Mission Statement

The New Centre for Research & Practice is conceived upon the idea that the space of knowledge is a laboratory for navigating the links between thought and action. Our pedagogical approach bootstraps the conventional role of the Arts and Sciences to construct new forms of research and practice alongside, within, and between the existing disciplines and technologies. The New Centre’s aim is a constructivist one, to assemble an environment, both virtual and actual, that inspires our members to invent alternate understandings that can be put into collective practice. →

List of New Centre Activities

/// 2016

The New Centre for Research & Practice enjoyed a productive Spring/Summer 2016, which included participating in the Reinventing Horizons conference / book launch featuring Jason Adams, Katerina Kolozova, Patricia Reed, Mohammad Salemy, Nick Srnicek, and Tony Yanick, as well as organizing the Artificial Cinema exhibition in Prague; the screening of our certificate student Manuel Correa’s #artoffline documentary at the 2016 Rotterdam International Film Festival, the appearence of Victoria Ivanova, Matteo Pasquinelli, and Mohammad Salemy at Studium Generale 2016, Gerrit Rietveld Academie’s annual transdisciplinary theory program in Amsterdam; partnering with the 11th Gwangju Biennale 2016; organizing the #AGI Accelerate General Intellect conference featuring Amy Ireland, Nick Land, Reza Negerastani, Patricia Reed, and Peter Wolfendale and the Future of Mind panel at The New School for Social Research. Other New Centre events from Spring/Summer 2016 included informational sessions at Institute for New Connotative Action (INCA) in Seattle and Oregon Public House in Portland, online roundtables with Antoine Bousquet, Andrew McLuhan, Steven Shaviro, and Tiziana Terranova, as well as a reading group on the work of Isabelle Stengers. To view the complete list of our activities so far in 2016, please visit thenewcentre.org.


/// 2015

The New Centre for Research & Practice enjoyed a momentous 2015, which included a partnership with e-flux, three international conferences, twenty-two seminars, and twenty-three roundtables, reading groups, and emergency-response events. We also published our first e-book, and our organizers were interviewed for an edited collection, “Politics of Study”. In addition, we successfully placed several of our certificate students into a range of graduate degree programs, while welcoming a number of new certificate students into our program.

Over the course of Summer 2015, we partnered with e-flux to produce Superconversations, a series of responses to Supercommunity, as part of the 56th Venice Biennale. In July, we partnered with Université de Technologie de Graz & IZK Institute for Contemporary Art for the Knowledge Forms, Forming Knowledge conference, a two day conference at Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst & Medien (watch). And in August, we partnered with Deakin University (an institutional member of The New Centre) to produce Alien Aesthetics, a two day conference in Melbourne, concerned with xeno-visions, -sounds, and -mediations (watch).

In Fall 2015, we continued this pattern initially in October, via our partnership with The Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, through which we broadcast a month-long seminar by Fernando Zalamea in Brooklyn entitled, “Grothendieck and a Theory of Contemporary Transgression” (watch). Finally, in December 2015, we partnered with e-flux to produce Machines That Matter, a conference held at e-flux’s headquarters in Manhattan.

In addition, throughout the year, we collaborated or partnered with a variety of institutions, including Center for Transformative Media at Parsons: The New School for Design, Department of Cultural Studies at University of Minnesota, Graduate Media Department at University of Buffalo, Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Sociales (Bogota), Corporación Para el Desarrollo de la Educación y la Investigación Social (Bogota), FOAM Collective, Michigan Political Science Association, Newcastle University, Department of Philosophy at Aquinas College, Sydney School of Continental Philosophy, & Momenta Art.

 

Seminar Enrollment

Seminar enrollment is available without prerequisites, and regardless of Membership, Friendship, or admittance into a New Centre Certificate Program. By being enrolled, you get a chance to closely work with your instructor and other enrolled students on the topic of the seminar. Enrollment will entitle you to access our video archive from the day you pay for the seminar until 8 weeks after the last seminar session. Enrolled students also get access to all the seminar material via Google Classroom. Credits and payments spent on all enrolled seminars can be rolled forward into a future certificate program application if they were taken within 12 months of the application being made.

