Long-Form Writing Laboratory

DESCRIPTION: What makes a good idea for a writing project? How do you move from a curiosity/impulse to an idea/argument? What would you tell an editor to persuade them to publish it? How do you follow through? This hands-on Writing Lab is a first collaboration between Liza Featherstone, a journalism professor and a columnist for Jacobin and The New Republic, and the philosopher Cécile Malaspina, programmer at the New Centre and at the College International de Philosophie. It aims at supporting a writing project over eight sessions, through targeted workshops, prompt writing exercises, and a series of short outside-of-class assignments, culminating in a draft that will have been progressively reviewed by fellow students and by the workshop leaders. The Lab is designed to address challenges of the writing process from start to finish, from the developing of robust ideas to the formulation of a pitch or proposal, from draft to fully edited submission. A combination of instruction and discussions, in-session groups activities, as well as assignments, this Workshop will help you to situate yourself as a writer, to argue with lucidity, and to identify and speak to your audience. You will practice initiating and sustaining a writing practice, finding structure and flow, as well parrying self-doubt by defining the scope of your argument and grounding it in evidence. Students will receive feedback on their final draft from peers as well as Instructors. The Workshop is supported by breaks of several weeks, to allow participants to write. Students from any discipline and working in any genre – whether academic, criticism, curatorial, fiction, theory, polemic, journalism, memoir – are welcome. Final projects are not limited to text and may take visual and/or auditory form.

SESSION ONE: WHAT MAKES AN IDEA FOR A WRITING PROJECT GOOD?
After a general outline of the course structure and final project outcomes, students and workshop leaders will introduce themselves and their writing objectives for the workshop. How do you move from a curiosity / impulse to an idea / argument? What would you tell an editor to persuade them to publish it? In the first session, instructors will provide guidelines for the upcoming pitching exercise, which will be due in the subsequent session. We will discuss how to move your project from topic to idea and how to explain it to funders, editors and of course yourselves. We will also discuss the final work, which will be due in the sixth session, allowing for review from peers and workshop leaders, and culminating in a revised draft, which will be due in week seven. We encourage students to limit their final work to 2500 words / 10-20 minute films or sound work in order to make the best of feedback. Larger projects are welcome but will be assessed based on samples from the text / visual / sound material.

SESSION TWO: PITCH PERFECT
Assignment for Session Two: write up your idea in required form: as a pitch to an editor / book proposal / curatorial project / grant proposal etc. Students will split into groups to read out the assignment submitted for this week. They will discuss the strengths of the pitch to editor / book proposal / curatorial project / grant proposal, giving and receiving feedback in a spirit of risk-taking and enabling comments. Instructors will visit with the small groups, guiding and offering feedback.

SESSION THREE: WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? WRITING AND SELF-DOUBT
Assignment due for session three: edit your pitch, incorporating feedback from Week Two and write a first draft of the introduction to your project. This session will focus on entitlement / imposter syndrome, revisiting writers and their self-doubt from Dante to Merleau Ponty and Mark Fisher. We will discuss what stops you from writing, and what gets you writing, thinking about habits & routines as survival strategies. The focus will be on establishing expertise: where does authority come from and how do you ground your claims enough to marshall confidence in your own writing? The group will workshop the un-muddling of ideas, focusing on the drafting of introductions as an exercise in setting up argument and story, as limiting scope.

SESSION FOUR: ARGUMENTS & EVIDENCE Assignment due for Session Four: turn pitch onto roadmap / plan for final piece, centered around the key evidence that grounds your argument / project. Session Four will be dedicated to the types of structures that can hold arguments. In a group discussion, students will generate different kinds of arguments and evidence, while also considering what sorts of mistakes can disqualify an argument. Splitting into groups, students will present the strongest version of their project’s argument to each other, discussing difficulties and strategies for refining and substantiating key arguments.

