Organized as forum for people and things, the presentations are set in a theatrical arena arranged around a number of disputed objects. Introductions by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman.

Roundtable I
Forensic Architecture
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Buildings are both sensors and agents. They materialize political and economical forces, and also the events that befall them. Buildings undergo constant formal transformations in response to forces. They expand and contract with temperature and with the slow degeneration of their component materials, registering transformation in humidity, air quality, CO2 levels, salinity, seismic movements – and sometimes also the abrupt or violent events that target them or simply happen next to them. Some of these processes can be reconstructed through structural calculations, blast analyses, and the determination of the failure points of structures, details, and forms.

Participants:
Nikolaus Hirsch, Städelschule, Frankfurt a.M., Germany, moderator
Eve Hinman, Hinman Consulting Engineers, New York/San Francisco
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Columbia University
Norman Weiss, GSAPP, Columbia University

Lunch Break 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

Roundtable II
Constructed Evidence: The Thing Makes Its Forum
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

What if the object is not a “witness” but an entity constructed for the express purpose of creating, or activating, the forum? Such an object might map the diffused networks of informal or illegal labor, or be called upon to narrate historical events in the absence of evidentiary materials. In fact, the object may be the very thing that produces a forum where none previously existed. An artwork likewise produces its constituency; it gathers, rather than simply assumes an already extant audience. If the object, conceptualized as such, is not that which registers the events that came before it in the manner of the classical witness, then it might be said the object itself becomes the event to which the forum as witness will address itself.

Participants:
Susan Schuppli, Goldsmiths, University of London, moderator
Amber Horning, John Jay College, New York
Sara Jordeno, artist, New York
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design
Arne Svenson, artist, New York

Roundtable III
Animism
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.

In the habituated scheme of modernity, objects are conceived as the passive stuff on which human action leaves its imprint or trace. Whenever this passive/active nexus between objects and subject, humans and the non-human is disturbed or even reversed – as in the coming-to-life of seemingly dead matter, the becoming autonomous of inert things – we inevitably step into the territory of animism: that non-modern worldview that conceives of things as animated and possessing agency. With regards to Forensic Aesthetics, the historical discourse of animism provides a foil for a reflection on the boundaries at stake. This session examines a series of objects and liminal cases in which those borders are being destabilized or transgressed, from the crystal ball to educational objects from the 1920s, via the forensics of hair, to rocks.

Participants:
Anselm Franke, moderator
Brigid Doherty, Princeton University
Spyros Papapetros, Princeton University
Hugh Raffles, The New School for Social Research

Closing Remarks
5:30 – 6:00 p.m.
Srdjan Jovanovich Weiss, Tyler School of Art, Architecture Department, Temple University

Follow the links to detailed event description and DAY ONE schedule.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

“Grave diggers” have, since the middle of the 1980s, been unearthing bones and turning burial sites into an epistemic resource from which the details of war crimes can be reconstructed and brought into the pale of the law. Forensic teams, including archaeologists, anthropologists, pathologists, radiologists, dental experts, bio-data technicians, DNA specialists and statisticians of all sorts, are working in international teams organized by NGOs or sponsored by the United Nations or international tribunals. Their practices mark a shift in emphasis from the living to the dead, from memory and trauma to empirical science, and from subjects to objects in accounting for atrocities.

Introduction:
Thomas Keenan, Bard College
Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths, University of London

Presentations:
Eric Stover, writer and faculty director, The Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley
Grupa Spomenik / Monument Group: Damir Arsenijevic, Branimir Stojanovic, and Milica Tomić, Belgrade, Serbia

Follow the links to detailed event description and DAY TWO schedule.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

While legal and cultural scholars have labeled the third part of the 20th century – with its particular attention to testimony – as the “era of the witness,” the emergence of forensics in legal forums and popular entertainment signifies a new attention to the communicative capacity, agency, and power of things. This material approach is evident in the ubiquitous role that science and technologies now play in shaping contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and communicating. Today’s legal and political decisions are often based upon the capacity to display and read DNA samples, 3D laser scans, nanotechnology, and the enhanced vision of electromagnetic microscopes and satellite surveillance. From mass graves to retinal scans, the topography of the seabed to the remnants of destroyed buildings, forensics is not only about the diagnostics, but also about the rhetoric of persuasion. The aesthetic dimension of forensics includes its means of presentation, the theatrics of its delivery, the forms of image and gesture. The forensic aesthetics of the present carries with it grave political and ethical implications, spreading its impact across socioeconomic, environmental, scientific, and cultural domains.