Admissions

To apply for our Graduate-level Certificate Programs, complete The New Centre's Application Form. →

Art & Curatorial Practice

The New Centre’s Art & Curatorial Practice Program is one of the only international curricula responding to the challenges that cultural and economic globalization as well as planetary telecomputation have together created for the production and distribution of contemporary art and knowledge in the 21st century. The Program engages with the fields from a critical standpoint by encouraging students to question the institutional assumptions about the role of artists and curators with a focus on the epistemological and social ramifications of art making, exhibitions, their surrounding activities, and their political economy. Part historical, part conceptual, and part practical, the program encourages students to form their own critical approach by focusing on research topics and connecting specific materials from within the discourse of contemporary art to other fields of knowledge from the sciences and humanities. As part of its practicum, the program will include the publication of research and student-curated events and exhibitions. Rather than issuing stand alone certificates, The New Centre’s Art and Curatorial Practice complements existing, accredited MA/PhD programs at other higher educational institutions by introducing students to newer concepts and methodologies which have yet to be incorporated in art and curatorial curricula at accredited universities and colleges, thus preparing students for either entering these institutions or providing them additional knowledge and skills for professionally entering the field as artists or curators. Through their course of study, the students will meet and become part of the network of professional artists, critics, curators and thinkers who are currently involved in the fields of art and curatorial practice. →

Critical Philosophy

The New Centre’s Critical Philosophy Program is devoted to developing philosophy adequate to the problems and questions posed by the 21st century. The rise of the Anthropocene, which threatens global catastrophe, developments in physics, neurology, and biology, transformations in global capitalism and the way in which the military, media, and economic systems are now intertwined and exceed the boundaries of nation-states have all generated new conceptual challenges for philosophy. These transformations have posed a set of questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and ethics that cannot fully be addressed by the resources of traditional philosophy alone and require new philosophical concepts. Students in the Critical Philosophy Program will attend seminars in critical contemporary philosophy seldom taught in university graduate programs. In addition, students will take seminars devoted to the history of philosophy and how that history might be appropriated in terms of the present and future conditions. Above all, students will be encouraged to develop research projects of their own devoted to thinking ontology, epistemology, and ethics within the frame of the contemporary. →

Media & Technology

If, following a roughly dialectical bent, we take concepts to be what mediates and modulates our relation to the world -- the circuits of communication and control in which we find ourselves -- then 'media' and 'technology' are names for the concept's material existence. They are the forms of our efferent alienation from the world we inherit, both the paths of the world's past and future humanization, and the relentless volatilization of our present humanity. It is this material existence of the concept that our programme aims to investigate. Though the horizon of our research is certainly universal or global in its scope, our seminars will each be grounded in particular case studies of technological mediation, ranging from cryptocurrency to mathematical formalisms, pornography to AI, sound art to cyberfeminism. Neither purely reflective nor purely technical, the majority of our seminars will seek to combine theory and practice, many aiming to train the students not only to theorize about this or that techno-aesthetic assemblage, but to tinker with it, build it, exploit it, and adapt it for themselves. This may involve learning how to construct a diagonal proof in logic, programme a machine learning algorithm, or code digital soundscapes on the fly, to invoke just a few upcoming seminars. →

Social & Political Thought

The New Centre’s Social & Political Thought Program is designed to intensify students’ capacities for comprehending and disturbing power relations as they exist today, in the increasingly undemocratic, markedly unequal, globalized world of the early 21st century. The seminars proceed by way of juxtaposition, generating divergent readings of the classic texts of political theory through a historically-informed and future-oriented encounter with more recent social & political thinking. The Social & Political Thought Program is distinguished however, not only in its synthesis of genres, but also in its affirmation of practice: mobilizing both classic and contemporary political thinking to question dominant assumptions about contemporary events in all of their legal, rhetorical, technological, aesthetic, economic and spatio-temporal ramifications. Just as the old is brought into a nexus with the new, so too is theory brought together with practice. And while the conventional liberal and communitarian, radical and critical threads of social and political thought are engaged throughout the coursework, the program emphasizes breadth of understanding across tendencies, as much as depth of fluency in any one tendency. →