SESSION FIVE: WRITING AS COMMUNICATION:
Assignment due for Session Five: break main project into parts and write an abstract for each part and bullet point outline for the sections. In this session we will workshop different styles of writing and find the language specific to a chosen audience. Breaking into groups, students will reformulate their project in different genres and styles, experimenting with the epistolary style, the diary style, presenting their project as a news item, or as an abstract for a scholarly essay etc. The exercises will help students render explicit the assumptions we make, or differences we fail to take into consideration, about our potential readers. The emphasis will be on foregrounding the purpose and objective of a given piece of writing. Does it aim to persuade, rectify misconceptions, propose new arguments, explore unchartered territory …? Does it aim at a blurring of genres and an experimentation with language, or at the bite of concision and clarity?

SESSION SIX: PRESENTATIONS OF FINAL PROJECTS
Assignement due for session six: submit and present first draft of final project. Feedback session: students split into small groups to present a first draft of their final projects to each other and receive feedback. This will be followed by a group discussion elaborating strategies for critically re-reading and revising one’s own project.

WEEK SIX: DELIVERY OF FINAL DRAFT
Assignment due for Session Six: students form pairs to read each other’s first draft. In the first part of this session students will form pairs to give each other feedback on their first drafts.The emphasis will be on identifying and providing positive reinforcement for effective writing strategies, as well as highlighting the visible effects of workable methods. Each student signs up for an in-session individual feedback slot with one of the instructors. This will be followed by a group discussion, where students read out particularly effective sections of each other’s work.

SESSION SEVEN: WRITING = REWRITING:
Consignment for Session Seven: submission of revised draft . How do you edit yourself? The final Session will revisit the transition from writing as the generation of raw material, to writing as the emergence of structure, dynamics, and refinement of argument. The Session will be dedicated to self-editing exercises and strategies.

SESSION EIGHT: DEBRIEF
Assignment for Session Eight: Resubmission of final essay, having incorporated comments and editorial strategies from Session Seven. The final session of the Workshop will consist in recapping and debriefing. Students will be encouraged to formulate a personalized writing strategy and criteria by which to assess and chart the dynamic development of their strengths and the progressive overcoming of difficulties.

 

IMAGE: Murray Library, Messiah University.

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Reflexive Architecture II:
Seven Continua for post-digital architectures

DESCRIPTION: Reflexive Architecture is a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgs, the augmented, and the mixed in the context of built worlds. Above all, such architectures simplify, amplify, or facilitate and make visible the complex entanglement of what Deleuze & Guattari termed “the chaoids or the daughters of chaos: Philosophy, Science, and Art.” It is this transdisciplinary reflexivity that this Workshop explores. The Workshop is structured at a slow-pace with breaks between Sessions to recognize the time participants need to remobilize concepts for their worldmaking practices.

Participants will be asked to respond to numerous smaller provocations, making works toward a substantial polemical work over the 6-month duration of the Workshop. Philosophical and technical software workshops facilitate the application of media/software concepts in post-digital worldmaking practices. The Workshop is geared towards those interested in establishing a postgraduate studio practice situated between drawing, modeling, prompting, scripting, coding and prototyping - both rapid and diegetic.

This Workshop is split into two strands: One, oriented towards architecture’s visionary mode, is set against the backdrop of cybercultural tendencies in reflexive architecture proposed by Neil Spiller in his 2002 issue of Architecture & Design magazine at the millennial turn including the exegesis of his visionary work Communicating Vessels; another strand detours and swerves through the strata of such worldmaking proposed in Derek Hales’ assimilation of the Deleuzian technical object as objectile, offering a philosophical-technical orientation centered on a guided hands-on encounter with software and hardware. We address the rather vexed question of toolsets and technical rigs practically. While assignments can be completed with mixed-media, simple image-editing tools and a scanner, advanced toolsets and workflows, both closed-and open-source software will be discussed in some considerable detail.

Through our first strand, participants will learn of reflexive architecture as originally pioneered by Spiller in a 7-point manifesto of continua: Space, Technology, Narrative Semiotics and Performance, Cyborgian Geography, Scopic Regimes, Sensitivity, and Time. This visionary orientation features guests with experimental practices relating to the developed themes. The second strand reconstructs this reflexive architectural proposition after web3 with which the reflexive architectural vision might be actualized anew in a visionary mode of worldmaking and practical engagement in making speculative hard/soft/wet-wares for fictive materialities.

