24.10. The work behind the work
Value / Labour / Work / Time
Hannah Arendt in Conversation with Günter Gaus, 1964
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958
The Chapter on Labor, p 79-93
19.09. Introduction to the Non-Visual
Naming as Seeing: Ah! Ernesto! (En Rachachant)
(You only see what you know? You only know what you see?)
Upside Down: natascha sadr haghighian vice/virtue
What I Do Not Yet Recognize, Now at This Very Moment
Spotting Blind Spots
What are you concerned with that you think isn’t seen? What are you reading? Who do you find interesting? What concepts? Sharing encounters with theory. Seeing as an active practice and the making of theory. How do you see? With what technologies, ideas, politics?
In what way all art is photography: Words of Light, p 44
Eduardo Cadava: Politically Red — Keynote lecture at 13/13 seminars
In general, a site to check out regarding politics of the visual: harun-farocki institute
26.09. At a Distance
Politics of Technology of Seeing
Etel Adnan (1925-2021)
“Inverted astronomy. Opening up the perspective from earth to moon, and moon to earth: Etel’s very interested in that,” notes Eshun. “She thinks the calendar should be named after Neil Armstrong, that the calendar should have begun again after the moon landing. She believes that artists still need to grapple with the profound dimensions of space that were opened up after that. She’s interested in art that is astronomical, de-anthropological, de-anthropomorphising. An art that decenters the human. I sympathize with that very much.” >>> from Bidoun
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
Harun Farocki (1944-2014)
Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989)
Nora M.Alter : The Political Imherceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki's Images of the World and the Inscription of War
Christopher Pavsek: Harun Farocki's Images of the World
3.10. The Right to Opacity (10:00 - 12:00 & 13:00 - 16:00)
Octavia Butler (1947-2006)
> Kunsthall, American Artist, The Monophobic Response (to be confirmed)
Butler: The Monophic Response
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
Tricontinental Institut, Dossier Fanon
Eduard Glissant (1928-2011)
Benjamin Davis: The Right to Opacity in Practice (scroll down)
Link to the Lecture from the 13/13 seminars
Ramon Amaro: Black Mirrors and the Problem of Identiy in Artificial Intelligence
Olivier Marboeuf: Towards a de-speaking Cinema
Sarah Messerschmidt: The Counter-Archive as Network
31.10. Invisible Structures
Support Structures
A question of funding
Organising otherwise
Around the institutional
The film is funny and quick. It’s not a "short" but a real film, in short. We must see it thinking on the one hand of Renoir (who had very libertarian ideas about education, thinking that we only ever know what we know already, and of whom—I know this—the Straubs have thought) and on the other of Alain Resnais whose next film Life is a Bed of Roses (coming soon!) begins from the reverse hypothesis: that education, strictly speaking, is filler. A great topic of our time.
Serge Daney on En rachachant by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Liberation, 7.April 1983, on Kino Blog.
The word theory comes from the Ancient Greek θεωρία (theōría), which meant: looking at, viewing, contemplation; spectacle or a sight, also used to describe philosophical contemplation or speculative thinking It derives from: θεωρός (theōrós) – spectator, one who looks at or observes; related to θεάομαι (theáomai) – to see, to behold
"Contrary to what is usually believed, it is not general ideas and grandiose unfolding of great events that impress the mind during times of heightened historic upheavals, but rather the uninterrupted flow of little experiences, observations, disturbances, small ecstasies, or barely perceptible discouragements that make up day-to-day living." (Etel Adnan)
Why does Benjamin write on the work of art
in the middle, I mean, like on the eve of military catastrophe?
Why does he write this essay from 1935 to 1939 or even to 1940
He can't let the essay go.
Why?
And why does he say,
I'm going to develop a series of theses on the work of art
that can be used as weapons against fascism?
Extraordinary, right?
Why?
I'll tell you why.
Because he's living in a moment when the German nation
is describing itself as a Gesamtkunstwerk,
as a total work of art.
And what it's doing is attributing all the attributes
that we normally attribute to the work of art,
originality, genius, creativity, authenticity, to themselves.
So what he does is he's scanning the landscape,
he sees them doing that, and he says,
okay, so I'm going to rethink our relation to these concepts
and to the work of art, and I'm going to show the way
in which every work of art is an archive of relations.
It's a mass.
He says it's mass-like.
So it's not something that can be linked to the singularity
of the moment which it's produced.
It's not something that is authentic.
It's not something that is original.
It's a citation machine.
If he can show that Germany itself is a citation machine,
he evacuates Germany from its claim to be an original work of art.
The pairing that you could put with that is Nietzsche's
On the Use and Disadvantage of a History for Life.
You can reduce that book to two theses.
One, Germany does not exist, and two, Germany does not exist
because it does not have its own proper being.
Why? It's a citation machine.
It's borrowing forms from Greece, from France, from Britain, etc.
It's linked to the Red Commonwealth,
what Marx does in that passage where he's bringing
all these multi-geographical things into the same space.
Look at Peter Sellers' work.
He's drawing from Polynesian texts, Indian texts,
Chinese texts, Greek texts.
He's putting them all in the same thing
because that's the way the world is right now.
You can click on the computer, and at one moment
you're looking at something in the Ukraine.
You click on the computer, and it's a fashion show.
You click on it, and you're looking at a baseball game.
That's the way the world works.
I think artworks that don't pretend that they're authentic,
original, the result of genius,
that emphasize their relationality, their citationality,
are worthy of, let's say, models for students
as they think about their own relationality in the world.
Does that make sense?
When Benjamin does that, when he goes after all those things,
what he's doing is trying to change your relation to those terms
because he thinks that if he can change your relation
to the language that you use,
he can perhaps change much more than just language.
He can change the relations in which we live,
and that's the stake for him.
That text is a training manual on how to read historically
in a moment of danger, and believe me,
we live in a moment of danger.
26.09. At a Distance / Findings, References
What do you think is misisng? What do you see what others don't? What is not seen
Not to feel Discomfort
After Comfort: User's Guide > collection of essays on eflux
Divisions, Illuminations, Reading as Riddling > Reading the Day—reading events
Ub'Ixik and Cecilia Vicuña is the one who has written about. Have not found it in other sources, except for Kiche-Maya dictionary as plain word for reading.
>> https://monoskop.org/Cecilia_Vicuña
Wood and the Time to grow
Elke Marhöfer >> filmmaking, farming, theorising >> texts assembeled on her website
Understanding & adressing class and the framing of it > in the cultural sector and beyond
>> Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter—Crisis Computing: The Frictions of global flows (lecture)
Art and Poverty >> a language to talk about precarity. Poverty & and legal framework >> Wealth >>