Transdisciplinary Research & Practice

The New Centre’s Transdisciplinary Research & Practice Program aims to explore the interfaces between the arts, sciences, and vernacular knowledge by engaging with strategies that capture complexity, cultivate new ecologies of knowledge, and affect individual and collective transformations. This program offers theoretical and practical support to enhance and realize issue-based transdisciplinary projects unrestricted by the constraints of any one discipline. The program provides support and access to resources and community, offering seminars that cannot fit into a discipline-specific program, but are at once between, across, and beyond all disciplines. This program is ideal for those interested in research across specializations and professions; including graduate students designing theses and dissertations and undergraduates seeking to enhance their skills in research methods, qualitative research, interdisciplinary / multidisciplinary / transdisciplinary approaches from a range of perspectives, and arts-based or community-based researchers. →

Seasonal Intensives

The New Centre for Research & Practice is excited to announce a new initiative called Seasonal Intensives. Enrolees in our Seasonal Intensives are distinct from our Certificate Students in that they receive intensive participation in five credits —fifty hours— worth of seminars. Seasonal Intensive are designed for those want to go beyond registering in a single seminar but without committing to one of our year-long Certificate Programs. Those enrolled in Seasonal Intensives are eligible to roll over their credits into a Certificate Program, at any point along the way, or afterward up to 12 months from the starting of their study with their credits and payments counted towards the total cost of the Certificate.

For more information please contact the Student Services.

Consultation

As of September 2017, The New Centre will offer one-on-one Consultation sessions with its Instructors for the purpose of tutoring and academic advice. Our Researchers and Members can book these tutoring sessions with our available Instructors in order to discuss questions and topics of interest that relate to their area of research. In addition, our Organizers and faculty are also available to provide academic advice, helping our Researchers and Members in articulating or achieving their career goals. These Tutoring and academic advice consultations can be booked for 160 USD per hour. Our Certificate Students receive two hours of free Consultation as part of their requirements.

For more information please contact the Student Services. < /br>

#Accelerate I:
The Accelerationist Reader

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Beyond Price & Profit:
Art, Finance & the Question of Value

DESCRIPTION
How can the art sphere function as an experimental ground for producing and circulating financial logics that deviate from those of financial capitalism? This seminar explores different theories of financialisation and how these may be applied in understanding the relationship between contemporary art and finance. Particular attention will be given to socio-cultural analyses of finance and the possibilities that these may open up for art as a platform for speculative modulation. Apart from textual references, the seminar will be based around a series of case-studies from the art field, both historical and current, while each session will involve a guest-speaker whose practice or current project is targeting different aspects of art’s potential as a vehicle for socially valuable financial paradigms.

22 March 2017 — Session 1

Deloitte and ArtTactic (2016) Art and Finance Report.

Ivanova, V (2016) Contemporary art and financialisation: two approaches. In: Finance and Society, 2(2): 127-37.

Knorr Cetina, K. and Preda, A. (2012) Introduction. In: Knorr Cetina, K. and Preda, A. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1-12.


29 March 2017 — Session 2
with special guests, João Enxuto and Erica Love

Gupta, V. (2015) Programmable blockchains in context: Ethereum’s future.

Projansky, B. and Siegelaub, S. (1971) The artist’s reserved rights transfer and sale agreement.


12 April 2017 — Session 3
with special guest, Alexandra Pirici

Appadurai, A. (1988) Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In: Appadurai, A. (ed.) The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, R. (2012) A precarious dance, a derivative sociality. In: The Drama Review, 56(4): 64-79.


26 April 2017 — Session 4
with special guest, Emily Rosamond

Dowling, E., Harvie, D. (2014) Harnessing the social: state, crisis and (big) society. In: Sociology, 48(5): 869-886.

Rosamond, E. (2016) Shared stakes, distributed investment: socially engaged art and the financialisation of social impact. In: Finance and Society, 2(2): 111-126.




