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In addition to our paid services - Certificate Programs, enrollment-based seminars, Memberships and Friendships - The New Centre for Research & Practice offers a variety of public services that are made available for free. It is a central part of our mission to serve the public - in particular, artists and other art professionals, as well as numerous humanities and sciences-related publics - regardless of income or education. As a primarily user-funded institution, the vast majority of our financial support that enables this comes from our monthly, annual, and lifetime memberships, which begin at an affordable 15 USD/month. Through these memberships, in addition to periodic donations, The New Centre is able to provide our public offerings, ranging from live-streamed and archived videos of lectures, roundtables, seminars, and discussions, to paywall-free books, journals, research groups, and reading groups.
Parallel Academia is a group within the New Centre available for Researchers and Students who regardless of institutional status would like to further their research interests. The group’s activities consist of planning and organizing events in collaboration with cultural institutions in cities around the world. Since the beginning of the COVD-19 Pandemics, all Paralell Academia activities are taking place online under Sheltering Places.
Sheltering Places This program began on March 25 as The New Centre’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and over the course of many seasons it has served as a way for our Students, Researchers and Instructors to engage with one another and with renowned artists, curators and philosophers across a range of urgent topics. It is a successful student-run attempt to experiment with modes of informal intellectual exchange as the opportunities for face-to-face interaction have been eroded globally, a way to make up for the loss of casual exchange of ideas with online spaces that would allow for a great variety of conversation forms and topics. As an online institution at the forefront of innovating knowledge production and transmission since 2014, The New Centre hopes that Sheltering Places can continue to support collaborative thinking and contribute to public discourse in the next few years.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE PROGRAM: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS1Kljasv7W3KILQ2vBX3vUAxml6qbYG8
>>> OUR PUBLIC VIDEOS & SEMINARS >>>
Public In-Person Events: All of our in-person events thus far have been free-of-charge, collaborative endeavors with other institutions, which has included Benjamin Bratton, Coco Fusco, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Harun Farocki, Boris Groys, Metahaven, Jussi Parrikka, Elizabeth Povinelli, Nina Power, and Martha Rosler, as part of the Supercommunity @Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2015), Julieta Aranda, Mark Dery, Ed Keller, Antonia Majaca, Anton Vidokle, McKenzie Wark, as part of Superconversations: Machines that Matter (NYC, USA, 2015), Diann Bauer, Amanda Beech, Federica Bueti, Victoria Ivanova, and Luciana Parisi, and Nick Srnicek, as part of Reinventing Horizons (Prague, Czech Republic, 2016), Sam Samiee and Zves Konstantinos as part of Artificial Cinema (Prague, Czech Republic, 2016), Ahmed El Hady, Katerina Kolozova, Eden Medina, Reza Negarestani, Patricia Reed, and Peter Wolfendale, as part of #AGI Accelerate General Intellect (NYC, USA, 2016), Jason Adams, as part of Beyond MOOCs: Theory, Practice, Platform (Seattle, USA, 2016), Mohammad Salemy, as part of “For Machine Use Only” book launch @Vancouver Art Book Fair (2016), Lou Cantour, Alexander R. Galloway, Sam Sackeroff, Maria Tsylke, and Mary Wang, as part of “For Machine Use Only” book launch @e-flux (NYC, USA, 2017), Altwoke Collective, Neha Chriss, Petra Kendall, Nick Srnicek, as part of as part of Red May (Seattle, USA, 2017), “Activist Futures” (LA, USA, 2018), Jason Adams, S. Charusheela, and Eva Cherniavsky, as part of as part of Red May (Seattle, USA, 2018), Misal Adnan Yildiz, John Gerrard, Markus Reymann, Boris Ondreička, Lucas Pietroiusti, Katja Novitskova, Manuel Correa, Andrej Tomažin, Katalin Timár, Arthur Steiner, Shaun Dacey, Philippe Pirotte, Leonardo Dellanoce, Marina Fokidis, Geert Lovink, Diann Bauer, Hyper Annotations @ Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2019).
Public Livestreamed Events: We regularly livestream public events around the world on an open-access basis, that would otherwise have remained available only to those who attend in person. This has included lectures by Peter Wolfendale, as part of "Get Reassembled: Time, Intelligence, Acceleration" (Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France, 2014), Amanda Beech, Robin Mackay,and Diann Bauer, as part of “Art and Reason: How Art Thinks” Newcastle, UK, 2015), Julieta Aranda and Bassam El Baroni, as part of “Knowledge Forms & Forming Knowledge” (Graz, Austria, 2015), Holly Herndon, Amy Ireland, and Bruce Sterling as part of “Alien Aesthetics” (Melbourne, Australia, 2015), Tom McGlynn and Yvette Granata, as part of “After Representation: Genres of Sense” (NYC, USA, 2015), Simon O’Sullivan and Ida Soulard, as part of “Art and Reason - How Art Thinks II” (Newcastle, UK, 2016), Bernard Stiegler and Mohammad Salemy, as part of “About the Neganthropocene and Its Economy” (Vancouver, Canada, 2016), Han Kang, Andrea Phillips, Hu Fang, Fernando Garcia-Dory, and Shin Ji Young, as part of "To All Contributing Factors: the Gwangju Biennale International Forum” (2016), Sylvia Federici, as part of “#MeToo and Capital Accumulation” (Portland, USA, 2018), Asad Haider, as part of Red May (Seattle, USA, 2018), Irina Aristarkhova, Reza Negarestani, J.-P. Caron, Davor Löffler, Tasha Lomonosova, among others, as part of "Alien Processes: Reproduction and Time", with The New School for Social Research (NYC, USA, 2020), Katja Novitskova, Annika Kuhlmann, Simon Rees, Aleksei Taruts, Clementine Deliss, Simon Denny, Ekaterina Inozemtseva and Sasha Burenkov as part of "Artistic Cosmos: Worldmaking & The New Normals", with Cosmoscow Foundation (2020), Brunella Antomarini, Valentin Golev, Reza Negarestani and Patricia Reed as part of "Collective Infrastructures and Knowledge Production in a Post-Digital Age" (2020).
