Comprehensive and sly, “Change Encounters” is a new project by Lin + Lam, developed over the course of the duo’s 2009-10 Vera List Center at the New School Fellowship and now making its debut.

Conceived in response to the Vera List Center’s focus theme “Speculating on Change,” Lin + Lam have collected an interdisciplinary array of cultural and historical predictive devices, appropriations from popular culture, historical sources, and academic scholarship, including original interviews with professionals from diverse backgrounds, and arranged this archive into an interactive website. “Change Encounters” offers multiple vantage points on the nature and the process of change and speculation and is accessed through a random number generator based on the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching, one of the oldest books in the world and a predictive device that is still commonly used today.

The project takes its name from the title of René Clair’s 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow, a comedy in which a journalist longs for the ability to know the future in advance in order to get a jump on breaking news. This desire for precognition determines human behavior across many fields of experience. Many a head of state – emperors, presidents and dictators, including Napoleon, Hitler and Reagan – has turned to oracles to authorize and consolidate their power. The capacity to aspire to a different future is, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, critical to the possibility for the underprivileged to overcome dire conditions. Can the capacity to aspire be learned and shared? What enables future thinking that is not a product of denial, defense or mere fantasy, but is constructive to change? For contemporary forecasting on our current recession and repressions, professionals from divergent fields join Lin + Lam and present their perspectives on how the future is speculated and formed.

Program
2:00-3:00pm
Premiere Showing “It Happened Tomorrow” by Lin + Lam

3:00-4:00pm
Panel Discussion

Patricia Ticineto Clough
Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York

Mitch Horowitz
Editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

Orit Halpern
Assistant Professor of Department of History at The New School for Social Research

H. Darrel Rutkin
Independent scholar, historian of science with an emphasis on the history of medieval, Renaissance and early modern astrology

4:00-5:00
Demo with Refreshments

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2011 focus theme “Speculating on Change.”

Posted on August 10, 2010

This panel discussion examines the viability of the conventionally printed and published book —monographic, serial, facsimile, high-value, low-budget, no-budget, and otherwise—as a means of artistic production in view of digital media. At a time of mass convergence, when much of the social experience is structured by virtual, electronic means, how might the physical and material residue of small-scale publications distinguish themselves from a space apart for resistance and subjectivity? Moderated by Gil Blank, the panel includes artists Roe Ethridge and Collier Schorr, alongside with James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff of Primary Information.

The Aperture Foundation, publisher of Aperture magazine, is a not-for-profit institution dedicated to the support and advancement of photography as a fine art. In collaboration with the Photography Program in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons Confounding Expectations XI is generously supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Henry Nias Foundation, the ASMP Fund, and the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. The lecture series has been hosted by The New School since 2001.

Posted on March 29, 2010

In this re-visitation of John Cage’s 1961 sound work WHERE ARE WE GOING? AND WHAT ARE WE DOING?, sounds of The New School, sampled from recordings collected across campus, are re-configured through processes involving various methods of chance and randomization. Cage was first asked to respond to the questions in the title when he addressed art students at the evening school of Pratt Institute. He has also described the resulting piece as emerging from conversations with friends about the mutually influential relationship between art, science and nature.

Echoing the structural elements of Cage’s original piece, this response to the questions “where are we going and what are we doing? ” draws on site recordings made during sound walks through The New School. These recordings are superimposed on each other using chance procedures and amplified as a two-channel composition onto the street around The New School’s main building.  The live ambient sounds function as the performer does in Cage’s work. While drawing attention to ongoing shifts in time they also encourage attention to and reflection on the conditions that produce those shifts–conditions that may themselves, be shifted.

When no events are taking place in the gallery and Parts & Labor lies inactive and mute, these recordings will emanate  from the vicinity of the truck, evocative of the institution and the activities around it.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

Posted on October 7, 2009

An informal gathering among faculty, librarians and archivists of The New School who will address how notions of institutional memory and identity are created through libraries and archives. Examining the way bodies of knowledge are structured and organized, the participants will also explore possibilities for the future of information science, and consider how the social production of knowledge contributes to identity – on both the level of the individual, and in society at large.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

Posted on September 20, 2009

This class is a query on the nature of history, interrogating the relationship of the things we collect to how we construct our pasts. We explore archives broadly defined, from the contents of family photo albums to vast collections housed in libraries to the design of buildings that contain such collections. Ultimately, the city itself is examined as an archive in its own right-a vibrant collection of interrelated artifacts that records the selective presence of the past in built form. Students visit archival sites and undertake projects that consider the history, condition, scope, format, and design of archives in New York City.

Presented as part of the week-long exhibition and event series, “By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School.”

Posted on September 20, 2009

Presented in conjunction with an exhibition of recent video art from the Middle East on view at the Art in General gallery, this discussion considers the contributions of video art to political developments in the region. Speakers include Galit Eilat, writer, curator and founding director of the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon and Reem Fadda, a Ramallah-based curator, art historian and former director of the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA).

Eilat and Fadda consider the role of art as a tool for civil disobedience and passive resistance that affects its surroundings, wielded by individuals during times of social or political distress. Within this context they discuss Liminal Spaces, a long-term project examining the possibility of joint action in light of the ever-growing existential hardship of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Video works that were produced during this project will be on view at Art in General as part of the Mobile Archive, a cross-national library of video art.

The Israeli Center for Digital Art was founded to promote, distribute, and exhibit video, media-, and Internet-based art in Israel. An exhibition space with a library open to the public, the video archive contains hundreds of works, including pieces by Israeli artists who have exhibited at the center and others who have contributed to the archive over time.

For the last two years, the Mobile Archive has traveled to art institutions in Europe and the Middle East, acquiring new works in each location. The exhibition at Art in General will be the Mobile Archive’s first stop in the United States.

Presented in collaboration with Art in General and the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon.

Posted on September 20, 2009