The Public School New York

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group Meeting 3

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 20:25:00 -0400

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group Meeting 3:

[Click the above link to download audio]

Discussion of Anti-Oedipus, chapters 1.6 - 2.2.

A Blade of Grass

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 13:44:13 -0400

A Blade of Grass has just posted an article on non-hierarchical learning using Trade School and the Public School as two different models.

Take a look through the link above.

To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body by Félix Guattari.

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 13:15:22 -0400

To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body by Félix Guattari.:

The essay linked to above should be of interest to the Anti-Oedipus reading group.

“To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body written by Félix Guattari yet published anonymously for the journal Recherches no. 12, 1973 for who he was the director of publications. Entitled “Three Billion Perverts: Great Encyclopedia of Homosexuals.” , this issue of the journal was destroyed by the French government presided by Georges Pompidou. It is accessible to us thanks to Sylvère Lotringer and his collection of Guattari’s writings published inChaosophy (semiotext(e), 2007).”

Conversations After the Creative Time Summit Update

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 17:20:11 -0400

Conversations After the Creative Time Summit will now take place at 1PM on Sunday, October 14th.

It will still be at 155 Freeman.

Upcoming Events

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 11:40:57 -0400

***Just Scheduled***

10/14 Conversations after Creative Time Summit

11:00 AM at 155 Freeman St.

This will be an open class to continue conversations about the theme of this year’s Creative Time Summit, ’Confronting Inequality.’ We are in the process of working with Creative Time to invite a few presenters to join us in this discussion.

This year’s Creative Time Summit will happen in October 12~13 in New York City. The first day will be live streamed on Creative Time website, the second day will be small group discussion with presenters.

“In light of the events of the past year, the 2012 Creative Time Summit will address the extreme wealth disparity that is increasingly affecting the global economy and politics. Presenters at the 2012 Creative Time Summit: Confronting Inequity will reflect upon recent upheavals in the international political and economic climate, focusing specifically on the topic of wealth inequity across the globe and the ways in which it erodes democracy.” http://creativetime.org/summit/overview/

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group Meeting 2

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 11:02:00 -0400

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group Meeting 2:

[click link above to download audio]

Discussion of Chapter one of Anti-Oedipus

Upcoming Events

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:26:00 -0400

10/3

7:00 Anti-Oedipus/Deleuze and Guattari Wednesday Reading Group

This meeting will cover the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus. There’s no need to have been at the first meeting to attend. Hope to see you all there!

This class will be held at 155 Freeman St.

10/7

7:00 Anti-Oedipus/Deleuze and Guattari Sunday Reading Group

The first meeting of the Sunday reading group for anyone unable to attend the Wednesday meetings.

This class will be held at Cage at 83A Hester St.

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 12:52:44 -0400

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group:

[Click link above to download audio]

This is a discussion of some key terms from the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus.

On Time: Rhythm and Musical Time

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 16:44:07 -0400

On Time: Rhythm and Musical Time:

[Click link above to download audio]

[Slides which accompany the presentation can be downloaded here:

part 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?4v6via18j4p4bmo

part 2: http://www.mediafire.com/?hg5oxka8lk5u5hb ]

Facilitators: Jackson Moore and Brian House

Music may have a biological basis as a faculty for synchronizing actions within groups of people. Periodic rhythms grounded in the body allow us to coordinate collective behavior in time. As anecdotal support for this idea, I will discuss two independent cases in which nascent cognitive theories of music had to be refactored to take time into account: James Tenney’s theory of musical gestalts, and Fred Lerdahl’s generative musical grammar. Both theorists came from a tradition that emphasizes pitch organization, but were compelled to ground their musical morphology in rhythm and time in order to produce a coherent formal model. A look at these efforts will help us to think about how we perceive and participate in events as they occur, and supplement our original discussion of time itself as a transcendent entity with a look at the forms that emerge from it.

Jackson Moore is a musician / composer / artist. In the nineties his work examined the semiotic systems that musicians use to think and communicate with one another. Since moving to New York in 1999, he has undertaken various projects: writing and recording antisymmetrical song forms with jazz soloists, creating a musical pidgin language, developing a formalized music based on natural language, and building an auditory spacecraft, among other things.

I will initiate a discussion on Rhythmanalysis (1992), a collection of essays in which Henri Lefebvre posits that rhythm deserves its own science. In one particularly evocative chapter, he attunes himself to the rhythms perceptible from his Paris balcony — a dérive through time rather than space — not just listening but engaging all of his senses to apprehend the cycles of the city. Lefebvre suggests that the acculturation of the individual to the environment and to society is a process of rhythmic entrainment, and he introduces classifications of rhythms and their relationships as a means of critical reflection on society’s relationship to time. I am also interested in the possibilities for and implications of a contemporary, data-centric practice of rhythmanalysis.