Public Seminar & Roundtable Videos: Our public archive includes seminars with Elie Ayache, Benjamin Bratton, Ray Brassier, Laboria Cuboniks, Yuk Hui, Victoria Ivanova, Katerina Kolozova, Alexandra Hedako Mason, Reza Negarestani, Anne-Françoise Schmid, Nick Srnicek, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Tiziana Terranova and roundtables with Mohammad Salemy, as part of “To Live and Think Like Pigs”, Zac Davis, as part of “Mazzola’s Topology of Music”, Christopher Breu and Carlos Amador, as part of “Reading ‘Capital’”, Adam Kleinman and Mohammad Salemy, as part of “From Escape to Exit”, Arthur Kroker and Kathy Ferguson, as part of “Meaning & Time: Remembering Michael Weinstein” (2015), Nicholas Tampio, as part of “The Rhizomatic Contract” (2015), David Xu Borgonjon, as part of “The Scientific Image: Reading Sci-Fi from Socialist States” (2015), Fernando Zalamea, Lucca Fraser, and Guerino Mazzola, as part of “Grothendieck & A Theory of Contemporary Transgression” (2015), Andrew McLuhan, as part of “Understanding Media” (2016), Antoine Bousquet, as part of “The Logistics of Military Perception” (2016), Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, Katerina Kolozova, Catherine Liu, Nina Power, and Steven Shaviro, as part of “Crisis, What Crisis? Political Technologies at a Crossroads” (2018).
Public Scholarships: We have offered and continue to offer partial and full scholarships to our Certificate Students and Members from the Global South (amongst others, as we are able) - depending upon the receipt of sufficient donations earmarked for that purpose. To request a scholarship, please apply to be a Certificate Student and mention this need, or, to be considered for a Membership scholarship email us at organizers@thenewcentre.org.
Public Research Groups: Since, 2014, we have organized a number of public Re:search Groups on Facebook including Accelerationism Re:search, Anthropocene Re:search, New Art Re:search, New Metaphysics, New Media Re:search, New Music Re:search, Paraacademia Re:search, Postcapitalism Re:search, Postcinematic Re:search, Poststatism Re:search, Time-Critical Media Re:search, Transsubjectivity Re:search.
Open-Access Journal: Triple Ampersand, our academic journal, is available paywall-free to all readers and can be accessed here. The journal can be accessed here.
Open-Access Books: Our first book published by Triple Ampersand (also the name of our publishing house), Gilles Deleuze’s “What is Grounding?” is available for free download.
Open-Access One-Month Memberships: The New Centre offers one-month memberships free of charge to the general public, upon request. To make a request, email organizers@thenewcentre.org
&&& Platform is The New Centre's publishing platform, both online and in print, that fosters new forms of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. It bridges the distinction between academic and popular realms, providing a more accessible platform for public intellectual practice.
Publications have no mandatory thematic or formal constraints. We view the editing process as a means to collaborate with authors, expanding and promoting their ideas, whether within the context of one of our Seminars or about topics beyond our institutional scope and mandate.
If you wish to submit a paper or have any questions regarding the submission process, please don't hesitate to contact our Editorial Team at editors@thenewcentre.org.
To read some of our published texts or purchase our books, please visit &&& Platform.
INCREDIBLE MACHINES 2022: THE MODEL IS THE MESSAGE
| ABSTRACTS | PROGRAM | SPONSORS | PARTICIPATE |
The New Centre for Research & Practice, in collaboration with Richmond Art Gallery, will host the Incredible Machines 2022: Model Is the Message on October 1 and 2, 2022. If you want to purchase the book containing the proceedings of this conference, please visit THIS LINK.
BACKGROUND: The original Incredible Machines conference was a two-day live, in person and online gathering on March 7-8, 2014, in Vancouver, Canada. Conceived as a transdisciplinary event for discussions about the transformative role of computational technologies, it brought together a large group of thinkers and artists in a new presentational format that challenged conventional thinking about technology inside and outside the world of contemporary art. Organized by Mohammad Salemy and Access Gallery, Incredible Machines 2014 was the first academic conference with both online and IRL presentations. It featured guest speakers and a sizable audience from different parts of the world and set the stage for the establishment of The New Centre for Research & Practice in the following September as an online platform with year-round programming dedicated to the questions of technology and futurity, now in its 9th year of operation.
DESCRIPTION: While keeping the discussions of the original event in the rearview mirror, the Incredible Machines 2022 will be looking at the technological developments of the last decade in the broadest sense, especially those with ontological roots in scientific, social, cultural, and political technologies. Our current epoch is marked by techno-capitalism's instrumental logic and unsatiated thirst for human attention, leaving less and less time for us to produce, contemplate, or even value original and extensive explanations, reflections, and critiques of the existing world.
If the declining value of meaningful content in the postwar world was summarized by Marshall McLuhan's famous words that "the Medium is the Message," today we are confronted with a changing world in which, according to the Philosophers of Technology Benjamin Bratton and the computer engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas, "The Model is the Message." Can a shift from the medium to modeling enable us to circumvent observations and critiques to instead arrive at alternative modes of operation that bring forth consequential interventions in the world?
Models are characterized by their deep foothold in the techno-scientific world and their prevalent role in executing tasks. They emblemize the interplays and tradeoffs between representational fidelity and practical constraints. Models not only signify the friction between our theoretical and practical resources versus reality but also navigate conflicts and conformities between various theoretical and practical frameworks.
