecture at Yale University (2019 – 2020); University Professor (2019-20) at the Institute for Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria; and former Professor at the California College of the Arts (CCA) where he was based for twelve years. David is the author of five books and over seventy published essays. His books include a materialist study of architecture and the modern urban environment, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (Princeton Architecture Press, 2009) and a history of New York City told through the design of the city’s air, Manhattan Atmospheres (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Ayodamola Okunseinde – Technologies of Protest
Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde (ayo) is a Nigerian-American artist, designer, anthropologist, and time traveler living and working in New York. He is a 2021-22 GIDEST Faculty Fellow and an Assistant Professor of Interaction and Media Design at Parsons, The New School for Design. Ayo is also a Ph.D. student in Anthropology at New School for Social Research where he explores the perceived and lived temporal experiences of Black communities.
He studied Visual Arts and Philosophy at Rutgers University where he earned his B.A. His works range from painting and speculative design to physically interactive works, wearable technology, and explorations of “Reclamation”. His residency participation includes ITP’s S.I.R., IDEO’s Fortnight, The Laundromat Project, Eyebeam, New INC, and Recess Assembly. He has exhibited and presented at the 11th Shanghai Biennale, Tribeca Storyscapes, EYEO Festival, Brooklyn Museum, M.I.T. Beyond the Cradle, and Afrotectopia amongst others.
He is the Co-founder and Director of Iyapo Repository, a resource library that exists in a nondescript future that was founded to collect and preserve artifacts to ensure the history and legacy of people of African descent. His works exist between physical and digital spaces; across the past, present and future. Okunseinde’s works ask us, via a technological lens, to reimagine notions of race, identity, politics, and culture as we travel through time and space.
Heather Davis – PETRO-TIME
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School. As an interdisciplinary scholar working in environmental humanities, media studies, and visual culture, she is interested in how the saturation of fossil fuels has shaped contemporary culture. Her forthcoming book, Plastic Matter, argues that plastic is the emblematic material of life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, showing how intimately oil has coated nearly every fabric of being, how the synthetic cannot be disentangled from the natural, and how a generalized toxicity is producing queer realities. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017).
In 1948, Hermann Muller coined the term ‘time bomb’ to describe chemical and nuclear fallout that kills ‘more in the future’ than when the bomb explodes. This metaphor could be aptly applied to the implications of climate change and petrochemical saturation. Exploring the various relations of time to fossil fuels, this project examines how time is not what it once was. Seasons happen at the wrong time; species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. In Western modernity, time is normatively framed in progressive, linear terms, but these measures are increasingly incommensurate and insufficient to understanding the ways that time speeds, collides, drags, and appears asynchronously. To theorize these new realities, entwined as they are with fossil fuels, Heather puts forward the concept of petro-time. Petro-time asserts that time itself has been compressed through millennia to become fossil fuels, and then burned, resulting in climate chaos. Petro-time describes the waiting, foreboding times of impending climate disaster, the experiences of climate refugees, and the sped-up times of raging fires. Plumbing the complexities of the future, Petro-time asks what the future means, and for whom.
McKenzie Wark – Rave
McKenzie Wark is a 2021-22 GIDEST Faculty Fellow and the author, among other things, of Capital is Dead (Verso 2019) and Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte 2020). She edited the trans | fem | aesthetics issue of eflux journal (2021). She is professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College and also teaches in the MA in liberal studies program.
Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Chuna – Waters everywhere
Anuradha Mathur, an architect and landscape architect, is Professor in the Landscape Architecture Department, University of Pennsylvania. Dilip da Cunha, an architect and planner, is Adjunct Professor at the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, and Visiting Faculty at Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology in Bangalore, and at Harvard GSD. An underlying thread in Mathur and da Cunha’s work is a concern for how water is visualized and engaged in ways that lead to conditions of its excess and scarcity, but also the opportunities that its fluidity offers for new visualizations of terrain, design imagination, and design practice. This concern has also guided their teaching and design studios, more recently in Mumbai, Jerusalem, the Western Ghats of India, Sundarbans, and along the US – Mexico border. In 2013/14 they led a PennDesign Team for a project titled Structures of Coastal Resilience supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. They are authors of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Yale University Press, 2001), Deccan Traverses: the Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006), Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (Delhi: NGMA and Rupa & Co., 2009), Splice: The Iconic Joint (Blurb, 2016), and co-editors of Design in the Terrain of Water (A+RD Publishers, San Francisco, 2014). Dilip’s new book titled The Invention of Rivers: Alexanders’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent is forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017/18.
