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‘Towards a Physiological Novel‘

(BL.)

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’ is a series of 8 bi-weekly talks and screenings initiated by Sidsel Meineche Hansen on the subject of communication and Angest, and the production of noise and nervousness in an electronic era.

The Nervous System is a collection of cells, tissues, and organs through which the body receives information from its surroundings and then directs the body in how to respond to that information. The reception and transmission of information and affect is a form of constant communication that models the biochemistry and neurology of the subject.

The talks will operate as a mode of research for a physiological novel that examines how information circulates – how it, in physiological terms, is embodied, and consumed in our current society.

The series will bring together a diverse range of theoreticians, artists and fiction writers whose works’ provide a flexible foundation for dealing with these ideas. To inform and compliment the talks, there will be a selection of literature available, including books and journals relating to critical theory and art, which together establish a bibliography. These events are free.

#3.

The Artistic Dérivative, or Some Things I Learned About Life and Labor from a Dead Hare

Speaker: Stevphen Shukaitis.

Wednesday 20^th of April.
Open 7pm, talk starts at 7.15pm

“Everyone is an artist” proclaimed Joseph Beuys. Beuys, as an inheritor of the avant-garde desire to abolish the separation between art and daily life, argued for the realization of a multitude forms of creativity through out many areas of social life, or forms of social sculpture as he called it. What can we make of this goal in age of semiocapitalism where the dream of everyone an artist has been realized in perverse form as “everyone is a worker” all the time? That is to say where the relationalality ‘sculpted’ through the circuits of an always-present network culture are rendered into opportunities for capitalist valorization, all YouWork and MyProfit? Is it possible to reclaim any of the subversive impulse of the avant-garde when the difference between the advertising firm and the détournement of the art provocateur is increasingly imperceptible? Drawing from a compositional approach to political analysis this presentation will examine the ways that social energies and processes created within various tendrils of the avant-garde have influenced the development of the capitalist production. From this it will elaborate the notion of the artistic dérivative, or a form of production where value is created through the labor of circulating creativity through the productive basin of the metropolis, configured as a factory.

Stevphen Shukaitis is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the Essex Business School at the University of Essex. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day (2009, Autonomedia) and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor. For more on his work and writing, see http://stevphen.mahost.org.

                                                                                          
Sidsel Meineche Hansen is an artist and researcher. Her current work titled “Towards a Physiological novel” is a mode of research for a novel that contest the relationship between physiology and fiction. She has recently obtained an MA from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths in London. In this context she co-initiated the ongoing collaboration Model Court that deals with technological, spatial and aesthetic aspects of legal procedures. Contact: Sidselmeineche@gmail.com

# 4. On the Concept of Angest in Kierkegaard. 

Next in the series is the 4th of May at 7pm.
Speaker: Isak Winkel Holm (DK)

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’
Bi-weekly talks on Wednesdays at 7pm.

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