In this sense, models are not mere idealizations, useful fictions, or indirect ways of talking or acting upon the world but encapsulations of know-whats and know-hows inherent to theoretical and practical commitments pertaining to framing and unframing the world, namely knowing and acting upon it. Given their entanglement with the suppositions and partialities—whether implicit or explicit—embedded in theoretical and practical frameworks, models can either reveal or surreptitiously carry and reinforce these elements. They create what is often called black box systems or black box societies in which programmatic schemes of operations have been not only automated but kept away from our awareness and intervention.
Incredible Machines 2022 will also examine the possibility that the fields of design and architecture via model making can function today as a space of refuge for artists and thinkers to embed their own descriptive and critical observations directly as speculative yet practical and implementable models. This approach might allow us to reformulate the function of models not just as developmental blueprints but as technologies to protect innovative ideas for their future access and implementation.
Incredible Machines 2022 is conceived as a space for experimenting with new ideas through meaningful interactions between conference guests and researchers from multiple fields of knowledge. Thus, the number of attendants will be limited, and observers will be shortlisted based on their research interests and fields of practice.
If you are interested in being an observer, please complete this form, and we will contact you soon with instructions for attending the conference.
Incredible Machines 2022: Model Is the Message: October 1–2
IMAGE: Modulating Ramp, Justin Lincoln, 2022
Organized by The New Centre for Research & Practice & The Centre for Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London
Dates: June 10th, June 11th, June 12th, 2024
Keynote speakers: Amanda Beech, Ray Brassier, Vanessa Wills
We live in a time of a renewed interest in Marx and in Marxism. Marx is now being read as having an ecological critique of capitalism, as being keenly interested in non-Western societies, and as having recognized the ambiguity of technology for human liberation. The successors of value-form theory have advanced the issue of abstract domination. New theories of class, and of ideology are also on the rise, foregrounding the friction between what is and what appears. Interest in Marx’s political thought is revived in tactically and strategically oriented theories of political organization. In tandem with this, the logics of the social world are pluralized in recent works, enabling a new understanding of social form, its compulsory character, the traction of the mode of production on the constitution of subjectivities, and the role of real abstraction. Psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious find in the concept of estrangement a common ground with Hegel and Marx, ushering in a new wave of Freud and Lacan influenced Marxism. Lively debates about the nature of abstract labor, discuss its historical and logical sources, and compatible theories of transition. The "communist hypothesis" finds new formulations.
This renaissance in serious readings of Marx parallels the rise of the so-called "Pittsburgh School" (Sellars, McDowell, Brandom, etc.) of analytic, neo-pragmatist philosophy. While the rejection of German Idealism might be seen as a foundational gesture in early analytic philosophy, the Pittsburgh School has revived interest in Kantian and Hegelian themes within a broadly naturalistic context. If previous forms of Analytic Marxism (Cohen, Elster, Roehmer) remained faithful to the analytic rejection of dialectics, the Pittsburgh School enables the recasting of Hegelian thought within a new form of semantic holism. The Pittsburgh School advances understandings of human action that problematize both "the causal" and "the normative" (and the relationship between them) in ways that could inform Marxist understandings of "the natural" and "the social." It activates conceptual tools from pragmatism, emphasizing the dimension of practice in concept use- offering possible new understandings of "praxis." It thinks through the dimension of concept-revision and world pictures, offering tools for developing more precise concepts of ideology. If, as Rorty once said of Brandom, his work "can usefully be seen as an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage," the question that now presses us is whether we can mobilize the resources of the Pittsburgh School to usher analytic philosophy from its Hegelian to its Marxist phase? Further, can Marxist thought gain insight into its own categories through an engagement with the thinking of Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, and related thinkers?
Following recent interest in the synergies and contradictions between these two traditions, we aim to build a dialogical space between Marxism and the Pittsburgh School in this conference and thus extend this call for papers.
Suggested topics include:
Please send a 500 word abstract by 30th March to: submissions@marxismandpittsburgh.org.
Preference will be given to submissions from presenters who can commit to attending the conference in person in London. We believe that direct interactions and networking at the conference venue will enhance the sharing and generation of knowledge among participants. That said, we understand that global circumstances and personal constraints might limit physical attendance for some. With that in mind, we will also accept a select number of strong submissions for online presentations, especially from individuals residing in the Global South. We strive to highlight and encourage contributions that bring forth varied global perspectives and experiences. So don't be discouraged to send a proposal for consideration. We are flexible.
To register, please fill our registration form.
IMAGE: Siah Armajani, Tomb for John Berryman, 1972–2012
Together with ESAP (Escola Superior de Arte do Porto), we hosted a roundtable titled "ChatGPT, Language and The Future of Thinking & Writing" on June 2nd, from 16:00-18:00 CET. You can watch it through this link.
ChatGPT and other developments in Large Language Models have taken the world by storm. Their profound and yet unformulated implications for thinking, reasoning and writing have sparked crucial debates on the transformation of human intellect and communication in our age. This roundtable explores the complex relationship between ChatGPT's emergence and the changes already underway in thinking and writing practices. This roundtable brings together: Elie Ayache, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, AA Cavia, Joao Oliveira Duarte, Anna Longo, Rafael Moscardi, Reza Negatestani, Mohammad Salemy, and is Moderated by Romulo Moraes.
Featuring human-like text generation and comprehension capabilities, ChatGPT has found applications in a myriad of industries, from content creation to customer service. It also sparked a number of controversies for its usage on academic tasks such as writing, editing, and summarizing as well as uses in creative writing. As much as AI models have been instrumental in augmenting human intellect, they have also inherited the limitations and biases of the data they have been trained on. With that in mind, this roundtable asks: What are the limitations it reproduces? Are we on the brink of a new revolution in intellectual labor? What does ChatGPT say about our own capacity for reasoning in our predicament?
Below, you can find the abstracts from our participants:
Elie Ayache: ChatGPT cannot write, it can only predict text probabilistically and you know what I think of probability and prediction as opposed to writing. Definitely, some arguments from derivatives writing and trading should be brought to bear. Especially in relation with the future, whose awareness seems to be the necessary condition from AI to be capable of thought.