Image: Damien Hirst, For the Love of God, 2007

Integrative Objects:
The invention of Philo-Fiction

DESCRIPTION
“This way of working leads us to consider the new objects of science no longer as complex, but as ‘integrative’. The complex object corresponds more or less to the stage of the open work, where the creation of a discipline of itself no longer allows us to apprehend the objects which it works with, but requires the interpretation of others. This state of affairs supposes the convergence of disciplinary perspectives upon partially-given objects—just as the Klavierstücke are always the work of Stockhausen, but only become audible through the intermediary of a performer who is not only implicitly the ‘translator’, but explicitly the ‘composer-translator’. The ‘new objects’ have very different characteristics. They superimpose fragments of knowledge according to a discipline+1. They also comprise the non-knowledge of each discipline in relation to these objects: disciplinary non-knowledge which, by iteration, allow us to reformulate in each discipline the knowledge that it masters and the non-knowledge that it constructs. The only unity these objects have, a partial and momentaneous unity, is that of the intentions of particular researchers, which never entirely encompass them as a whole. Ultimately these objects are no longer manipulable; they are not constructed in a phenomenological distance which separates the researcher from his or her object. They are radically non-synthesizable. Just as the concept of ‘uncertainty’ has passed from the margins of science into its heart, that of the non-synthesizable is beginning to afford a certain methodological access to created objects (GMOs, the product of nanotechnology, of synthetic biology, etc.) and objects of study (obesity, depression) which involve numerous disciplines and which do not converge. We need to invent scientific methods that will allow the construction of methods of invention within this non-synthesis.”

Fiction and philosophical invention are not the same. The first is an operator which permits passing from one real punctum to another, the second concerns philosophical knowledge and its structure. But is it possible, and now necessary in the new ways of philosophical writing, to associate the two. These new affinities are the theoretical and practical topics of this course.

As already suggested, these connections are new and not given and can be forged indirectly. The role of what Anne Francoise Schmid calls the Integrative Objects is to render them possible with entire new varieties of fiction, not only in the site of literature, science or art, but also in the tradition of philosophy. The unexpected associations these operations provide appear in a generic space, and need our labor for their articulation.

Philo-fiction is made possible by three conditions:

• A point of exteriority –Integrative objects are not immediately visible, but absolutely necessary


• Generic and Ordinary Human, Order and Resistance – Painting is not possible in an exclusively ordered space (see Maurice Matieu, the mathematician and painter), but creating new relations between philosophy and science requires an order. The philosophies which concern the “ordinary” are searching for the same gestures which connects science and philosophy. In return, Fiction enables the passage from order to resistance and to the shift in potentialities.


• The Architecture of Knowledge versus the Architectonic –Architecture often comes first, with repetitious rhythms and rhetorical constructs (see Vitruvius against ancient and modern rhetoric). However, architectural operations are not sufficient for philosophical constructions which require a combination of both empirical-a priory and transcendental materials with a ratio of 2 to 3.

The seminar is both a review of existing literature regarding the connections between philosophy and fiction and a forum for generating new associations between the two realms. Throughout the seminar, students will work individually and collaboratively to work on three practical exercises:

• Writing a philosophical fiction
• Describing a philosophical invention
• Inventing a link between one to another

REQUIREMENTS
The seminar is composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. Readings will be set for each week, and students will be expected to write 400 words on some aspect of the week’s topic in advance. During this period material written by the participants about the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Both the reading list and the student's responses will be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment on, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion. The final assessment will consist of an extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance.

Image: Stock photography, Hour glass concept by Julieta Aranda

VIEW SEMINAR ON FACEBOOK

The Stack to Come:
Synthetic Sensing/ Intelligence (and The New Normal)

DESCRIPTION
This 8 session seminar will explore the design philosophy of systems at diverse scales: from planetary-scale computation (through Bratton’s recent book, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty) to molecular-scale sensing/intelligence (though his recent work and research with D:GP at University of California, San Diego).

Our condition is one that links seemingly distant and different things, one into another. Ecological flows become sites of intensive sensing, quantification and governance. Global computing infrastructure spurs platform economics and creates virtual geographies in its own image. Cities link into vast discontiguous urban networks as they also weave borders into enclaves or escape routes. Addressing systems locate billions of entities and events into unfamiliar maps. Interfaces present vibrant augmentations of reality, standing in for extended cognition. Users, both human and non-human, populate this tangled apparatus, an accidental megastructure that Bratton, calls The Stack.

The seminar will include a discussion of The Stack and several discussions, with invited guests, and demonstrations of recent design projects and technical research programs. Some presentations and discussions may also intersect with design development at D:GP at UCSD and Bratton’s seminar at SCI_Arc.