Kevin Jerome Everson
Born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, Kevin Jerome Everson has an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Based on extensive historical research and embodying a profound sense of place, Everson’s films combine scripted and documentary moments with rigorous formalism, his filmic subjects inspired directly by gestures, tasks, and conditions of working-class African American life. Avoiding traditional strategies of cinematic realism, Everson focuses on actions and statements, which are then abstracted into theatrical gestures, re-editing or restating archival footage, incorporating non-actors enacting fictional scenaria based on their own lives, intermeshing historical observations with contemporary narratives. His artwork – paintings, sculptures, site-specific installations, and photographs – as well as his films, including five features (Spicebush, 2005; Cinnamon, 2006; The Golden Age of Fish, 2008; Erie, 2010; Quality Control, 2011), his celebrated eight-hour immersive documentary Park Lanes (2011), and over seventy short-form works, have been exhibited internationally at museums and art institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MoMA, New York, the Whitney, New York, the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the Wurttenbergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. His work was featured in the 2008 and 2012 Whitney Biennials and in the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, and at numerous international film festivals, including Venice, Sundance, Rotterdam, Toronto, SXSW, CPX:DOC, Copenhagen, and Curta Cinema, Rio. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, an American Academy Rome Prize, residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell Colony and numerous university fellowships.
Daniel Sauter – Citizens of the Cognisphere
Daniel Sauter, Associate Professor of Data Visualization at Parsons School of Design and 2016-17 GIDEST Faculty Fellow, is an artist who creates installations and visualizations dealing with the cultural and social implications of emerging technologies. His research focuses on how the computational regime transforms geopolitics and humanity. Daniel’s works have been shown internationally, including at the OK Center for Contemporary Art (Ars Electronica Festival, Linz ’04 and ’09), ACM SIGGRAPH Convention and Exhibition Centers (Boston ’06 and Los Angeles ’10), China Millennium Art Museum (Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition ’06), Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Tokyo ’05), National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung ’05), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (International Film Festival Rotterdam ’06), Microwave International Media Art Festival (Hong Kong ’06), Art Center Nabi (Seoul ’06), Luminale Biennial for Light Culture (Frankfurt ’10), Hangar Bicocca Center for Contemporary Art (Mixed Media Milan ’06), and the LA County Museum of Art LACMALab (Los Angeles ’03). In his GIDEST seminar, Daniel explores decentralized organizational forms enabled by the blockchain. He will discuss ways in which the computational regime transgresses geopolitical sovereignty and systems of control, exemplified in a collaborative project called Frauenbank which is concurrently on view at the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
Julia Foulkes – CULTURE CITY: THE ARTS IN POSTWAR NEW YORK
Julia Foulkes, Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement, is a 2016-17 GIDEST Faculty Fellow who investigates interdisciplinary questions about the arts, urban studies, and history in her research and teaching. She is the author of Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey (2002); To the City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal (2011); and A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York (2016). At GIDEST, Julia is exploring the rise of cosmopolitanism and the arts amidst urban development, exemplified by Lincoln Center and by Joseph Papp, the founder of Shakespeare in the Park, who claimed that the arts were as “important as garbage collection,” part of the structure and everyday life of the city. In her GIDEST seminar, Julia examines how that idea took hold in New York after World War II when the arts became a way to prove inclusion and reach in governmental action and support: they moved from a good reserved for the deserving to a good for all. She argues that success in doing this has been both modest and uneven in practice but perhaps most effective rhetorically. The “culture wars” of the 1990s hinged on questions of public support for an identity politics in the arts, which could be targeted because of tax dollar support (however small) and openness to diversity and expression (however incomplete).