Brian House is a bricoleur whose work has traversed locative media, experimental music, interactive narrative, and social practice. By constructing embodied, participatory systems, he seeks to negotiate between programmed constraints and the serendipity of everyday life. He spends his days at the New York Times’ R&D lab and his nights at Eyebeam. http://brianhouse.net

On Time

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:15:00 -0500

On Time:

[Click link above to download audio]

This is a recording of the first discussion of On Time, a class which invited participants from a wide variety of fields to share their thoughts about time. Here is the course description:

Any sensation or experience that we have can be understood only on the basis of time, only if we locate the occurrence within its temporality. Yet, we never have an experience of time itself; time is never an object present in our world that we can intuit or conceive of. Something like this paradox led Hegel to call time the nonsensuous sensuous. What, then, can we actually know of time?

It seems that time, much like Being, can only be known through its difference from these phenomena (time never manifests itself as such, within the phenomenal realm). Time is only intelligible on the basis of some difference, the changes in our world that lead us to intuit a temporal progression of cause and effect, which in turn requires time as the ground of its identity and continuity. We expect something to support the flux of our world, and yet time is only this flux; Aristotle said as much when he defined time as the “number of motion,” and Einstein said the same when he defined time as what we measure with a clock.

We will hold a series of meetings examining how time shapes the form of expression in a variety of discourses, and how these arts and sciences play with and within their peculiar temporality. We will begin with a meeting where we consider the representation of time in the history of metaphysics, by looking at Derrida’s Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Derrida locates Heidegger’s lecture “On Time and Being” on the cusp of this metaphysical tradition. Heidegger points out, among the many paradoxes of time, that time is nothing temporal. What is temporal arises and passes away within time, while time itself does nothing such. As with Being, Heidegger cautions against saying “time is,” as such a locution presumes what can never be a given, that time is, that it could ever come to presence as a being. He employs an idiomatic German expression, es gibt, it gives, which would translate to the English “there is” (it gives time/there is time). For the same reason, we must avoid asking the question “what is time,” and inquire instead - Time: what gives?

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 7: Jonathan Basile on A Crossing Without Borders: Death in the Thought of Jacques Derrida (audio is part II of II)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:27:00 -0500

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 7: Jonathan Basile on A Crossing Without Borders: Death in the Thought of Jacques Derrida (audio is part II of II):

[Click link above to download part 2 of audio]

What is death? How does our being mortal shape the possibilities of our cognition and our desire? How should we live in order to come to terms with the term of life, and how does our orientation towards a good death become an art of living? How does the history of thinking about death shape our understanding of these possibilities, and how do the cultural and other differences surrounding the treatment of death play a part in constituting those very differences—the demarcations of ethnicities, nations, religions, genders, etc.—all the lines drawn on this side of the division between life and death? What does thinking about death in general reveal to us about death in our culture—about our medical industry, about our political furor over “death panels,” about a culture industry obsessed with the equation of youth and beauty, for example?

We will discuss these themes as they are developed in two of Derrida’s major works on death: The Gift of Death and Aporias. In all of our thinking about life in this world, about responsibility, authenticity, temporality, finitude, or mortality, for example, it seems that we always surreptitiously introduce some infinite beyond into the constitution of the here-below, a transcendence that may be utterly unknowable despite our complete reliance on it. It has gone by many names throughout history: the Form of the Good, God, the unnameable possibility of the name, the Unconditioned, the Inverted World, Being, Differance, or the secret; we will consider what it would mean to nickname it “Death.”

Jonathan Basile is a volunteer with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, visiting hospice patients and their families. He currently studies at Brooklyn College, working towards an MFA in Creative Writing. This past summer he organized a series of discussions on death in Western philosophy through The Public School New York, focusing on the work of Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida.

For more information, including the related readings and writing assignment, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3753

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 7: Jonathan Basile on A Crossing Without Borders: Death in the Thought of Jacques Derrida

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:26:00 -0500

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 7: Jonathan Basile on A Crossing Without Borders: Death in the Thought of Jacques Derrida:

[Click link above to download part 1 of audio]

For more information, including the related readings and writing assignment, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3753

‎#whOWNSpace wants to help take back the commons in Greenpoint (not to mention NYC, the US, and...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 09:35:00 -0500

‎#whOWNSpace wants to help take back the commons in Greenpoint (not to mention NYC, the US, and around the world). It all starts with a walk, a talk, a few simple materials, and you. Join us today at 1:00pm at 155 Freeman. Design experience not required.

This Public School NY studio/class will use design and urban theory to critically study the design, ownership, and rules of Greenpoint’s open spaces and infrastructure as part of the #whOWNSpace project. The lens for the studio will be on neighborhood power dynamics around space, focusing on the potential of open space to create democratic vitality.