AA Cavia: AI as a research project has as its founding myth the notion that mimicry and intelligence are indistinguishable. What modes of artificial reason lie beyond the imitation game? I will argue for the centrality of the notion of a 'world model' in accounts of sapience.
João Oliveira Duarte: Our aim will be to address ChatGPT as a bodiless language from above as a particular example of Borges’s library: a place in which sense and nonsense, gibberish and meaningful sense, cannot be distinguished.
Joao Enxuto & Erica Love: We will discuss the uses and effects of deploying descriptors such as “dreaming” and “hallucinating” to generative AI and how these allusions to transcendental states confer (humanistic) artistic agency to computational processes.
Anna Longo: Based on statistical methods, chat GPT confirms opinions, perspectives, and knowledge that we have already rather than improving and differentiating them. Entailed by the strategy of the current industry for information production and consumption, it favorises the latter while reducing the space for actual "creativity" and dissent.
Rafael Moscardi: From the Jacquard Loom to the thermodynamic engine, from the computer to the database and now with ChatGPT and other LLMs, paradigmatic “machines” bring the demystification of a task and change the form and function of labor as such. Can we forecast where these developments are heading after the release of ChatGPT?
Reza Negarestani: ChatGPT is a logical continuation but also an exacerbation of the so-called arsenals of democracy. The focus will be on how ChatGPT can be seen via the emerging doctrine of weapon open system architectures where potentials for weaponization are developed in accordance with adversarial dynamics and threats which do not yet exist.
Mohammad Salemy: ChatGPT did not change the nature of thinking and writing, thinking and writing had already changed and this is precisely why ChatGPT emerged.
And Your Bird Can Sing: Computational Theatre & the After-Image of Social Media is a research-based collaborative project organized by The New Centre for Research & Practice and Michael Turner and Daniel Young. This project will produce a work of experimental cinema about social media in general, Twitter in particular.
The artistic problem arises from an interest in historical transitions between media systems that continue to be understood as a fossil record’s sedimentary layers despite a shift from analog to digital. If our brain is a screen, and media a consciousness that we endlessly scroll, are we not cinematic spectators in an electropedic gyre?
We are motivated by the formal and aesthetic problem of media and time: How would 20th-century cinema understand 21st-century social media? How does social media understand cinema? We want to be better informed on how we have been re-structured globally and locally through heightened conflict mediated by algorithms that feed on publicly-shared and emotionally-charged content. Is social media the primary site of social power?
Can an interest in the production of vernaculars stemming from absurdist uses of both language and visual culture through witticisms and memes provide much-needed psychic breaks from larger narratives that consider contemporary histories as echoes of a teleological past?
These and other questions will be tackled throughout the seven sessions of this Seminar Series, which will take place on Saturdays, February 18 and 25, and March 4, 11, 18, and 25, 2023, at 10 am PST / 7 pm CET. It will provide a casual and intimate space for propositions and discussions by the guests featuring ideas and examples of social media and experimental cinema, relating to their research interests. Confirmed guests are Julieta Aranda, Hossein Derakhsan, Ganaele Langlois, Anna Longo, Reza Negarestani, and Mohammad Salemy.
Participation in the seminar series is free. To attend, please complete this form, and we will contact you soon with instructions. This form will shortlist an audience that will have the opportunity of engaging with our Guests.
For this Conference, our guests have offered abstracts that comply with the 280 character limit, immersing themselves into the constraints and temporalities of Twitter and inquiring into its capacity to evoke different effects and convey knowledge.
ABSTRACTS AND SCHEDULE
Session 1, Julieta Aranda, February 18 Cinema & social media organize our experiences of time and our desires in different trajectories. Concomitant with the disruption of Hollywood's old power dynamics, was Social Media able to usher in a new era of audience production, or is it the end of cinema as we know it?
Session 2, Hossein Derakhshan, February 25Presents a case study of two political imaginaries about protests in Iran, written on twitter between 2017-19, in a film script-style, creating pragmatic possibilities of resistance on the ground against anticipated real oppression.
Session 3, Anna Longo, March 4Twitter cannot fly. Assemblages of enunciation are products of desiring machines. Birds’ songs are expressions of territorial assemblages and movies express lines of flight. Twitter is a machine operating according to the capitalist regime of signs: can cinema teach it to fly?
Session 4, Ganaele Langlois, March 11Affect as misinformation. Misinformation provokes intense affects: anger, fear, but also detachment, among others. This Session is an invitation to look closely at the organization of affect in misinformation propagated through social media, and about the kinds of tools needed to create new modes of engaging through affect.
Session 5, Reza Negarestani, March 18"Affect Economy between brains and algorithms" aims to foreground the economy of affect in the age of social media through a synthesis between several theories of neuroscience, and a number of critical theories concerning algorithmic design and mass-entertainment.
Session 6, Roxanne Panchasi, March 25 Belgian musician Paul van Haver, aka "Stromae," is a deep-feels electro rapper/crooner & multimedia phenomenon. His 2013 song "Carmen," animated (literally) in the music video by Sylvain Chomet, is one of the most compelling visualizations of Twitter/social ever. Don't @ me.
IMAGE: Paul Klee, Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine), 1922, Detail.
HELP CREATE A PARALLEL ACADEMIA
Login / Public Programs / About / People / Membership / Programs / Seminars / Archive / Connect / Refund Policy / Apply Now / e-flux Education
In addition to our paid services - Certificate Programs, enrollment-based seminars, Memberships and Friendships - The New Centre for Research & Practice offers a variety of public services that are made available for free. It is a central part of our mission to serve the public - in particular, artists and other art professionals, as well as numerous humanities and sciences-related publics - regardless of income or education. As a primarily user-funded institution, the vast majority of our financial support that enables this comes from our monthly, annual, and lifetime memberships, which begin at an affordable 15 USD/month. Through these memberships, in addition to periodic donations, The New Centre is able to provide our public offerings, ranging from live-streamed and archived videos of lectures, roundtables, seminars, and discussions, to paywall-free books, journals, research groups, and reading groups.