Sreshta Rit Premnath – BLUE BOOK/MOON ROCK
SRESHTA RIT PREMNATH, the 2016-17 GIDEST Artist-in-Residence, works in multiple media including photography, sculpture, video and installation. He is the founder and editor of the publication Shifter since 2004, and Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Parsons. Originally from Bangalore, India, Rit lives and works in New York. Rit has had solo exhibitions at the Nomas Foundation, Rome; Kansas Gallery, New York; Gallery SKE, Bangalore; The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin; Wave Hill, New York; Art Statements, Art Basel; as well as numerous group exhibitions at venues including the Queens Museum, New York; YBCA, San Francisco; Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris; 1A Space, Hong Kong and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York. For his GIDEST seminar, Rit will present a series of projects that rethink the archives of such figures as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the artists Edward Krasinski and Andre Cadere. In each project, Rit transposes the protagonists’ conceptual framework onto a different historical, linguistic or cultural register. Through his contextual displacements Rit proposes new ways of considering conceptual methodologies that appear historically calcified.
Sara Hendren – INVESTIGATING NORMAL: TECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF THE BODY
Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, and professor at Olin College of Engineering, outside Boston, where she runs the Adaptation + Ability Group. Her recent work, including Slope Intercept and Engineering at Home, involves collaborative mixed media projects and social design work on technology, the human body, and the politics of disability. Sara writes and lectures on prosthetics, disability studies, hybrid art-engineering practices, critical design, and related topics. Her first book, on the unexpected places where disability is at the heart of design in everyday objects and environments, is forthcoming from Riverhead/Penguin. Is it possible to engineer an inclusive social future? An artist in an engineering school, Sara’s work is driven by questions about human ability in tech-driven cultures. What counts as normal capacity? Which technologies liberate, and which confine? Drawing from disability studies, design research, social practice art, and urban planning, her work is a restless, hybrid body of projects that yield both designed objects and a disposition toward research. This discussion will take up whether a single making practice—part design, part art, part engineering—can both solve problems and ask questions when engaging the complicated cultural topic of disability. Works shown in video include Shaheen Sheriff’s PSA student film for the Accessible Icon Project, created as a project for his film animation class at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India; the ongoing work of Slope: Intercept and its current work with Kinetic Light, Sara’s collaboration with dancer and choreographer Alice Sheppard, Zhenya Zastavker, and students at Olin College of Engineering.
Chris Stover – THOUGHTS AROUND A POLITICS OF IMPROVISED MUSIC
Chris Stover is a 2016-17 GIDEST Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor at The New School College of Performing Arts, where he teaches Music Theory, Composition, and World Music, and coordinates the Jazz Theory curriculum. His research focuses on improvisation and interaction, philosophies of time and process, and the folkloric and popular music of Cuba and Brazil. His work has been published in Media and Culture, The Open Space Magazine, Music Theory Online, Journal of Jazz Studies, Analytical Approaches to World Music, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, and elsewhere, including chapters in the edited volumes Improvisation and Music Education and Sounds of Resistance. In 2015 he spent four months in Brazil researching folkloric music as a Fulbright Teaching and Research Fellow, and he returned to Brazil in 2016 supported by a New School Faculty Research grant. Of the paper for his GIDEST seminar, Chris writes: “How does (or can) music express politics? Improvised music, and especially jazz, has been tasked with exemplifying certain kinds of political/relational thinking—liberatory politics, new forms of democratic structures—this is a theme that animates a great of current work in critical improvisation studies. I’m curious about what a politics of improvised music actually is, how it could conceivably unfold, how it communicates with its histories and contexts, and perhaps how it could potentially express transformative political/relational thought beyond itself. Rather than focusing on music that is expressly political (like, for example, protest songs), I am interested in how relational structures and processes between human and sonic “agents” are put into play in order to determine or define the identity of some given musical performance. In this way I follow Jacques Rancière’s blurring of aesthetic and political expression, especially his assertion that both begin with a series of actions that redistribute the sensible, that erupt within known, reproductive structures in order to imagine new ways of doing and experiencing. Might this be a music-political moment?”
Raven Chacon – WHAT GETS AMPLIFIED
Raven Chacon is a composer of chamber music, a performer of experimental noise music, and an installation artist. He performs regularly as a solo artist as well as with numerous ensembles in the Southwest USA, and is also a member of the American Indian arts collective Postcommodity. He lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has presented his work in different contexts at Vancouver Art Gallery, ABC No Rio, REDCAT, La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Musica, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center among other traditional and non-traditional venues. His work with Postcommodity will be featured in the upcoming Whitney Biennial and documenta 14. For his GIDEST seminar, Raven will present sound works, music compositions, and installations from his body of work that are enacted in public spaces, non-conventional venues, and rural communities. His artworks utilizing noise, uncomfortable silences, and reimagined ceremony will be discussed as a way to envision the potential of durational actions. How can artists contribute to disruptions of social spaces and interchanges by creative shared experiences?