Meet up: 155 Freeman St, Brooklyn
Facilitators: DSGN AGNC, DoTank:Brooklyn, BRUNO, 596 acres
Twitter: #whOWNSpace, #GRNPNT

Activist Technology Demo Day

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:27:00 -0500

Activist Technology Demo Day
http://demo-day.org
Saturday, January 28 3-6pm
Eyebeam Art + Technology Center
http://eyebeam.org
#demoday_nyc
#demoday

From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, technology has played an important role in shaping contemporary resistance and the representation of these events in the media. What new tools of protest and occupation have emerged over the past year? How does their use help to shape tomorrow’s democracies? The Urban Research Group @ Eyebeam and The Public School New York have invited activists, technologists, artists, designers, and community organizers who have a working prototype of an activist technology to occupy a worktable at Eyebeam and share their work with the public. Drawn from proposals submitted through an open call, we have selected a group of projects and communities that extend the creative use of technology and its social implications. Our interest is in creating a platform for encounter, conversation and collaboration. Visit http://demo-day.org/projects for participating project information.

#whOWNSpace: Observe, Diagram, Intervene

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 05:54:00 -0500

ANNOUNCING:

#whOWNSpace: Observe, Diagram, Intervene#UES | #midtown | #FiDi
November 19th, at Noon in the three locations indicated above. (RSVP to attend these classes)

William Whyte on urban space and the enforcement of undemocratic rules: “a stiff, clarifying test is in order.”

This Public School NY studio/class will use design and urban theory to critically study the design, ownership, and rules of New York City’s open spaces as part of the #whOWNSpace project. It will occur at three sites simultaneously in order to focus on the varying centers of control in Manhattan—both public and private. The lens for the studio will be on power dynamics around public space, focusing on the potential of open space to create democratic vitality.

The Upper East Side (#UES) group will focus on the civic center of power that dictates many of the rules and designs of New York’s public space: NYC’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Meet up: 64th St and 5th ave
Facilitators: Aurash Khawarzad and Daniel Latorre Twitter: #whOWNSpace #ues

The Midtown (#midtown) group will focus on Bryant Park and the privately-owned public spaces (POPS) around the Bank of America headquarters.Meet up: 42nd St and 6th ave
Facilitators: Quilian Riano, Phil Grimaldi, and Melissa Frost Twitter: #whOWNSpace #midtown

The Financial District (#FiDi) group will focus on the area near the Goldman Sachs headquarters. Meet up: Hudson River Greenway and Warren St
Facilitators: Rena Mande and Amanda Rekemeyer Twitter: #whOWNSpace #FiDi

At 3PM All groups meet up at the POPS inside the Bank of America headquarters for the official launch of a #whOWNSpace crowd-sourcing map of Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS) and POPS, publicly-owned open spaces (POOS ).

This collaborative studio/class has been organized and will be led by DSGN AGNC, DoTank:Brooklyn, and Not An Alternative in collaboration with The Public School NY

#whOWNSpace

triplecanopy: n+1, with Astra Taylor (Examined Life; Zizek!)...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:54:00 -0400

triplecanopy:

n+1, with Astra Taylor (Examined Life; Zizek!) and Sarah Leonard of Dissent, have put together Occupy!, “a history, both personal and documentary, and the beginning of an analysis of the first month of the occupation.” Contributors include Elizabeth Gumport, Mark Grief, Benjamin Kunkel, Marina Sitrin, and Triple Canopy senior editor Sarah Resnick. Download here.

A project that features contributions from friends of the Public School New York.

Toward a Speculative Realist Literary CriticismFacilitated by...

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 01:11:00 -0400

Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism
Facilitated by Eileen Joy
September 15, 2011
Van Alen Books, 30 West 22nd Street, New York

This class was co-produced by the Public School New York and BABEL Working Group.

Download the audio file, here.

Relative to the current debate over “close” versus “symptomatic” (New Historicist + psychoanalytic) reading strategies, I’d like to outline a series of leading questions relative to what an inhuman or post/human “close reading” might look like, especially under the cross-disciplinary influence of the movements known as “speculative realism,” “object-oriented ontology,” “dark ecology,” “weird realism,” and “vibrant materialism” (as mainly typified in the work and thought of Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett). This will also serve as a springboard to collectively explore what Michael Witmore, in his essay “We Have Never Not Been Inhuman” (published in the inaugural issue of postmedieval on the post/human), suggested with respect to the inhuman characteristics of literary narrative:

Mathematics and diagrams have often been associated with an anti- or inhuman reduction of complexity into ‘graphs and numbers’, a reduction that we associate with the rise of experimentalism in the seventeenth century. Why should this be so? Are there not, on the one hand, ways in which narrative itself is—particularly in terms of plot—designed to implement a strategic reduction in complexity among the social and physical sources of change and transformation in the world?