Parallel Academia is a group within the New Centre available for Researchers and Students who regardless of institutional status would like to further their research interests. The group’s activities consist of planning and organizing events in collaboration with cultural institutions in cities around the world. Since the beginning of the COVD-19 Pandemics, all Paralell Academia activities are taking place online under Sheltering Places.
Sheltering Places This program began on March 25 as The New Centre’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and over the course of many seasons it has served as a way for our Students, Researchers and Instructors to engage with one another and with renowned artists, curators and philosophers across a range of urgent topics. It is a successful student-run attempt to experiment with modes of informal intellectual exchange as the opportunities for face-to-face interaction have been eroded globally, a way to make up for the loss of casual exchange of ideas with online spaces that would allow for a great variety of conversation forms and topics. As an online institution at the forefront of innovating knowledge production and transmission since 2014, The New Centre hopes that Sheltering Places can continue to support collaborative thinking and contribute to public discourse in the next few years.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE PROGRAM: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS1Kljasv7W3KILQ2vBX3vUAxml6qbYG8
>>> OUR PUBLIC VIDEOS & SEMINARS >>>
Public In-Person Events: All of our in-person events thus far have been free-of-charge, collaborative endeavors with other institutions, which has included Benjamin Bratton, Coco Fusco, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Harun Farocki, Boris Groys, Metahaven, Jussi Parrikka, Elizabeth Povinelli, Nina Power, and Martha Rosler, as part of the Supercommunity @Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2015), Julieta Aranda, Mark Dery, Ed Keller, Antonia Majaca, Anton Vidokle, McKenzie Wark, as part of Superconversations: Machines that Matter (NYC, USA, 2015), Diann Bauer, Amanda Beech, Federica Bueti, Victoria Ivanova, and Luciana Parisi, and Nick Srnicek, as part of Reinventing Horizons (Prague, Czech Republic, 2016), Sam Samiee and Zves Konstantinos as part of Artificial Cinema (Prague, Czech Republic, 2016), Ahmed El Hady, Katerina Kolozova, Eden Medina, Reza Negarestani, Patricia Reed, and Peter Wolfendale, as part of #AGI Accelerate General Intellect (NYC, USA, 2016), Jason Adams, as part of Beyond MOOCs: Theory, Practice, Platform (Seattle, USA, 2016), Mohammad Salemy, as part of “For Machine Use Only” book launch @Vancouver Art Book Fair (2016), Lou Cantour, Alexander R. Galloway, Sam Sackeroff, Maria Tsylke, and Mary Wang, as part of “For Machine Use Only” book launch @e-flux (NYC, USA, 2017), Altwoke Collective, Neha Chriss, Petra Kendall, Nick Srnicek, as part of as part of Red May (Seattle, USA, 2017), “Activist Futures” (LA, USA, 2018), Jason Adams, S. Charusheela, and Eva Cherniavsky, as part of as part of Red May (Seattle, USA, 2018), Misal Adnan Yildiz, John Gerrard, Markus Reymann, Boris Ondreička, Lucas Pietroiusti, Katja Novitskova, Manuel Correa, Andrej Tomažin, Katalin Timár, Arthur Steiner, Shaun Dacey, Philippe Pirotte, Leonardo Dellanoce, Marina Fokidis, Geert Lovink, Diann Bauer, Hyper Annotations @ Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2019).
Public Livestreamed Events: We regularly livestream public events around the world on an open-access basis, that would otherwise have remained available only to those who attend in person. This has included lectures by Peter Wolfendale, as part of "Get Reassembled: Time, Intelligence, Acceleration" (Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, France, 2014), Amanda Beech, Robin Mackay,and Diann Bauer, as part of “Art and Reason: How Art Thinks” Newcastle, UK, 2015), Julieta Aranda and Bassam El Baroni, as part of “Knowledge Forms & Forming Knowledge” (Graz, Austria, 2015), Holly Herndon, Amy Ireland, and Bruce Sterling as part of “Alien Aesthetics” (Melbourne, Australia, 2015), Tom McGlynn and Yvette Granata, as part of “After Representation: Genres of Sense” (NYC, USA, 2015), Simon O’Sullivan and Ida Soulard, as part of “Art and Reason - How Art Thinks II” (Newcastle, UK, 2016), Bernard Stiegler and Mohammad Salemy, as part of “About the Neganthropocene and Its Economy” (Vancouver, Canada, 2016), Han Kang, Andrea Phillips, Hu Fang, Fernando Garcia-Dory, and Shin Ji Young, as part of "To All Contributing Factors: the Gwangju Biennale International Forum” (2016), Sylvia Federici, as part of “#MeToo and Capital Accumulation” (Portland, USA, 2018), Asad Haider, as part of Red May (Seattle, USA, 2018), Irina Aristarkhova, Reza Negarestani, J.-P. Caron, Davor Löffler, Tasha Lomonosova, among others, as part of "Alien Processes: Reproduction and Time", with The New School for Social Research (NYC, USA, 2020), Katja Novitskova, Annika Kuhlmann, Simon Rees, Aleksei Taruts, Clementine Deliss, Simon Denny, Ekaterina Inozemtseva and Sasha Burenkov as part of "Artistic Cosmos: Worldmaking & The New Normals", with Cosmoscow Foundation (2020), Brunella Antomarini, Valentin Golev, Reza Negarestani and Patricia Reed as part of "Collective Infrastructures and Knowledge Production in a Post-Digital Age" (2020).