The Workshop offers both an engagement in the construction of media systems and a philosophical engagement in the future of drawing and technical objects. The visionary worldmaking mode will be underpinned by the philosophical development of the Deleuzian concept of objectility, relating it to the process-orientation of Whitehead and Simondon. We will do this by reanimating notions of an analog audio visuality from the practice of Simondon’s construction of a television and Kittler’s building of a synthesizer and loose these amidst the assemblage of digital infrastructures of web3, NFT worldbuilding, and emerging metaverses, as we reconfigure instances of the seven continua of a post-digital reflexive architecture.

Session 1: Introducing seven continua for reflexive architecture:
1- S‌‌‌pace 2- Technology 3- Narrative, Semiotics and Performance 4- Cyborgian Geography 5- Scopic Regimes 6- Sensitivity 7- Time.

We will revisit these continua through philosophical research, using mythopoesis (original myth-making by means of higher imagination) and technogenetics (the twisted relationship between the origins of humans and technology). In this Session we will explore the rapid expansion of XR metaverse (XR Metaverse refers to a digital universe that combines elements of augmented reality AR, virtual reality VR, mixed reality MR) as a technical assemblage, we will provide a practical introduction to the construction of n-dimensional worlds.

Session 2: Many areas of rich potential for architectural experiments have been left fallow, and the surreal processes by which augmented and mixed realities actualize remain under-explored. Spiller’s Communicating Vessels exemplifies the designing of relations across continua in a body of drawn work that has an interwoven lexicon of objects, things, and spaces developed cybernetically involving a referential, reflexive relationship with itself and the contexts (geographical, psychological, and imagistic) in which its worlds form in complicating mythopoetic, mythotechnical, and technogenetic ways. Technical discussion on open standards (openUSD) and protocols and the possible worlds of the open-source and proprietary software and ecosystems of the metaverse.

Session 3: This Session will open with a presentation on works through which the first phase of reflexive architectural concepts has been explored by other students and researchers. Particular attention will be given to the notion of the split-site and how this was deployed as a reaction to the problems of architecture and cyberspace as perceived at the turn of the millennium and in relation to XR continua. This Session externalizes the individual project ideas of participants, which can go on to be developed further.

Session 4: In much of late 20th- and early 21st-century digital architecture, with its limited concern for technical virtuality, the initial promise of technical objects as objectiles has led to preoccupations with form/content at the expense of reflexive creativity. In this Session, the Workshop prepares for its winter break by focusing on creative methodologies intended for confronting the infinite blankness of XR (Extended Reality) continua and remobilizing the objectile across a split-site and in pursuit of prototyping fictive materialities in speculative hardware and pataphysical computing or the science of imaginary digital solutions. The last hour of this Session will be dedicated to reviewing participants' proposals for their final projects.

The final four Sessions of the Workshop, starting in January 2025, are project-based and necessarily led by responses to participants' research. In design academy, the exposition of worldmaking is limited to a summary 'crit' in which an exegesis of a work is provided with an untimely sense of its finality.  Instead, we will retain an openness to the chaos of the works of our participants as prototypes for other prototypes and, through our responses to such ongoing series of worldmaking, draw out a sense of the relation between a revisiting of Reflexive Architecture's Seven Continua and mythopoetic and technogenic processes of worldmaking.

Session 5: The basis of this first of our final Sessions is that the encounter with visionary and speculative architectural works is constructed as onto-political, frequently in tensile relation with the polemical discourse on architecture and imagination. Interspersed between presentations from participants on the memory palaces of their chunking engine prototypes will be a selection of works from the archives of visionary architecture.

Session 6: Responses to the research of participants guide this Session. We ask that participants to complicate our opening discussions on reflexive architecture's Seven Continua through encountering the uncertain and ambiguous sense of time in their work.

Session 7: In this session, the participants will be asked to complicate our previous discussions on non-diegetic prototyping by encountering chaos, slipping, and sliding between continua.