And further,

Our work with narratives puts us in touch with forms of reduction or compression that are every bit as diagrammatic and so (potentially) inhuman as those who study the compression algorithms of physics or planetary biology. The key for us is the way in which narratives of human action introduce counterfactual ideals—impossible, limiting, but also operative and effectual—that are immanent in the objects we study, not simply projections of the creators or interpreters of those objects. The issue here is where one locates the absence of the human, just as a century ago, it was where one located its essence.

This class will work to open up new questions relative to the possibilities and problematics of what might be called close, inhuman reading—an “inhuman” reading, moreover, that does not dispense with “humanist” reading ethics, per se, but rather, fortifies them through non-human-centric lenses and concerns.

Eileen A. Joy teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and has published various articles and book chapters on Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, violence, ethics, and the post/human. She is the founder and co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group, and co-director of punctum books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion. She is also the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf (West Virginia University Press, 2007) and Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2007).

For more information, please visit: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3659

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 4: Ben Woodard on...

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:18:22 -0400

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 4: Ben Woodard on Complicitous Continuums: The Horrors of the Cosmicist Earth

Saturday, September 17, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

This course explores the Geo-philosophical earth as theory-fictional node for explaining a cosmicism/universalism in which the outside is continuously advancing upon all purportedly firm grounds and solid bodies. Weirdness, as in the weird of weird fiction and the darkness of dark romanticism and the crumble of the gothic, is explored as the intrusion of the non-local upon the local, arguing that all stability is in fact subject to continuous degradation, shift, and collapse.

Ben Woodard is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His work focuses on the concept of Nature in German Idealism, philosophies of becoming, contemporary philosophy, as well as in Weird and Speculative fiction. In addition to On an Ungrounded Earth, his book Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life is forthcoming from Zer0 books. He blogs at Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought.

For more information, including the related readings and writing assignment, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3562

Audio recordings of the entire series can be found here.

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on...

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:08:00 -0400

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on Nabokov, Coincidence and Otherwordliness (Audio is part two of two)

Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

Information about Steve and this class can be found in this related post.

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on...

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:04:00 -0400

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on Nabokov, Coincidence and Otherwordliness (Audio is part one of two)

Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977) is perhaps most famous for Lolita and Pale Fire, novels of startling linguistic and literary playfulness. But as his wife, Vera, wrote in a foreword to a collection of his poetry in 1979, the true watermark of Nabokov’s work is the concept of “potustoronnost” or otherwordliness. Though much of Nabokov’s work may seem straight-forward and realist, lurking underneath his fiction is an entire pantheon of ghosts, shades, demons and devils that comprise the true world of Nabokov’s writings.

Stephen Aubrey descends from hardy New England stock. He is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, dramaturg, lecturer, storyteller and recovering medievalist. His writing has appeared in Publishing Genius, Commonweal, The Brooklyn Review, Pomp & Circumstance, Forté and The Outlet. He inexplicably holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Hollow Earth Society and is an instructor of English at Brooklyn College.

He is also a co-founder and the resident dramaturg and playwright of The Assembly Theater Company. His plays have been produced at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Flea Theater, The Collapsable Hole, The Brick Theater, Symphony Space, the Abingdon Theater Complex, UNDER St Marks, The Philly Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where his original play, We Can’t Reach You, Hartford, was nominated for a 2006 Fringe First Award.

He has an MFA from Brooklyn College where he received the Himan Brown Prize and the Ross Feld Writing Award and a BA with Honors from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University.

He is—for the record—not a Christian singer-songwriter. He does, however, hold the dubious distinction of having coined the word “playlistism” in 2003.

For more information, including the related readings and writing assignment, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3562

Audio part two of this session can be found here.

Audio recordings of the entire series can be found here.

The Public School New York

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group Meeting 3

A Blade of Grass

To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body by Félix Guattari.

***Conversations After the Creative Time Summit Update***

Upcoming Events

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group Meeting 2

Upcoming Events

Deleuze and Guattari/Capitalism and Schizophrenia/Anti-Oedipus reading group

On Time: Rhythm and Musical Time

On Time

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 7: Jonathan Basile on A Crossing Without Borders: Death in the Thought of Jacques Derrida (audio is part II of II)

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 7: Jonathan Basile on A Crossing Without Borders: Death in the Thought of Jacques Derrida

‎#whOWNSpace wants to help take back the commons in Greenpoint (not to mention NYC, the US, and...

Activist Technology Demo Day

#whOWNSpace: Observe, Diagram, Intervene

triplecanopy: n+1, with Astra Taylor (Examined Life; Zizek!)...

Toward a Speculative Realist Literary CriticismFacilitated by...

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 4: Ben Woodard on...

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on...

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on...

Conversations After the Creative Time Summit Update