The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks. Each module consists of two lectures and two sessions of extensive discussions

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance.

Image: James Clark, Mountain Lion Diorama, 1955, Hall of North American Mammals

Maths & Ideas:
From Antiquity to Renaissance

DESCRIPTION
This course provides a basic introduction to mathematical thinking and elementary mathematical concepts. We will survey the history of mathematical discoveries from the antiquity to the end of Renaissance by analyzing case studies and situating them in the context of advances in philosophy, logic, physics and technology. For example, how developments in banking system, bookkeeping methods and maritime navigation advanced the theory of magnitudes which in turn contributed to developments in Kinematics and what is now called linear algebra. By looking at different case studies and examining thoughts and methods behind these discoveries, the course aims to portray mathematics in a different light as a field where intuitive thinking, formal rigor and creative experimentation come hand in hand.

The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks.

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance.

Image: Rafael, School of Athens, 1509-1511

Curatorial Practice II:
Curating the Future

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Qwernomics:
Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality

DESCRIPTION
The format of the Qwerty keyboard illustrates the production of a destiny. Even in the epoch succeeding the mechanical type-writer, and its specific design imperatives, the legacy layout of alphanumeric keys settled during the 1890s has remained frozen into place without significant revision. In the language of complex systems analysis, this is a special example of path-dependency, or irreducible historicity, characterized by irreversibility. Qwerty persists – arguably, as a suboptimal keyboard solution – due to identifiable ratchet-effects. Based upon this privileged model, the historical, technological, and economic process of ‘lock in’ through positive feedback is called QWERTY-nomics (and here simply ‘Qwernomics’).

This two-module course will (1) re-visit the late 20th Century debate on qwernomics as an illustration of central themes in complexity theory (and the cybernetics of positive feedback), then (2) re-open the discussion of Qwerty as a techno-economic manifest destiny, and thus a gateway into the workings of modern historical time.

The first module will reconstruct the theory of path dependency, with Qwerty as its key. The second module will be primarily devoted to the exploration of Qwerty as a semiotic fatality. How can Qwerty be most rigorously apprehended as an abstract object, or number pattern? What are the exoteric and esoteric consequences of this convention having been robustly installed within global history?

The most fundamental pre-requisites for the course are a Qwerty keyboard and a basic competence at alphabetical ordering (or alphabetical ordinal arithmetic).

Preliminary Readings
‘Clio and the Economics of QWERTY’ (1985), Paul A David
http://econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/Ec100C/DavidQwerty.pdf

‘The Fable of the Keys’ (1990), Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis
https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

‘10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It is?)’, from A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
(Worth reading as a cryptic disquisition on the keyboard, among all its other merits.)

Image: Chinese typewriter,

Anti-Oedipus:
Deleuze & Guattari Beyond the State

DESCRIPTION
The hypothesis for this seminar is that the State is essentially a theological structure. In conceptualizing theology as a State structure we should take care to distinguish this structure from religion and the supernatural. Although many forms of religiosity are, in a sense, theological, the distinguishing mark of theology is not the presence of the supernatural or the divine, but rather that of the sovereign that overcodes all other elements of a particular social field. There are thus purely secular theologies as in, for instance, those forms of sociality organized around a sovereign leader, a master-signifier such as “the party”, or ontotheologies like Nietzsche's where all of being is subordinated to a key term such as the “will to power”.  

This structure is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “Oedipus” in Anti-Oedipus. Thus, Oedipus should be thought as much broader than a particular structure of the family or a psychoanalytic theory and instead as a theological form of thought that manifests itself in forms of labor, thought, science, metaphysics, politics, art, and, of course, religion. The thesis of this seminar is that it is essentially this theological structure of thought and practice that Deleuze and Guattari target in their politics.  Deleuze and Guattari strive to go beyond the State, and therefore propose an a-theism, an anarchism, or a form of thought, practice, and politics where the site of the overcoding sovereign is void or absent. Through a close reading of Nietzsche & Philosophy, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, and Anti-Oedipus, this seminar will explore the mechanisms by which the State is formed, how it functions, and why subjects become so ineluctably attached to these theological formations. Above all, we will look at the strategies of flight from the State and how these formations might be contested.