Session 8: The final Session of the Workshop focuses on redesigning reflexive continua, inviting participants to consider their work's mythopoetic and technogenic processes.

Through workshopping of worlds and subjectivities, we will shift away from systems of judgment to question the individuation of worlding, from concluding back to the beginning to something conducive to emergent reflexive frameworks of drawing, constructing, and building prototype speculative worlds teeming with machinic life.

IMAGE: Frank Lloyd Wright, Falling water, 1935.

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Film and Forensic Workshop:
Towards a Documentary Practice

DESCRIPTION: In the age of social media, where content is distributed algorithmically with attention to political or psychological biases, we are immersed in the landscape of post-truth. In this paradigm, the testimonies of witnesses and victims can be easily dismissed as false or subjective, challenging the credibility of journalistic, judicial, or investigative work. Distrust in witnesses who hold differing political views poses a significant threat to the construction of democratic institutions. Critically engaging with the contemporary world requires a transformation in our toolboxes for activism and documentation. As a response to the complexities of the post-truth mediasphere, we need rigorous proximity to victims and familiarity with scientific knowledge, understanding the powerful role that visualization can play in community building and public advocacy during these times.

This Workshop moves away from the traditional ethics of testimony and employs various documentary techniques to directly approach violations against humans or nature. The goal of the Workshop is to develop an understanding of evidentiary techniques such as image analysis, geolocation, OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), and data mining, exploring ways to utilize these tools in investigative filmic facts. We will engage with non-optical moving image-making technologies like AI videos, voice-overs, and found footage, with the final goal of collaborating in groups to produce a vertical film lasting 3-15 minutes. The Workshop will consist of four Sessions, with the final class held three weeks after the third Session, so that the groups of participants have time to prepare and complete their films.

Session 1: Introduction to Forensic Investigations
Session 2: Non-Optical Moving Image-Making Technologies
Session 3: Research and Development
Session 4: Film Production and Presentation

IMAGE: JFK Assassination, 1963.

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Music Writing Workshop

DESCRIPTION: An apocrypha, misattributed at different times to Miles Davis, Frank Zappa, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and others, states that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture."

This maxim is a provocation against music critics, who would try to express musical sentiments in language as if they could casually translate them through their words. Although the quote hides a romantic notion of the ineffability of musical aesthetics, it is fair in its contestation of the current paradigm of music writing, which either implies easy transparency in the conversion of sonic impressions or relies on a cold, technical, supposedly rational interpretation of music by way of notational parameters. It also acknowledges the first lesson of art criticism: that writing is a form of literature, an art form of its own like any other, to which the critic needs to submit different artworks. Thus, music criticism would be, first of all, a literary practice. The main fault of the maxim is not that music is easy to translate but instead that the difficulty in translating itself can be potentially productive.

This Workshop will provide practical training on how to write effectively and synthetically about music. In particular, we will address pop music, which lacks a common imaginative vocabulary of abstractions, and we will use forms of communication that are amicable to current-day social media, which, contrary to traditional publishing, are ever relevant. Exercises will include short reviews, one-liners, video commentaries, and a longer essay (from the online pitch to the final editing process). The main takeaway from this Workshop should be a deeper engagement with listening and clarification of one's taste and its translation into text. Why do you like or dislike a song that has been just released? How do you transmit the images and feelings it evokes in you to a wider audience, without alienating either the musically trained or the total dilettante? Lastly, how can music writing allow us to better understand the openings between art forms, between media, and between people?

Session 1: Introduction to Music Writing - We will introduce the bulk of the seminar and its schedule and assignments, and talk about comparative aesthetics and the phenomenology of the musical work, or how to effectively translate between artforms.

Session 2: Short Review - We will read and edit the outputs to your first assignment (short review) and compare them with examples of great music writers to understand how music reviews are usually structured and how creative writing techniques can play into it.

Session 3: One-Liners - We will read and edit the outputs to your second assignment (one-liners) and discuss the conditions of critique and judgment of a piece of music, as well as learn to synthesize complex ideas into punchy, forthright, often humorous or dramatic phrases.

