The scanned notebook of Casey Gollan, a participant in Triple Canopy’s first Summer Intensive, a two-week seminar on contemporary writing, art, digital media, and the practice of publishing. Participants Maya Harakawa and Dennis Hogan discuss the experience.
Learn more about the program.
October 2, 2014
7:00pm
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
In graphic design, what does it mean for a period to have a style? What does it mean for a style to have a proper period? With Period Styles, Triple Canopy examines how aesthetic movements, technological shifts, social networks, and popular sentiments come together in the creation of dominant styles in certain places and at certain times. For instance, consider the mid-century International Typographic Style associated with the Basel School of Design and Armin Hoffmann; the multifarious, if eventually iconic, work and structure of Pentagram, established in 1972; avant-garde Dutch practices such as Studio Dumbar, whose creations from the 1980s and 90s later filtered into American graduate programs. How have the hallmark changes of the past several decades—the rise of the MFA, the ubiquity of design software, the patterns of producing and consuming that characterize the digital environment—changed the ways in which styles are distinguished, deployed, and consolidated?
Participants will identify today’s preeminent styles, discuss their precedents and genesis, and parse their influence and effects. They will also ask if the period style may now be a thing of the past: In light of widespread access to design tools and the incredible speed at which visual identities are formulated and discarded, is graphic design now too profuse and diverse for the period style to be a useful concept? Or, given that period styles tend to reflect centers of capital, esteemed designers, and wealthy clients, how might the period styles of the future be formed or deformed by nascent cultural and geographic orientations?
Agency, Asceticism, Autonomism, Automation, Guaranteed Basic Income, Communization, Crisis, Democracy, Debt, Detroit, Disappointment, Domes Extinction, Hedge-fund Utilitarians, Hurricane Sandy, Innovation, Interplanetary Colonization, Moravec’s Paradox, Nature, No Future, Occupation, Promethianism, Resignation, Singularity, Solutionism, Speculation, State, Surveillance, Technological Unemployment, Work, Zombies, Trayvon, Justice, Enhancement, Famine, Overpopulation, Governance, Geoengineering, Localism, Science Fiction, Silicon Valley, Technology, Quantified Self, Scarcity, Posthumanism, Robots …
Speculations (“The future is ______”), the upcoming book from Triple Canopy, is a lexicon of the central terms of Speculations, is meant to convey the relationship between ideation and action, in order to suggest viable approaches not just to interpreting the world but to changing it.
Each entry consists of edited excerpts from speculations made by, among others, Fatima Al Qadiri, David Auerbach, Gopal Balakrishnan, Ray Brassier, Ted Chiang, Jace Clayton, John Crowley, Samuel Delany, Silvia Federici, Rivka Galchen, David Graeber, N. Katherine Hayles, Katie Kitamura, Josh Kline, Benjamin Kunkel, Rachel Kushner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mary Mattingly, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeny Morozov, Hương Ngô, Trevor Paglen, Ashwin Parameswaran, Christian Parenti, Srikanth Reddy, David Rieff, Taryn Simon, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Rush, Sukhdev Sandhu, Astra Taylor, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Kathi Weeks. The book includes new artwork by José Léon Cerillo, who created the structure that housed Speculations at MoMA PS1.
Speculations (“The future is ______”) is available exclusively, for free, to Triple Canopy members who sign up in the next 24 hours at the laughably low rate of $3 per month.
The book is a lexicon of the central terms of Speculations—a fifty-day series of lectures, discussions, and debates held at MoMA PS1 last summer—and strives to convey the relationship between ideation and action and to suggest viable approaches to interpreting and changing the world. Featuring work by Ray Brassier, Ted Chiang, Jace Clayton, Samuel Delany, Silvia Federici, Rivka Galchen, N. Katherine Hayles, Josh Kline, Rachel Kushner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeny Morozov, Hương Ngô, Trevor Paglen, Christian Parenti, Srikanth Reddy, David Rieff, Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Rush, and Astra Taylor.
Out of Alternatives
Presented by Common Practice New York
and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard)
Artists Space Books & Talks
55 Walker Street, New York, NY
Sunday, May 18, 2014
11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
On May 18, Common Practice New York will present Out of Alternatives, a symposium on the role of small-scale arts organizations in New York City, hosted by Artists Space Books & Talks and co-presented by CCS Bard. Participants include Rhea Anastas, Katherine Brewer Ball, David Joselit, Ralph Lemon, Stephen Levin, Park MacArthur, Nadja Millner-Larsen, and Andrea Fraser and Lise Soskolne for Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), with additional presentations and support from CCS Bard students Sabrina Blaichman, Neringa Cerniauskaite, Andrew Kachel, Clara Lopez, Cloé Perrone, and Carla Acevedo-Yates.
