Performing thinking in action: the meletē of live coding

Within this article, live coding is conceived as a meletē, an Ancient Greek term used to describe a meditative thought experiment or exercise in thought, especially understood as a preparatory practice supporting other forms of critical — even ethical — action. Underpinned by the principle of performing its thinking through 'showing the screen', live coding involves 'making visible' the process of its own unfolding through the public sharing of live decision-making within improvisatory performance practice. Live coding can also be conceived as the performing of 'thinking-in-action', a live and embodied navigation of various critical thresholds, affordances and restraints, where its thinking-knowing cannot be easily transmitted nor is it strictly a latent knowledge or 'know how' activated through action. Live coding involves the live negotiation between receptivity and spontaneity, between the embodied and intuitive, between an immersive flow experience and split-attention, between human and machine, the known and not yet known. Moreover, in performing 'thinking-in-action', live coding emerges as an experimental site for reflecting on different perceptions and possibilities of temporal experience within live performance: for attending to the threshold between the live and mediated, between present and future-present, proposing even a quality of atemporality or aliveness

(Re)Making Public Campus Art: Connecting the University, Publics and the City

Public campus art in the U.K. is predominantly a postwar phenomenon and can be interpreted as artworks situated in university spaces with free access to its audience: any public users — where the multiplicity of such audience defines them as “publics”: communities of interest. Public art’s ontology of “publicness” is complex: what is “public” and who are the “publics”? The local, theme and form of art in “public” space is contested along dualist conceptions of public/private, indoor/outdoor, closed/open, permanent/temporary, decorative/interactive, past/future, space/place, online/offline, and so on and so forth. It may moreover span any material, digital, performative and socially engaged, practice-based work and multimedia beyond more traditional sculptural artworks. This article analyses how public campus art has traditionally related to historic university agendas and campus communities, but has recently provided a platform for far-reaching public engagement beyond the campus, thus reaching new audiences

'Small change of the universal': beyond modernity?

The paper is a sounding of Ulrich Beck's and Edgar Grande's conceptual map of the varieties of second modernity - Western and Non-Western, European and beyond - that makes up today's world. Their mapping is examined in the light of two, striking analytical perspectives associated with Ulrich Beck: everyday 'cosmopolitization' and his call for a methodological cosmopolitanism. A line of inquiry explores whether contemporary modernities are essentially expressions of a single, underlying modernization drive or whether they are utterly disparate entities. The implications of treating them as 'variants and variations' are unpacked with reference to musical models and how they generate difference. The probe into methodological cosmopolitanism touches on 'de-provincialization' that is somewhat at odds with the postcolonial project of 'provincializing' Europe. It looks at the attempt to go beyond 'nation-bound' sociological dualisms in determining the appropriate 'unit of analysis' for our ever-morphing current reality. Does this imply engaging with 'singularity'- with a mode of conceptualization that sidesteps the universal/particular couple and related either/or thinking? References to the making of the 'first modernity' under unequal centre/periphery relations of colonial power are aired for possible lessons in mappings of the second. Ulrich Beck's 'impure, really-existing cosmopolitanism'- in contrast to its speculative counterpart derived from the realm of pure ideas - springs from humdrum global economic and political links and institutions that span out across, above and beyond the 'container of the national space'. With the inadvertent cosmopolitical impact of the migrations it amounts in practice to a functioning 'cosmopolitan realpolitik'. Is there room for it to develop or will it stall as a mere front for national, tribal-territorial interests - going the way of 'multiculturalism and diversity' that seem increasingly to serve as governmental ideologies for managing global difference? Whether each of the varieties of second modernity throws up a 'cosmopolitan vision' of its own remains to be determined more fully. It seems possible that friction between the modernities might fetch up on a higher plane as clashing cosmopolitanisms. Historical precedents give scant comfort if we look at the fate of the ecumenic empires of the ancient world of the 'first cosmopolitan age' or at landmark cosmopolitan endeavours such as Aby Warburg's and WEB Du Bois' on the eve of counter-cosmopolitan currents of the 1930s. An abiding scepticism prevails about the capacity of 'impure cosmopolitanism' to bootstrap and elaborate itself from an involuntary, reflex condition into a self-reflexive, critical dispensation

Veronica Ryan

Montserrat artist Ryan discusses the concerns underlying work she produced during a 1987-88 fellowship in Cambridge (England), while Maharaj links its interpretation to Adorno's notion of black art. Biographical notes. 35 bibl. ref

Lyn Carter: Incognito

"This exhibition called Incognito includes works that toy with the act of deception, hybrid objects that echo shapes from everyday life yet disguise their true construction in playful illusion. Passing among Lyn Carter's creations, one glimpses the silhouette of a piece of furniture , a shape that looks like a shovel, other attenuated implements that could have a function - decoration being an essential service." -- Stuart Reid, page 6

Social Fabric

Social Fabric, Iniva, London, March 10th (with professor Sarat Maharaj)

Session 2: How do you know?

Video recording of session 2, Artistic Research Week/ Kunstnerisk forskningsuke 2018“How do you know?” is a discursive project challenging artists and other professionals to think, analyze, and deconstruct their own activity in the frame of artistic research and the production of knowledge. Participants: Apolonija Šušteršič (Professor of Art and Public Space), Maria Lind (Professor of Artistic Research), Sarat Maharaj (Theoretician, Professor at Lund University, Malmö Art Academy) and Matts Leiderstam (Artist, Professor at Malmö Art Academy). Time: 23 January, 2018 Venue: Hovedscenen, Oslo National Academy of the Arts

Skin:textile:film

In handing down and perpetuating a dysfunctional relationship between artist, materials, and tools, gendered and occidental canons of art practice have caused art-viewing and art-making to become separated activities. For many artists this cuts directly across the grain of their work, nowhere more so than within textile practice. In unpicking, locating, and mapping (inter)relationships between the haptic and scopic, this article proposes a model for understanding and positioning textile practice within broader artistic discourse. In creating a triptychal landscape for such (inter)relations—skin:textile:film—and endowing the textile with the role of filter between skin and film, the muffled areas that lie between the purely haptic and the purely scopic can be identified and examined. Alongside this, (linings) (Ann Hamilton 1990) will be explored to highlight and test some of the subtleties present in this proposed framework. This article focuses on a practice-based engagement with materiality in art-making, most specifically that of the artist working with textiles, in order to suggest a more nuanced understanding of the role of the artist culturally and critically. Finally, this article will consider the potential of the textile itself as a model for understanding haptic‐scopic (inter)relationships which allows for a more subtle feeling of the way around practice