Session 4: Video Commentary - We will watch and discuss the outputs to your third assignment (video commentary) and discuss the role of music criticism in the current landscape of low-attention-span, influencer-dominated social media, or how one may or may
not become a music writer in the practical sense, attentive to how freelancing markets work.

IMAGE: Mohammad Salemy, Record Store, 2023

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Angelicism, A User Guide

DESCRIPTION: Angelicism/angelicism01 is a system of online posting that achieved niche celebrity status from the summer of 2021 onwards, marking a crucial moment in internet culture, philosophy, and art history. Angelicism01 is known for coining the term 'vibe shift,' for the use of online 'clone' accounts, the cultivation of meme art, the development of internet cinema, and a unique and evolving philosophy of extinction. As a form of pure open intelligence, angelicism will come to name what is endless and open in both directions (finitude and infinitude, offline and online, extinction and the material soul), a new type and style of abbreviated education that is unthinkable outside the layered context of 'being online.'

Anyone can create angelicism clone accounts, or variations on angelicism accounts, even children. With the lightest task-load possible, we will allow 'users' into the space of angelicism, from the conceptual origins to the features of our online presence. We will then dedicate two sessions to angelicism film, where we will work with angelicism01 as director to produce documentary-internet-cinema hybrids. The workshop will culminate in the making of an 'angelicism film segment' by each participant.

In our videoconferences, a visually and sonically coded angelicism01 will teach alongside Film01 producer Lola Jusidman. Between sessions, a discord channel will host experiments and 'hands-on' exercises in conjunction with the workshop.

Session 1: infinite internet, finite life, and angelicism's conceptual space

We will survey the 'space' of angelicism and its expression in internet 'posting': what is a 'post'? Does a 'post' have a different meaning to other forms of self(-positing)? Angelicism will be presented as a system of general plasticity tuned to the bi-directional nature of extinction qua extinction. In such a system, posting no more posits extinction than it posits absolute formal ontology in its Badiouian sense. The meeting point here, in the common set that takes the finite and infinite as inner and outer brackets, might be zero sharp (0# or 01), what Badiou calls 'a secret finitude of the absolute itself'. Extinction realism as in Tom Cohen's work will be synthesized with 'secular inexistence' as it figures in Honor Levy's My First Book. By the end of this first session, we will also have an overview of the practical aspects of the workshop, and 'users' will start to determine the form of their project, an 'angelicism film segment.' 

Session 2: archive, clone, and terrain 

The space of angelicism as namelessness, facelessness, and universality. The protection of purity through anonymity, and of offline space through emptiness cloning, already post-everything, entering into namelessness and answerlessness (Malabou 2024). We will study the impersonal populism of the internet and the international clone phenomenon which came together on X (formerly 'Twitter') in angelicism's first phase. Then, angelicism as internet-ark: whether, why and how to archive the end of the world. This vision of the internet and its uses will lay the groundwork for the following sessions on making angelicism film. 

Session 3: making Film01, internet cinema and posting film

Source: the internet. The principles of Film01. This session will span recruiting a Film01 production team (noticing star power and latent talent), sourcing material, soft and hardware tools, group editing, AI-human mergers, technical and formal innovations, the four (plus) modes of angelicism montage (#angelicism #omega #rainbow #ciara), and our style of screening and distribution. We will review the making of key passages in Film01 from a technical and conceptual POV. We will then workshop sketches for student's final 'film segments' and discuss the group's conceptual and technical questions. 

Session 4: beyond Film01 (after the 'one artwork per century')

Angelicism moves via lightweight-weightlessness of production and gravity of effect. We'll study the films of Lav Diaz, Marguerite Duras, Hubert Sauper, and others, and work with angelicism01 as director in the crafting of new documentary internet cinema hybrids. We will view and give feedback on each other's film work. We will probe the possibility of taking cinema with us beyond Film01. What, now, can a film contain and duress? 

 

IMAGE: Angelicism01, Untitled, 2024.

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