Miriam Ticktin – THE POLITICS OF SORTING AT BORDER WALLS
Miriam Ticktin, Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, works at the intersections of the anthropology of medicine and science, law, and transnational and postcolonial feminist theory. Her research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity. She is the author of Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Immigration and Humanitarianism in France (2011), co-editor of In the Name of Humanity: the Government of Threat and Care (with Ilana Feldman, 2010), and a founding co-editor of the journal Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development. While at GIDEST, Miriam will be working on a new book project on practices of containment at the border, from border walls to spaces of quarantine, and how these are shaped by encounters between humans and non-humans, from wildlife to viruses. The premise of the book is that we cannot understand the politics of border walls without also taking into account how they intersect with and are shaped by the politics of health, environment and conservation. In her GIDEST seminar, Miriam will explore the ways in which border walls and zones come not simply to defend but also to define, that is, to shape or alter categories of natural and human kinds. She will suggest that borders walls, and all the surrounding and auxiliary technologies they harness, work by shifting how we understand different kinds of beings, ultimately rendering certain kinds killable.
Bruno Latour – ON A POSSIBLE TRIANGULATION OF SOME PRESENT POLITICAL POSITIONS
Bruno Latour was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he was Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’Innovation at the École nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, Visiting Professor at UCSD, the LSE, and Harvard. Since 2006, he has been a Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, where he is Director of the médialab. Since October 2013, he has been the part-time Centennial Professor at the LSE, and in October 2015, he began a five-year appointment as Professor-at-Large at Cornell. After field studies in Africa and California, Bruno specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work producing a series of ground-breaking and extraordinarily influential books that include Laboratory Life, Science in Action, Aramis or the Love of Technology, The Pasteurization of France, We Have Never Been Modern, Politics of Nature, Resasembling the Social, the essay collection Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies, and, most recently, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. In these and other publications, he has undertaken a radical rethinking of the traditional topics and methodologies of the social sciences, most obviously in relation to religion, law, and social theory. He has also co-curated a series of major international exhibitions at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany: Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Making Things Public: The Atmospheres of Democracy, and Reset Modernity! (all with catalogues from MIT Press). Two current projects at Sciences Po are the médialab, a digital resource laboratory for the social sciences, and SPEAP, an experimental program in art and politics, launched with his longtime collaborator Valérie Pihet that has led to his involvement in two theater productions, Cosmocoloss: A Global Climate Tragic Comedy and Gaia Global Circus.
Vijay Iyer – MOVEMENT IN RELATION
Composer-pianist Vijay Iyer was named Downbeat Magazine’s Jazz Artist of the Year for 2012, 2015, and 2016. He received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, and a 2011 Grammy nomination. He has released twenty-one albums, including A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (ECM, 2016) in duo with legendary composer-trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, named “Best New Music” by Pitchfork; Break Stuff (ECM, 2015) with the Vijay Iyer Trio, winner of the German Record Critics’ Award for Album of the Year; the live score to the film Radhe Radhe: Rites of Holi (ECM, 2014) by filmmaker Prashant Bhargava; and Holding it Down: The Veterans’ Dreams Project (Pi Recordings, 2013), his third politically searing collaboration with poet-performer Mike Ladd, named Album of the Year in the Los Angeles Times. Iyer’s compositions have been commissioned and premiered by Bang on a Can All-Stars, The Silk Road Ensemble, Ethel, Brentano Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Imani Winds, American Composers Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Chamber Orchestra Leopoldinum, Matt Haimowitz, and Jennifer Koh; his concert works are published by Schott Music. Iyer is the Director of The Banff Centre’s International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, the 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Musical Director for the 2017 Ojai Festival. Vijay Iyer’s writings have appeared in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Wire, Music Perception, JazzTimes, Journal of the Society for American Music, Critical Studies in Improvisation, and The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies. In 2014 he began a permanent appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University.
