Project sigma: the temporality of activism

This chapter focuses on sigma, a network of cultural practitioners that was active roughly between 1963–1965. This highly ambitious project involved a network of writers, artists, scientists and psychiatrists, including William Burroughs, Jeff Nuttall and R.D. Laing. Its successes were modest: the most tangible outcome of the project was the sigma portfolio, an expanding, self-published collection of texts (Trocchi, 1964), ‘part manifesto, part manual’ for art activism (Wark, 2011 : 126). Its initiator and convener was Alexander Trocchi, the Scottish novelist, poet, Situationist and drug addict. The intention of the text is to present a close reading of sigma essays to explore the unfolding of an art activist logic within the programmatic texts of the portfolio

Institutional critique. A philosophical investigation of its conditions and possibilities

'Institutional critique' is a term that refers to a range of diverse artistic practices and discourses that emerged at the end of the 1960s and that continue in the present. In spite of their differences, they all share a concern with the institutional conditioning of artists and artworks. Various historicizations of institutional critique (Alberro and Stimson, 2009; Raunig and Ray, 2009; Welchman, 2006) concur that one could distinguish two 'phases': artists of the 1960s and 1970s allegedly investigated the possibilities of an escape towards an 'outside' of the art institution, whereas those of the 1990s analysed the ways in which the artistic subject reproduced the structures of the art institution. Since the beginning of the 2000s various artists and authors have revisited the histories and legacies of institutional critique. This growing interest was triggered by the perceived intensification of a process that began at the end of the 1960s; it refers to the recuperation and neutralization of artistic types of critique by what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) have called the 'new spirit' of capitalism. In this context, the Austrian philosopher Gerald Raunig and the members of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies have proposed the hypothesis that 'a new phase' of institutional critique was to emerge. However, this proposition was based less on empirical evidence, than on a 'political and theoretical necessity to be found in the logic of institutional critique' (Raunig, 2009, 3). This thesis is a response to this set of circumstances. By asking 'what are the conditions and possibilities of institutional critique?' it investigates the categories of institutional critique's logic. My main argument is that a 'phase change' of institutional critique could and should be understood through the apparatus of Derridean deconstruction. This implies a criticism of the idea that one needs to escape the art institution in order to respond to urgencies stemming from the social, economic, and political realms (Truth Is Concrete Platform, 2012). At the same time, I will also refute the idea that institutional critique is trapped in the art institution (Fraser, 2009a). Institutional critique works on the remainder and rest that necessarily escapes the instituting will and intention of defining and describing in an exhaustive manner the whatness of what (art) is (Boltanski, 2011). I show that between critique and the art institution there is an irreducible relation of symbiosis and cohabitation, and that the deconstructive logic of institutional critique allows it to be both partner and adversary, at the same time, of the art institution

Constant magnetic field and 2d non-commutative inverted oscillator

We consider a two-dimensional non-commutative inverted oscillator in the presence of a constant magnetic field, coupled to the system in a ``symplectic'' and ``Poisson'' way. We show that it has a discrete energy spectrum for some value of the magnetic field.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX file, no figures, PACS number: 03.65.-

Noncommutative gravity: fuzzy sphere and others

Gravity on noncommutative analogues of compact spaces can give a finite mode truncation of ordinary commutative gravity. We obtain the actions for gravity on the noncommutative two-sphere and on the noncommutative ${\bf CP}^2$ in terms of finite dimensional $(N\times N)$-matrices. The commutative large $N$ limit is also discussed.Comment: LaTeX, 13 pages, section on CP^2 added + minor change

Isotropic representation of noncommutative 2D harmonic oscillator

We show that 2D noncommutative harmonic oscillator has an isotropic representation in terms of commutative coordinates. The noncommutativity in the new mode, induces energy level splitting, and is equivalent to an external magnetic field effect. The equivalence of the spectra of the isotropic and anisotropic representation is traced back to the existence of SU(2) invariance of the noncommutative model.Comment: 15 pages, RevTex4, no figures; article format, improved version of the previous paper; new references and aknowledgements adde