Public Seminar & Roundtable Videos: Our public archive includes seminars with Elie Ayache, Benjamin Bratton, Ray Brassier, Laboria Cuboniks, Yuk Hui, Victoria Ivanova, Katerina Kolozova, Alexandra Hedako Mason, Reza Negarestani, Anne-Françoise Schmid, Nick Srnicek, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Tiziana Terranova and roundtables with Mohammad Salemy, as part of “To Live and Think Like Pigs”, Zac Davis, as part of “Mazzola’s Topology of Music”, Christopher Breu and Carlos Amador, as part of “Reading ‘Capital’”, Adam Kleinman and Mohammad Salemy, as part of “From Escape to Exit”, Arthur Kroker and Kathy Ferguson, as part of “Meaning & Time: Remembering Michael Weinstein” (2015), Nicholas Tampio, as part of “The Rhizomatic Contract” (2015), David Xu Borgonjon, as part of “The Scientific Image: Reading Sci-Fi from Socialist States” (2015), Fernando Zalamea, Lucca Fraser, and Guerino Mazzola, as part of “Grothendieck & A Theory of Contemporary Transgression” (2015), Andrew McLuhan, as part of “Understanding Media” (2016), Antoine Bousquet, as part of “The Logistics of Military Perception” (2016), Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, Katerina Kolozova, Catherine Liu, Nina Power, and Steven Shaviro, as part of “Crisis, What Crisis? Political Technologies at a Crossroads” (2018).
Public Scholarships: We have offered and continue to offer partial and full scholarships to our Certificate Students and Members from the Global South (amongst others, as we are able) - depending upon the receipt of sufficient donations earmarked for that purpose. To request a scholarship, please apply to be a Certificate Student and mention this need, or, to be considered for a Membership scholarship email us at organizers@thenewcentre.org.
Public Research Groups: Since, 2014, we have organized a number of public Re:search Groups on Facebook including Accelerationism Re:search, Anthropocene Re:search, New Art Re:search, New Metaphysics, New Media Re:search, New Music Re:search, Paraacademia Re:search, Postcapitalism Re:search, Postcinematic Re:search, Poststatism Re:search, Time-Critical Media Re:search, Transsubjectivity Re:search.
Open-Access Journal: Triple Ampersand, our academic journal, is available paywall-free to all readers and can be accessed here. The journal can be accessed here.
Open-Access Books: Our first book published by Triple Ampersand (also the name of our publishing house), Gilles Deleuze’s “What is Grounding?” is available for free download.
Open-Access One-Month Memberships: The New Centre offers one-month memberships free of charge to the general public, upon request. To make a request, email organizers@thenewcentre.org
&&& (TRIPLE AMPERSAND PUBLISHING)
&&& Platform is The New Centre's publishing platform, both online and in print, that fosters new forms of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. It bridges the distinction between academic and popular realms, providing a more accessible platform for public intellectual practice.
Publications have no mandatory thematic or formal constraints. We view the editing process as a means to collaborate with authors, expanding and promoting their ideas, whether within the context of one of our Seminars or about topics beyond our institutional scope and mandate.
If you wish to submit a paper or have any questions regarding the submission process, please don't hesitate to contact our Editorial Team at editors@thenewcentre.org.
To read some of our published texts or purchase our books, please visit &&& Platform.
INCREDIBLE MACHINES 2022
INCREDIBLE MACHINES 2022: THE MODEL IS THE MESSAGE
| ABSTRACTS | PROGRAM | SPONSORS | PARTICIPATE |
The New Centre for Research & Practice, in collaboration with Richmond Art Gallery, will host the Incredible Machines 2022: Model Is the Message on October 1 and 2, 2022. If you want to purchase the book containing the proceedings of this conference, please visit THIS LINK.
BACKGROUND: The original Incredible Machines conference was a two-day live, in person and online gathering on March 7-8, 2014, in Vancouver, Canada. Conceived as a transdisciplinary event for discussions about the transformative role of computational technologies, it brought together a large group of thinkers and artists in a new presentational format that challenged conventional thinking about technology inside and outside the world of contemporary art. Organized by Mohammad Salemy and Access Gallery, Incredible Machines 2014 was the first academic conference with both online and IRL presentations. It featured guest speakers and a sizable audience from different parts of the world and set the stage for the establishment of The New Centre for Research & Practice in the following September as an online platform with year-round programming dedicated to the questions of technology and futurity, now in its 9th year of operation.
DESCRIPTION: While keeping the discussions of the original event in the rearview mirror, the Incredible Machines 2022 will be looking at the technological developments of the last decade in the broadest sense, especially those with ontological roots in scientific, social, cultural, and political technologies. Our current epoch is marked by techno-capitalism's instrumental logic and unsatiated thirst for human attention, leaving less and less time for us to produce, contemplate, or even value original and extensive explanations, reflections, and critiques of the existing world.
If the declining value of meaningful content in the postwar world was summarized by Marshall McLuhan's famous words that "the Medium is the Message," today we are confronted with a changing world in which, according to the Philosophers of Technology Benjamin Bratton and the computer engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas, "The Model is the Message." Can a shift from the medium to modeling enable us to circumvent observations and critiques to instead arrive at alternative modes of operation that bring forth consequential interventions in the world?
Models are characterized by their deep foothold in the techno-scientific world and their prevalent role in executing tasks. They emblemize the interplays and tradeoffs between representational fidelity and practical constraints. Models not only signify the friction between our theoretical and practical resources versus reality but also navigate conflicts and conformities between various theoretical and practical frameworks.
In this sense, models are not mere idealizations, useful fictions, or indirect ways of talking or acting upon the world but encapsulations of know-whats and know-hows inherent to theoretical and practical commitments pertaining to framing and unframing the world, namely knowing and acting upon it. Given their entanglement with the suppositions and partialities—whether implicit or explicit—embedded in theoretical and practical frameworks, models can either reveal or surreptitiously carry and reinforce these elements. They create what is often called black box systems or black box societies in which programmatic schemes of operations have been not only automated but kept away from our awareness and intervention.