Kaija Saariaho – COMPOSING OPERA TODAY
Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish artists who are making a worldwide impact. She studied in Helsinki, Fribourg, and Paris. At IRCAM in Paris, she developed techniques of computer-assisted composition and acquired fluency in working on tape and with live electronics. This experience influenced her approach to writing for orchestra, with its emphasis on the shaping of dense masses of sound in slow transformations. Significantly, her first orchestral piece, Verblendungen (1984), involves a gradual exchange of roles and character between orchestra and tape. And even the titles of her, linked, pair of orchestral works, Du Cristal (1989) and …à la Fumée (1990) suggest her preoccupation with color and texture. Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as Orion (2004), Laterna Magica (2008), and Circle Map (2008). The detailed notation using harmonics, microtonaly and detailed continuum of sound extending from pure tone to unpitched noise – all features found in one of her most frequently performed works, Graal Théâtre for violin and orchestra (1994). Her catalogue also includes Aile du songe (2001), Notes on Light (2006), D’OM LE VRAI SENS (2010), Maan Varjot (2014). In 2015, Gerald Finley and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, premiered True Fire for baritone and orchestra. Since the late nineties, Saariaho has turned to opera, with outstanding success: L’Amour de Loin (2000), Adrian Mater (2006), Emilie (2010) and the oratorio La Passion de Simone (2006). Her opera Only the Sound Remains was premiered in March 2016 at The Dutch National Opera. Other performances will follow in Paris, Helsinki, Madrid and Toronto. Saariaho has claimed many major composing awards including the Grawemeyer Award, the Wihuri Prize, the Nemmers Prize, the Sonning Prize, and the Polar Music Prize. In 2015, she was the judge of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Kaija Saariaho’s harp concerto Trans will get its world premiere in August 2016 by Xavier de Maistre and The Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ernest Martinez-Izquierdo at the Suntory Hall, Tokyo.
Otto von Busch – VITAL VIOLENCE: AESTHETIC ANTAGONISM AND REAL FASHION
Otto von Busch is Associate Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons, The New School for Design and a 2016-17 GIDEST Faculty Fellow. In his research, he explores the emergence of a new hacktivist designer role in fashion, where the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations, anxiety, and fear into a collective experience of empowerment and liberation. In his GIDEST seminar, Otto explores allure not only as a game of attraction, but also as an aggressively seductive labor of prestige, deception, and cruelty. Most studies of fashion, he argues, are framed from a perspective of idealism, echoing Herbert Simon’s famous claim that design is concerned with “how things ought to be.” Within the realm of dress, this means interactions are primarily seen as symbolic endeavors, most often aiming at communication, seduction and aesthetic markings of class or conspicuous consumption. Taking cues from political philosophy, this idealist position could be countered with a realist perspective in which fashion would appear as something else, something more messy and cruel, a quest for power in the form of prestige and popularity. Indeed, it may be the very essence of fashion to be “nasty, brutish, and short” in a true Hobbesian way. Not only does realism move from how things ought to be towards how they are, but dress also becomes a more blatant instrument for domination and processes of selection by rejection. Rather than a tool for seduction, fashion becomes a weapon for rivalry, competition and aesthetic violence. From such a perspective, conflicts expressed in dress are aesthetic reflections of other social forces, while fashion is a playful arena trying to escape the limits of the socio-economic domain.
Kalup Linzy – QUEEN ROSE AND DA CHUREN
From his original take on the daytime soap opera and sketch comedy genres to his music videos and filmic shorts, Kalup Linzy is widely-admired for his live performances, video works, and animation that explore stereotypes around sexual identity, race, class, and gender. Working as a writer-director-actor and singer-songwriter, he draws on a variety of American pop- and counter-culture genres, including early video and performance art, gay drag performance, reality TV competitions, and YouTube videos.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan – The Right to Lie
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a 2015-17 Vera List Center Fellow, is a visual artist and audio investigator with a background in DIY music. He has had solo presentations at Portikus, Frankfurt, Kunsthalle St Gallen, Beirut in Cairo, Casco Utrecht and The Showroom, London. Abu Hamdan was the Armory Show commissioned Artist of 2015 and has exhibited and performed at venues such as The New Museum, Van AbbeMuseum, The Shanghai Biennial (2014), The Whitechapel Gallery, MACBA, Tate Modern, MHKA and The Taipei Biennial (2012). In 2013 Abu Hamdan’s audio documentary The Freedom of Speech Itself was submitted as evidence at the UK asylum tribunal where the artist was called to testify as an expert witness. He continues to make sonic analyses for legal investigations and advocacy. Most recently, his audio analysis was a prominent part the No More Forgotten Lives campaign for Defence for Children International. His writing can be found in Forensis (Sternberg Press, 2014), Manifesta, and Cabinet.