Etymologically, forensics refers to the “forum,” and to the practice and skill of making an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering. Forensics has always been part of rhetoric, but its domain includes not only human speech but also that of objects. In forensic rhetoric, objects can address the forum. Because objects do not speak for themselves, there is a need for “translation” or “interpretation” – forensic rhetoric requires a person or a set of technologies to mediate between the object and the forum, to present the object, interpret it and place it within a larger net of relations.

The lectures and roundtable discussions by the participating artists, scholars and curators investigate these issues in a series of “forums” organized around a number of disputed objects.

Follow the links to detailed event schedules: DAY ONE and DAY TWO.

Presented by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and co-sponsored and co-organized with Cabinet Magazine, The Forensic Architecture ERC Project at The Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, and The Human Rights Project at Bard College, on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2011-2013 focus theme “Thingness.”

2001 Vera List Center Fellow Margarita Gutman speaks with leading urban scholars William Morrish and Saskia Sassen about her new book Buenos Aires: Itinerant Images of a Metropolitan Future in the First Centennial. This is the first book that comprehensively examines the imagination of the urban future in Buenos Aires. The volume contains close to two hundred images selected from over seven thousand publications which circulated in Buenos Aires between 1900 and 1920. The diversity, creativity, and humor of the images express what the citizens of Buenos Aires expected from a promising urban future. Moderated by David Scobey.

The event is co-sponsored by The New School for General Studies, Bachelor Program.

Buenos Aires: El Poder de la Anticipacion. Imagenes Itinerantes del Futuro Metropolitano en el primer Centenario.
(Buenos Aires: The Power of Anticipation. Itinerant Images of a Metropolitan Future in the First Centennial).
Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, 2011.

Presenter:
Margarita Gutman, Associate Professor, Urban Studies and International Affairs, The New School for General Studies

The Photography Program in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons the New School for Design, The Aperture Foundation, Vera List Center for Art and Politics, and The Shpilman Institute for Photography jointly present The Photographic Universe: A Conference. This two-day symposium brings together a range of leading photographers, scientists, theoreticians, historians, and philosophers from Parsons as well as other institutions, to reflect and discuss photography at a pivotal moment in its history.

The field of photography is constantly changing. Technologies, theories, and what constitutes a ‘photographer’ or a ‘photograph’ are prone to unending developments. In the last decade, this rapid transformation has only accelerated due to pervasive digitization. Quite possibly, photography is now in a similar place to where it was during the first few decades of its invention – a time when its emerging cultural significance quickly expanded due to innovative technological developments. Similarly, in the last two decades, we have seen an expanding definition of photography through the digital revolution, the Internet, and growing interest in new photographic processes and applications.

The Photographic Universe: A Conference reflects on this current moment. What is the importance of photography as a medium and a discipline, seen from the perspective of practitioners, users, pedagogues, technologists, historians and others? How can we evaluate contemporary culture within the expanding photographic field while speculating on the future of images? Prominent thinkers and practitioners discuss their roles in the expanding photographic field, evaluate its increasingly blurry relationship between art and life, and speculate on how photographic images will continue to change the way we see our world.

March 2 – Art and Philosophy
Charlotte Cotton & David Reinfurt , Andrea Geyer & Susie Linfield, Walter Benn Michaels & James Welling, Anne Collins Goodyear & Penelope Umbrico, Chris Boot & Susan Meiselas

March 3 – Science and Technology
Richard Benson & Frank Cost, Simone Douglas & Michael T. Jones, Anthony Aziz & Douglas Lanman, Wafaa Bilal & Virgina Rutledge, Trevor Paglen & Julia Bryan-Wilson

For more information, visit photographicuniverse.parsons.edu.

For video documentations of all the conversations that took place in the conference, visit vimeo.com/veralistcenter/videos.

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life.

In the 4th-century AD the Maya began writing exponentially large numbers to link historical dates to periods deep in time.  They used various glyphs and symbols to write these dates, symbols that include a dot for one and a bar for five and a stylized shell for zero within their positional base-twenty system.  The first known Maya zero dates back to AD 357, carved on a stone stela at Uaxactun, Guatemala.  Why Maya scribes wrote dates so deep in time and how they use, conceive, and visualize their zero has been the focus of Anna Blume’s archeological and ethno-historical research for the past eight years.

This event is paired with a lecture by artist with Josiah McElheny, presented on November 16, 2010.