Incredible Machines 2022 will also examine the possibility that the fields of design and architecture via model making can function today as a space of refuge for artists and thinkers to embed their own descriptive and critical observations directly as speculative yet practical and implementable models. This approach might allow us to reformulate the function of models not just as developmental blueprints but as technologies to protect innovative ideas for their future access and implementation.
Incredible Machines 2022 is conceived as a space for experimenting with new ideas through meaningful interactions between conference guests and researchers from multiple fields of knowledge. Thus, the number of attendants will be limited, and observers will be shortlisted based on their research interests and fields of practice.
If you are interested in being an observer, please complete this form, and we will contact you soon with instructions for attending the conference.
Incredible Machines 2022: Model Is the Message: October 1–2
IMAGE: Modulating Ramp, Justin Lincoln, 2022
MARXISM & THE PITTSBURGH SCHOOL
Organized by The New Centre for Research & Practice & The Centre for Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London
Dates: June 10th, June 11th, June 12th, 2024
Keynote speakers: Amanda Beech, Ray Brassier, Vanessa Wills
We live in a time of a renewed interest in Marx and in Marxism. Marx is now being read as having an ecological critique of capitalism, as being keenly interested in non-Western societies, and as having recognized the ambiguity of technology for human liberation. The successors of value-form theory have advanced the issue of abstract domination. New theories of class, and of ideology are also on the rise, foregrounding the friction between what is and what appears. Interest in Marx’s political thought is revived in tactically and strategically oriented theories of political organization. In tandem with this, the logics of the social world are pluralized in recent works, enabling a new understanding of social form, its compulsory character, the traction of the mode of production on the constitution of subjectivities, and the role of real abstraction. Psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious find in the concept of estrangement a common ground with Hegel and Marx, ushering in a new wave of Freud and Lacan influenced Marxism. Lively debates about the nature of abstract labor, discuss its historical and logical sources, and compatible theories of transition. The "communist hypothesis" finds new formulations.
This renaissance in serious readings of Marx parallels the rise of the so-called "Pittsburgh School" (Sellars, McDowell, Brandom, etc.) of analytic, neo-pragmatist philosophy. While the rejection of German Idealism might be seen as a foundational gesture in early analytic philosophy, the Pittsburgh School has revived interest in Kantian and Hegelian themes within a broadly naturalistic context. If previous forms of Analytic Marxism (Cohen, Elster, Roehmer) remained faithful to the analytic rejection of dialectics, the Pittsburgh School enables the recasting of Hegelian thought within a new form of semantic holism. The Pittsburgh School advances understandings of human action that problematize both "the causal" and "the normative" (and the relationship between them) in ways that could inform Marxist understandings of "the natural" and "the social." It activates conceptual tools from pragmatism, emphasizing the dimension of practice in concept use- offering possible new understandings of "praxis." It thinks through the dimension of concept-revision and world pictures, offering tools for developing more precise concepts of ideology. If, as Rorty once said of Brandom, his work "can usefully be seen as an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage," the question that now presses us is whether we can mobilize the resources of the Pittsburgh School to usher analytic philosophy from its Hegelian to its Marxist phase? Further, can Marxist thought gain insight into its own categories through an engagement with the thinking of Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, and related thinkers?
Following recent interest in the synergies and contradictions between these two traditions, we aim to build a dialogical space between Marxism and the Pittsburgh School in this conference and thus extend this call for papers.
Suggested topics include:
- How does Marxism complicate or challenge the Sellarsian distinction between “the space of reasons” and “the realm of law”?
- How should Marxism be positioned with respect to “the manifest image” and “the scientific image”?
- Can the space of reasons encompass dialectics?
- How might Marxists critically assess McDowell’s distinction between “first nature” and “second nature”?
- What might a Marxist reading of Brandom’s Hegel look like? Does Brandom’s Hegel invite or foreclose such a reading?
- Is there a bridge from rule-following to a Marxist pedagogy?
- What kinds of traction can world pictures constituted within the space of reasons have in changing the reality of social relations?
- How could the Pittsburgh School contribute to our understanding of ideology?
- How do Marxist and Sellarsian conceptions of science relate, and is the latter compatible with historical materialism?
- How could one accommodate real abstraction within the categorial fabric of a Pittsburgh-influenced approach?
Please send a 500 word abstract by 30th March to: submissions@marxismandpittsburgh.org.
Preference will be given to submissions from presenters who can commit to attending the conference in person in London. We believe that direct interactions and networking at the conference venue will enhance the sharing and generation of knowledge among participants. That said, we understand that global circumstances and personal constraints might limit physical attendance for some. With that in mind, we will also accept a select number of strong submissions for online presentations, especially from individuals residing in the Global South. We strive to highlight and encourage contributions that bring forth varied global perspectives and experiences. So don't be discouraged to send a proposal for consideration. We are flexible.
To register, please fill our registration form.
IMAGE: Siah Armajani, Tomb for John Berryman, 1972–2012
CHAT GPT ROUNDTABLE
Together with ESAP (Escola Superior de Arte do Porto), we hosted a roundtable titled "ChatGPT, Language and The Future of Thinking & Writing" on June 2nd, from 16:00-18:00 CET. You can watch it through this link.
ChatGPT and other developments in Large Language Models have taken the world by storm. Their profound and yet unformulated implications for thinking, reasoning and writing have sparked crucial debates on the transformation of human intellect and communication in our age. This roundtable explores the complex relationship between ChatGPT's emergence and the changes already underway in thinking and writing practices. This roundtable brings together: Elie Ayache, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, AA Cavia, Joao Oliveira Duarte, Anna Longo, Rafael Moscardi, Reza Negatestani, Mohammad Salemy, and is Moderated by Romulo Moraes.