John Bruce – End of Life
To date, the End of Life project has included ethnographic fieldwork with five people experiencing various stages of the end of life. The fieldwork began in the spring of 2012 and is ongoing with three people, two having died. The 42-minute assembly of video images and sound prepared for the GIDEST seminar is a work-in-progress for an anticipated feature-length film. Four of the five people are introduced in this initial segment. The video is best viewed in one continuous session with careful attention to the sound. John Bruce is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at the School of Design Strategies at Parsons. His teaching and professional practice involve empathy, ethnography, and creative intervention. He serves as senior strategist at Forward Mapworks, a wholesystems consultancy, providing insight and design for ventures and movements operating in complex ecosystems. John’s work in a variety of media formats explores possibilities for modes of immersive experience, engagement, and exchange. He studied painting and installation at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and sustainable systems at Pinchot in Seattle. End of Life is a non-fiction moving image project focused on people experiencing various stages of the end of life. During a research period of more than three years, John’s fieldwork, in collaboration with filmmaker Paweł Wojtasik, involved five different people within varying contexts in the U.S. The durational nature of the fieldwork conducted and the media works created from these experiences attempts to address the distances created between the living and the dying.
Laura Y. Liu – Sweatshop City
Laura Y. Liu is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. Her ongoing research project, Sweatshop City, examines the urban geography of migration, industry, and neighborhood change in New York City. The contemporary global city is a “sweatshop city,” dominated by a spatial hierarchy of work that is unevenly visible and intentionally obscures relations of power and accountability. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on immigrant community organizing at workers’ centers in New York City, the study demonstrates the extent to which sweatshop labor – hyper-exploitative work performed in highly segmented and segregated labor markets embedded within structures of subcontracting – remains a constitutive feature of New York City’s urban economy. In her paper for the GIDEST seminar, Laura examines how immigrant labor organizers deploy the sweatshop not only as a set of conditions around which they organize, but also as an organizing analytic. Rather than representing conditions of the past, or of outsourced labor “elsewhere,” the sweatshop has current significance across a range of urban industries, from existing and new spaces of manufacturing, to the locally fixed sectors and spaces of the “service sweatshop.”
Tony Dunne & Fiona Raby – The United Micro Kingdoms, A Traveller’s Tale
When we leave the “here and now” and design for the “not here, not now,” where exactly are we relocating to? Dunne & Raby’s GIDEST seminar presents a fictional draft report that summarizes observations and thoughts from a month spent traveling in the United Micro Kingdoms (UmK). The report focuses on what is unique and special to each micro kingdom rather than covering standard areas across all four. During the period of their travels, Dunne & Raby observed the culture, nature, language, mythologies and philosophy of the UmK. Their report is not in any way scientific or objective and entirely reflects the authors’ own interests as designers in material culture for the purposes of research and their own work.
Marina Rosenfeld – Surface Species – Playback and the Object
Marina Rosenfeld is an artist and composer who lives and works in New York. Her works include compositions for choir, orchestra and complexes of loudspeakers; a series of conceptual electric-guitar orchestras (Sheer Frost Orchestra); and since 2008, a custom sound-system (P.A.) that she has composed for and deployed in monumental sites including New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Western Australia’s Midland Railway Workshops. Rosenfeld has also performed as an experimental turntablist since the late ’90s, working with an ever-expanding palette of hand-crafted dub plates, alongside collaborators from Christian Marclay to Warrior Queen to Ralph Lemon, to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Rosenfeld’s work has been presented at numerous biennials, festivals, and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum (including Whitney Biennials 2002 and 2008), the Holland Festival, Tate Modern, the Secession, and Wien Modern, among many others. Upcoming projects in 2016 include collaborations with choreographer Maria Hassabi at the Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, and solo pieces at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and Mexico City’s House of Gaga. She teaches in the MFA program at Bard College, where she co-chairs the department of Music/Sound.