REQUIREMENTS
Participants in the seminar will be required to write one weekly post addressing some issue in that week’s reading or the prior week’s seminar discussion.  In addition, students will be required to respond to one other student's blog post each week. Blog posts and responses are to be posted every Saturday prior to the Tuesday seminar meeting to the classroom’s page .  At the end of the seminar, students will be required to write a 2000 – 3000 word essay dealing with some of seminar's themes or to produce a media or artistic artifact based on the issues discussed over the semester.  Students are free to propose other projects as well.  These projects will be due two weeks after the last seminar session.

Complexity and Computation:
An Introduction to Measures, Paradigms and Programs

DESCRIPTION
This seminar is an introduction to two widely popular yet often culturally misconstrued topics, complexity and computation. Why are social sciences no longer tenable without an extensive restructuring around theoretical and applied dimensions of these two subjects? Why is in the absence of a systematic engagement with the all-encompassing consequences implied by the findings and advances in computation and complexity sciences, philosophy's regression to antediluvian platitudes inevitable? And at the same time, why should the vogue culture surrounding complexity and computation be approached with a critical vigilance and extreme caution? By presenting a survey of some of the key ideas in complexity sciences and computation which have direct implications for philosophical and political thinking, this seminar sets out to tackle and answer these questions. →

New Rationalism:
The Shape of Systems to Come | Reason & Time

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Archeology of Abstraction (Reconstructing Futures I)

Module I: Archeology of Abstraction

DESCRIPTION: This seminar is based on the materials from the upcoming publication, “Generative Realities: On the Temporality and Metaphysics of Technological Civilization”

Starting around 1880, with the fusion of industry, capital and science, the sphere of human domestication expanded into the realm of sub-mechanical, sub-corpuscular, sub-organic, sub-conscious, and sub-phenomenal processes. The interface to this realm of generative processes was “information”. Cast into cybernetics, it first allowed for the rendering of all kinds of dynamic relations as accessible units, while later in the form of algorithmization, it proliferated an entirely new continuum of objects, agencies and ontologies. Today, these developments are eroding modernity’s phenomena at all of its fronts – social, economical, political, scientific, industrial, cognitive, metaphysical, temporal, anthropological – thus heralding the beginning of a new civilizational stage, a fundamental shift in human-world-relations. But where does it lead? To answer this question this seminar will travel back in time to where it all began. Based upon the recently developed cognitive-archaeological “Tübingen Model of the Expansion of Cultural Capacities” we will examine stages in early cultural and cognitive evolution (3Ma – 25Ka) for developmental patterns and principles that might help us to understand the current transformation of the human structures by locating it within the progression of civilizational expansions. This formalization of the outside of cultural and social evolution will enable us to extrapolate forms of mind, society, temporality and metaphysics that we can expect to emerge both during and after our existence.



Readings

5/20/2017
Session 1: The Search for the Second Sun

Meillassoux, Quentin: After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity on Contingency. London/New York: Continuum 2008
___pp. 5-7, 9-18, 27

Luhmann, Niklas: Introduction to Systems Theory. Cambridge/Malden,MA: Polity Press 2013 ___pp. 63-71

Mühlmann, Heiner: Nature of Cultures. A Blueprint for a Theory of Cultural Genetics. Wien/New York: Springer 1996
___pp. 2-12

Ogburn, William F./Thomas, Dorothy: Are Inventions Inevitable? In: Political Science Quarterly, 1922, Vol. 37, No. 1, 1922, 83-98
___pp. 83-98 (especially the list of 148 multiple discoveries pp. 93-98)

Simonton, Dean Keith: Multiple Discovery and Invention: Zeitgeist, Genius, or Chance? In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1979, Vol. 37, No. 9, 1603-1616
___pp. 1603-1605

Tennie, Claudio/Call, Josep/Tomasello, Michael: Ratcheting up the Ratchet: On the Evolution of Cumulative Culture. In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 364, 2009, 2405- 2415
___pp. 2405, 2407-2409, 2411-2412