Featuring human-like text generation and comprehension capabilities, ChatGPT has found applications in a myriad of industries, from content creation to customer service. It also sparked a number of controversies for its usage on academic tasks such as writing, editing, and summarizing as well as uses in creative writing. As much as AI models have been instrumental in augmenting human intellect, they have also inherited the limitations and biases of the data they have been trained on. With that in mind, this roundtable asks: What are the limitations it reproduces? Are we on the brink of a new revolution in intellectual labor? What does ChatGPT say about our own capacity for reasoning in our predicament?
Below, you can find the abstracts from our participants:
Elie Ayache: ChatGPT cannot write, it can only predict text probabilistically and you know what I think of probability and prediction as opposed to writing. Definitely, some arguments from derivatives writing and trading should be brought to bear. Especially in relation with the future, whose awareness seems to be the necessary condition from AI to be capable of thought.
AA Cavia: AI as a research project has as its founding myth the notion that mimicry and intelligence are indistinguishable. What modes of artificial reason lie beyond the imitation game? I will argue for the centrality of the notion of a 'world model' in accounts of sapience.
João Oliveira Duarte: Our aim will be to address ChatGPT as a bodiless language from above as a particular example of Borges’s library: a place in which sense and nonsense, gibberish and meaningful sense, cannot be distinguished.
Joao Enxuto & Erica Love: We will discuss the uses and effects of deploying descriptors such as “dreaming” and “hallucinating” to generative AI and how these allusions to transcendental states confer (humanistic) artistic agency to computational processes.
Anna Longo: Based on statistical methods, chat GPT confirms opinions, perspectives, and knowledge that we have already rather than improving and differentiating them. Entailed by the strategy of the current industry for information production and consumption, it favorises the latter while reducing the space for actual "creativity" and dissent.
Rafael Moscardi: From the Jacquard Loom to the thermodynamic engine, from the computer to the database and now with ChatGPT and other LLMs, paradigmatic “machines” bring the demystification of a task and change the form and function of labor as such. Can we forecast where these developments are heading after the release of ChatGPT?
Reza Negarestani: ChatGPT is a logical continuation but also an exacerbation of the so-called arsenals of democracy. The focus will be on how ChatGPT can be seen via the emerging doctrine of weapon open system architectures where potentials for weaponization are developed in accordance with adversarial dynamics and threats which do not yet exist.
Mohammad Salemy: ChatGPT did not change the nature of thinking and writing, thinking and writing had already changed and this is precisely why ChatGPT emerged.
AND YOUR BIRD CAN SING
And Your Bird Can Sing: Computational Theatre & the After-Image of Social Media is a research-based collaborative project organized by The New Centre for Research & Practice and Michael Turner and Daniel Young. This project will produce a work of experimental cinema about social media in general, Twitter in particular.
The artistic problem arises from an interest in historical transitions between media systems that continue to be understood as a fossil record’s sedimentary layers despite a shift from analog to digital. If our brain is a screen, and media a consciousness that we endlessly scroll, are we not cinematic spectators in an electropedic gyre?
We are motivated by the formal and aesthetic problem of media and time: How would 20th-century cinema understand 21st-century social media? How does social media understand cinema? We want to be better informed on how we have been re-structured globally and locally through heightened conflict mediated by algorithms that feed on publicly-shared and emotionally-charged content. Is social media the primary site of social power?
Can an interest in the production of vernaculars stemming from absurdist uses of both language and visual culture through witticisms and memes provide much-needed psychic breaks from larger narratives that consider contemporary histories as echoes of a teleological past?
These and other questions will be tackled throughout the seven sessions of this Seminar Series, which will take place on Saturdays, February 18 and 25, and March 4, 11, 18, and 25, 2023, at 10 am PST / 7 pm CET. It will provide a casual and intimate space for propositions and discussions by the guests featuring ideas and examples of social media and experimental cinema, relating to their research interests. Confirmed guests are Julieta Aranda, Hossein Derakhsan, Ganaele Langlois, Anna Longo, Reza Negarestani, and Mohammad Salemy.
Participation in the seminar series is free. To attend, please complete this form, and we will contact you soon with instructions. This form will shortlist an audience that will have the opportunity of engaging with our Guests.
For this Conference, our guests have offered abstracts that comply with the 280 character limit, immersing themselves into the constraints and temporalities of Twitter and inquiring into its capacity to evoke different effects and convey knowledge.
ABSTRACTS AND SCHEDULE
Session 1, Julieta Aranda, February 18 Cinema & social media organize our experiences of time and our desires in different trajectories. Concomitant with the disruption of Hollywood's old power dynamics, was Social Media able to usher in a new era of audience production, or is it the end of cinema as we know it?
Session 2, Hossein Derakhshan, February 25Presents a case study of two political imaginaries about protests in Iran, written on twitter between 2017-19, in a film script-style, creating pragmatic possibilities of resistance on the ground against anticipated real oppression.
Session 3, Anna Longo, March 4Twitter cannot fly. Assemblages of enunciation are products of desiring machines. Birds’ songs are expressions of territorial assemblages and movies express lines of flight. Twitter is a machine operating according to the capitalist regime of signs: can cinema teach it to fly?
Session 4, Ganaele Langlois, March 11Affect as misinformation. Misinformation provokes intense affects: anger, fear, but also detachment, among others. This Session is an invitation to look closely at the organization of affect in misinformation propagated through social media, and about the kinds of tools needed to create new modes of engaging through affect.
Session 5, Reza Negarestani, March 18"Affect Economy between brains and algorithms" aims to foreground the economy of affect in the age of social media through a synthesis between several theories of neuroscience, and a number of critical theories concerning algorithmic design and mass-entertainment.
Session 6, Roxanne Panchasi, March 25 Belgian musician Paul van Haver, aka "Stromae," is a deep-feels electro rapper/crooner & multimedia phenomenon. His 2013 song "Carmen," animated (literally) in the music video by Sylvain Chomet, is one of the most compelling visualizations of Twitter/social ever. Don't @ me.
IMAGE: Paul Klee, Twittering Machine (Die Zwitscher-Maschine), 1922, Detail.
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