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Anna Blume has been teaching and writing about art as a particular mediation between what can be seen and what remains un-seeable.  From this perspective, art, in its very making and existence, has within it a metaphysical component and a potentiality to exceed its own materiality towards expression both unleashed and unbound. Her field of research ranges from 6th-century sandstone rock cut temples in central Western India to 9th-century numerical Maya notations carved into limestone stelae. Blume received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University in 1997. She has taught at various art colleges in New York including Cooper Union, Parson’s School of Design, School of Visual Arts, and is currently Associate Professor of the History of Art at the State University of New York (FIT).  Supported by the Ford Foundation, State University of New York, and the American Philosophical Society, her research on Maya concepts of zero is forthcoming in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life.

Artist Mel Chin discusses the philosophical and conceptual development of selected works, in relation to the notion of sustainability. For more than three decades, Chin has been developing a unique and socially engaged body of work in which cultural diversity and global solidarity played an important role. His project Revival Field, perhaps his most well-known work, has made him one of the most important pioneers of ecological art. His works have been defined “sculptural witnesses to ecological and political tragedies.” Whether examining American imperialism in Central America, September 11, the fate of the Native American Indians, civil wars in postcolonial Africa, abuse at Guantanamo Bay, the extinction of animal species, or the way in which people pollute the natural world, Chin’s practice creates an arena in which social and (geo)political activism are coupled with ideas from philosophy, biology, history, religion, anthropology, literature, and alchemy. Chin received a BA from Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1975, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 and 1990. He lives in North Carolina.

]]> http://www.veralistcenter.org/currentprograms/?p=2005 Wed, 03 Nov 2010 19:30:23 +0000 http://www.veralistcenter.org/?p=2005 Tuesday, November 16, 2010 – 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Parsons The New School for Design
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Kellen Auditorium
2 West 13th Street at 5th Avenue
Free

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary…

A man-made catastrophe of rare magnitude has changed the Gulf of Mexico. The largest marine oil spill in history, the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewed oil into the sea for close to three months, from April 20 to July 15, 2010, at the rate of 60,000 barrels a day. How are we to think of this catastrophe? Do customary categories – environmental disaster, corporate responsibility, governmental regulations – still apply? Is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill calling for a new consideration of systems we depend on?

Join faculty members from across The New School as they analyze distinct aspects of the oil spill, drawing from their expertise in political science, economics, environmentalism, media, ethics, fashion, and art. Each one will speak for five minutes and address the crisis from their particular professional domain. Possible questions include: what is the nature of our dependency on technology, and how has technical know-how become the domain of a few? What is the impact of those who made their living on boats and beaches along the coast, and of their new conversations with distant peers in Alaska, still struggling after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill? What issues of design are implicated in the inability to cap the well? How have images of the plume served as a metaphor of the failures of both corporate responsibility and government regulation? How has the visual, what can be seen versus what cannot, shaped our perception of the spill’s effects? What long-term social, political, and environmental consequences might the disaster have in the years to come? What are we to the coral crabs and brittle stars, the mussels and tube worms of the “cold seeps,” the geological features of the Gulf’s ocean floor?

An interdivisional encounter organized by Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School for General Studies, The New School for Social Research and Parsons The New School for Design.

Looking at other animals is, for most humans, a fun thing to do. That is, unless it’s depressing. Contemporary zoos go to surprising lengths in order to satiate our desires to see animals that look happy–from spraying Calvin Klein cologne in tiger enclosures (to inspire them to be more active) to giving female gorillas human contraceptives so that they can have the joy of sex without the complication of too many babies. But how do we know if a zoo animal is happy or not? And once we’ve figured it out, what on earth do we do about it? In this talk, Laurel Braitman explores human understandings of animal happiness and discontent in the context of zoos and aquariums and just what these ideas say about us.

Laurel Braitman’s lecture is paired with a talk by artist Nina Katchadourian, also focusing on human/animal relationships.

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Laurel Braitman, historian and anthropologist of science at MIT, studies the phenomena of mental illness in nonhuman animals. Braitman has worked as a biologist and environmental conservation professional and her interests include not only the shifting relationships between humans and other creatures, but also how understandings of evolutionary relationships and species distinctions change our ideas of ourselves. She received her B.A. in Biology and Writing from Cornell University and is completing her doctorate in MIT’s History, Anthropology and Science, Technology and Society Program. Braitman’s book on her research, Animal Madness, is forthcoming with Simon and Schuster.