Out of Alternatives, the first public initiative by CPNY, will examine the ways in which small-scale organizations are perceived and understood by audiences, artists, and funders; identify the challenges of operating in today’s climate; and revive discussions of obstacles and inequalities which have persisted since the rise of the alternative space. Out of Alternatives will further a partnership between CPNY and CCS Bard that began in fall of 2013 with a series of invitational roundtables, site visits, and discussions. This partnership will continue with the production of a publication that will include transcripts from these events alongside additional essays and artistic contributions.
Space is limited, seating is first-come, first-served.
11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.
Keynote: “In Praise of Small”
Art historian David Joselit will ask whether there is a particular ethos possessed by small-scale organizations and, if so, how does it operate within the greater field? By reframing small-scale organizations as propositions unto themselves, Joselit will discuss how publics emerge from these spaces; the relationship between scale and radicalism; the importance of documentation; and the ability to speculate, politicize information, and re-signify art beyond its profit-making potential. Joselit will be introduced by members of Common Practice New York and Paul O’Neill, director of the graduate program at CCS Bard.
12:00–1:00 p.m.
New York City Council Member Stephen Levin and the activist group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.)—represented by artists Andrea Fraser, board member, and Lise Soskolne, core organizer—will each present propositions for the city’s cultural policy. Both plans address the economic challenges facing artists and ways of combating inequality. Taken together, their proposals question how structures for art production, presentation, and reception are shaped and surveyed, especially with regards to the role of small-scale nonprofits. Do such organizations have a responsibility to local artist communities? How can these organizations successfully argue for their importance at the level of city government?
2:00–3:00 p.m.
Artists Ralph Lemon and Park McArthur and scholar Katherine Brewer Ball will discuss how performance, deliberately or incidentally, adapts to the scale and audience of an organization. How is the radicalism of a performer’s proposition changed as a result? The academic field of Performance Studies considers performance as a sprawling category—one that encompasses social life and is inherently interdisciplinary and site-responsive. What can performance tell us about the changing relationship between small-scale organizations and their publics? With research and support by CCS Bard students Andrew Kachel and Clara Lopez.
3:30–4:00 p.m.
CCS Bard students and curators Sabrina Blaichman, Neringa Cerniauskaite, andCloé Perrone will present three propositions for small-scale organizations, informed by the work of proliferating, agile, artist-led collectives. What methodologies might organizations adopt from collectives that have embraced so-called capitalist infrastructures and “accelerationist” strategies? In a landscape where both models coexist, even thrive, what challenges do artists and curators face when attempting to envision the future?
4:00–5:00 p.m.
Art historian Rhea Anastas, media historian Nadja Millner-Larsen, and Light Industry cofounder and director Ed Halter, will discuss whether small-scale organizations establish a kind of instant art history, serving museums and culture-at-large as test sites for new artistic practice. What is the responsibility of an organization to address pressing social and political concerns with “instant” programming? Likewise, can an organization’s history—its archive, its public-as-archive—provide an ethical roadmap for its future? With research and support by CCS Bard student Carla Acevedo-Yates.
Common Practice New York would like to thank Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, David Joselit, Margaret Lee, Ralph Lemon, Allan Schwartzman, and Lynne Tillman, whose contributions to our invitational roundtables this past fall have informed and inspired Out of Alternatives. Generous support for Common Practice New York and Out of Alternatives has been provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Lambent Foundation/Fund of Tides Foundation, and Outset USA.
The Penitentiary is a collaborative umbrella project by artists Marina Andrijcic-Ojeda and Catarina Ferreira—operating a series of independent, site-specific art exhibitions to take place in abandoned war-era prisons throughout Eastern Europe. The Battery Project is The Penitentiary’s first exhibition and will take place at Patarei Prison, located in Tallinn, Estonia, June 1–July 1, 2014.
For other interventions into Cold War bunkers, see Lisi Raskin’s “Endgame Tourism” on Triple Canopy.
Image: David Baumflek.
EXCERPTS >|< Finding His Voice (1929)
| Hosted at: Internet Archive
| From: Western Electric Company, Inc.
| Download: Ogg | 512Kb MPEG4 | MPEG2
| Digital Copy: public domain
A series of Animated GIFs excerpted from Finding His Voice: a cartoon showing how sound motion pictures work, produced by a company that was an innovator in the field. Story by W.E. Erpi (pseudonym for Western Electric, Electrical Research Products Inc.). Directors: F. Lyle Goldman and Max Fleischer.We invite you to watch the full video HERE.
EXCERPTS by OKKULT Motion Pictures: a collection of GIFs excerpted from out-of-copyright/unknown/rare/controversial moving images.
A digital curation project for the diffusion of open knowledge.>|<
(via 2headedsnake)
Source: archive.org
Circa 1976, this was a Dial-A-Satellite hotline providing New Yorkers with daily information about passing satellites.
Other tips from the 1976 listicle published in the New York Times, “101 Things to Love About New York City.”
“Internet is coming”
A memo from 20 years ago, today.
Key quote: “The internet is a collection of computer networks that is connected around the world…A code of ‘netiquette’ exists among users and within user groups, but otherwise, you pay your money, find your niche and take your chances.”
via Johnny Kauffman at NPR
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