5/27/2017
Session 2: Operational Chains, Depths of Time and the Evolution of the Mind: The Tübingen Model of the Expansion of Cultural Capacities

Guest: PD Dr. Miriam Noël Haidle, Research Center “Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans”, Institute of Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology, Tübingen/Germany

Haidle, Miriam N./Bolus, Michael/Collard, Mark/Conard, Nicholas J./Garofoli, Duilio/Lombard, Marlize/Nowell, April/Tennie, Claudio/Whiten, Andrew: The Nature of Culture: An Eight-Grade Model for the Evolution and Expansion of Cultural Capacities in Hominins and other Animals. In: Journal of Anthropological Sciences, Vol. 93, 2015, 43-70

Haidle, Miriam N.: How to think tools? A Comparison of Cognitive Aspects in Tool Behavior of Animals and during Human Evolution. In: Cognitive perspectives in tool behavior, Vol.1, 2012 http://tobias-lib.uni-tuebingen.de/frontdoor.php?source_opus=6014
___pp. 196-198 (only cognigrams of animal tool use)

Lombard, Marlize/Haidle, Miriam N.: Thinking a Bow-and-arrow Set: Cognitive Implications of Middle Stone Age Bow and Stone-tipped Arrow Technology. In: Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2012, 237–264
___pp. 244-258 (only cognigrams and tables of bow-and-arrow-assembly)


6/3/2017
Session 3: Formalizing Technogenesis / Noogenesis

Suddendorf, Thomas: The Gap. The Science of What Separates Us from other Animals. New York: Basic Books 2013
___pp. 91-111, 216 (Chap. “Time Travelers”)

Leroi-Gourhan, André: Gesture and Speech. Cambridge,MA/London: MIT Press 1993 ___pp. 237-255 (Chap. “Gesture and Program”)

6/10/2017
Session 4: Probing the Threshold to Civilization: Coupled Minds, Excentric Insulations, Aesthetical Membranes

Tomasello, Michael: A Natural History of Human Thinking. Cambridge,MA/London: Harvard University Press 2014
___pp. 120-123, 133-141 (table on p. 140)

Mühlmann, Heiner: Nature of Cultures. A Blueprint for a Theory of Cultural Genetics. Wien/New York: Springer 1996
___pp. 11-24, 29-40

Sloterdijk, Peter: Foams. Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology. Cambridge,MA/London: MIT Press 2016
___pp. 362-500 (Chap. “Anthropogenic Islands”)
___For a summary of this chapter see: Rouanet Freitag, Bárbara: The Trilogy Spheres of Peter Sloterdijk. In: IOP Journal, Vol. 21, 2011, pp. 73-84, pp. 79-83)

Donald, Merlin: The Exographic Revolution: Neuropsychological Sequelae. In: Malafouris, Lambros/Renfrew, Colin (Ed.): The Cognitive Life of Things. Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind. Cambridge/Oxford: Oxbow Books 2010, 71-79

Contemporary Readings of Hegel

DESCRIPTION
Hegel famously characterized philosophy as its own time comprehended in thought. Today, 185 years after Hegel’s death, several contemporary philosophers have enlisted Hegel in their attempts to comprehend our time in thought. What is striking however is that these philosophers invoke Hegel as the inspiration for radically antagonistic comprehensions of our present. Since the spontaneous comprehension of our present is as a time of catastrophic crisis it is unsurprising that the comprehension of crisis should be riven by a crisis of comprehension. The power of Hegel’s thought, and its contemporary salience, so this course will argue, is that crises of comprehension must yield comprehensions of crisis that obligate their critical overcoming.

The necessity at issue is rational and it is precisely the status of rational necessity that is at stake in these antagonistic reactivations of Hegel. The claim that Hegelian rationalism is committed to converting crises of comprehension into their comprehensive overcoming will be tested against those who emphasize the conciliatory, integrative aspect of Hegel’s rationalism at the expense of traumatic discontinuities, but also against the attempt to convert Hegel’s thought into a tragic meditation on the impossibility of rationally overcoming trauma. We will trace the schism between these integrative and disintegrative reactivations of Hegel back to conceptual issues about the status of rationality, metaphysics, critique, dialectics, and the absolute in Hegel’s thought. We will also try to understand how these conceptual antagonisms give rise to fundamental political antagonisms, not only between social democratic reformism and revolutionary communism, but also between communism as a possible object of affirmation and communism as an impossible lost object of mourning.

The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks.

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance.

Image: Contemporary Hegel by Arkan Ehonis, 2013-2016

Outer Edges:
21st Century Spatial Metapolitics

DESCRIPTION
This Seminar is concerned primarily with the tradition and prospects of geopolitical anarchy snd its related literature, as exemplified by the principle of Dynamic Geography theorized by Patri Friedman. The other significant theorists of this tendency whose work will be reviewed and discussed are Robert Nozick, and Scott Alexander. The object of the seminar is the cultural current that counterposes dissociation in space to resolution in time. ‘Metapolitics’ – in this sense – designates the strategic perpetuation of ideological irresolution into (fractured) space. Geography is thus advanced as an alternative to dialectics.

Central preoccupations of the seminar will include: Universality, particularity, peculiarity, singularity; the ‘meta-’ function in philosophy; cognitive investment of space; exit and voice; nationality as an epochal construct; spatial subtexts in the conception of property; politics and diplomacy; boundaries, borders, and frontiers; seasteading and space colonization.

The course consists of two modules, each of four weeks. The first module will concentrate on political philosophy, the second will ramify the discussion into historical and science fictional / futurological territory.

REQUIREMENTS
Each module of the two-part seminar will be composed of four two and a half hour sessions, each of which will be conducted as an extended seminar. During this period material blogged the previous week will be discussed alongside the set material. Based upon the set readings, online news and commentary, and ongoing class discussion, students will be expected to contribute ~400 words of content to the seminar blog on relevant topics. (This will additionally be posted to the google classroom page for everyone to read and comment upon as they wish, providing some preliminary threads for the group discussion). The final assessment will consist of a 2500 word extended essay on a topic agreed upon with the instructor in advance.

Image: Mark Rothko, Red on Maroon Mural, Section 74, 1959

Curatorial Practice III:
Curating the Future Now!

DESCRIPTION
The 20th century, particularly after the Second World War, witnessed the emergence of a new class of cultural producers named curators who worked with with artists, museum officials, and private collectors to organize art exhibitions. Through an ongoing process of self-specialization, curators began to play a decisive role not only in the production of art, but in shaping the function of the individual artist as well. Over the course of the last two decades, in turn, many universities have begun to offer curatorial studies programs, focusing on the development of the curator’s role in constructing associations between art, artists and audiences, as well as elaborating the significance of exhibitions as the key space for approaches to contemporary art and society.


REQUIREMENTS
This seminar is the final module of the Curatorial Practice series of seminars.* It will consist of 6 strictly hands-on workshops which continue the work of the seminar from the previous module. Participants will collaborate closely with the instructor in small groups, and at times will work on an individual basis, in order to utilize the cybernetic strategies developed in the previous module.** The seminar will assist in the further development, installation & presentation of the planned exhibition and conference in March at Prague’s TranzitDisplay. In addition, the seminar will focus and contribute to the production and publication of the events’ catalogue.

Building the Commune:
Insurgent Government, Communal State

→

Emergency Government:
The Political Theory of Decisionism

→

Reintroduction to Metaphysics I:
The Speculative Return

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Anthropol:
The Future of Human Insecurity

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Philosophy and Mathematics I:
Consequences of Diagonalization

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Artifice & Alienation:
SF Cinema as Critical Political Thought

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Contact Us

Main Office:
The New Centre for Research & Practice
4417 Broadmoor Ave SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49503

P: 616.439.1338 | F: 616.698.7220
E: info@thenewcentre.org
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Student Services: Tracy Susheski

 

Access Service Hours of Operation:
As of Monday, October 13th, 2014, The New Centre offers Access Service hours Monday - Friday, 8 AM - 8 PM EST. This is not only for Students, Members and Friends, but the general public as well. We will be providing registration and technical support, as well as providing details about our current and upcoming activities and how to become involved. Please add access@thenewcentre.org to your Google+ contact list and use it to either email us about issues / questions / concerns or to access us via video/audio Google hangouts, during these times.

***General information questions should continue to be sent to info@thenewcentre.org.