Building Intellectual Communities Beyond the Academic Bubble

DESCRIPTION: In a world governed by what the Oxford Internet Institute has described as "epistemic bubbles," where the architecture of visibility turns every thought into a commodity and every dissenter into an echo, the scholar is faced with an agonizing paradox. To think rigorously is to risk irrelevance; to think publicly is to flirt with flattening. Beyond the bubble, however, one can operate in a space of tension, taking inspiration not just from contemporary theorists but from the less-tread pathways of intellectual history. This is a Workshop for those who want to think without becoming caricatures, to build without succumbing to collapse, to inhabit the fractures of a decaying landscape as if they were, in fact, an invitation.

Consider the work of early Enlightenment polymath Pierre Bayle, who wrote amidst the aftermath of Cartesian metaphysics; or the spiritualist theories of Hildegard von Bingen, who saw thought as a radiant emanation between body, earth, and divinity; or Gabriel Tarde, whose late-19th-century theories of social imitation prefigured the meme before it had a name; or even the deeply eccentric autodidacts of the Viennese coffeehouse scene. What might their divergent modes of inquiry teach us about scholarship today, caught as it is between disciplinary isolation and the hyper-connected glut of new media? Their idiosyncrasies—so resistant to containment—offer a blueprint for navigating what remains possible when systems of knowledge seem to ossify into self-parody.

What would an intellectual practice look like now, in the age of the TikTok essay and the algorithmic scroll? How do we construct scholarship that holds its form as it leaks into public life? How can we examine intellectual life not as a refuge but as a tactic—a way of dwelling within platforms, institutions, and communities without becoming their object? Drawing on neglected thinkers, participants of this Workshop will learn to see research as not just a body of work but a way of living among others. In this spirit, the Workshop will offer tools for building porous intellectual communities: writing groups that outlast trend cycles, collaborative projects that critique rather than capitulate to institutional norms, and public engagement that resists both insularity and superficiality. This is not a Workshop in personal branding, nor a utopian call to ""save"" intellectual life from its supposed decline. Instead, it is a practice of detour, borrowing from traditions that refuse clean categorization—a provocation into what it means to think today, to build without infrastructures, and to find vitality in the gaps.

Session 0 (Open Session): Contemporary Landscapes and the Contingency of Scholarship: Historical and contemporary roles of public intellectuals, heterodoxy, and disciplines; Understanding the shifting terrains of online culture and intellectual ecosystems; Rethinking the ""core tenets"" of scholarship; How to embrace contingency without sacrificing rigor; Writing routines and strategies for developing your intellectual voice.
Session 1: Intellectual Communities in Practice: Building and sustaining reading and writing groups; Lessons from international reading groups and focus groups; Finding collaborators who challenge your thinking beyond your epistemic bubble.
Session 2: Digital & Cultural Strategies: The limits of academic publishing and the potential of new media; How to position yourself publicly without flattening your work into "content"; Case studies from successful projects that found balance between intellectual depth and public accessibility.
Session 3: Critique and Perspectives: Analysing cultural currents while avoiding myopia and general pessimism; Lessons from the downtown New York cultural scenes through online and in-person ethnographic perspectives; How to resist cooptation by algorithms and superficial trends.
Session 4: Building for the Future: Tools for long-term sustainability in scholarship beyond academia; Final project presentations outlining a new intellectual project that incorporates the strategies discussed.

IMAGE: Vintage Microphones

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Prototyping the Para-Institutional

DESCRIPTION: Over the last decades, alternative art schools have emerged in response to watershed events such as the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street, and the Arab Spring, signaling a need for pedagogies that engage with critical social and political junctures. These para-institutional responses were often immediate, fugitive, and fleeting. While structurelessness was a feature, sustaining these efforts over time proved challenging. Many found stability through partnerships with established institutions, private patronage, or public funding, the latter being a hallmark of modernity by decoupling funding sources from their allocation.

Para-institutional models emerged as alternatives to this system. With European cultural funding currently facing deep cuts, the state’s support for culture is faltering and accelerating the demand for practical alternatives. This Workshop is an opportunity to devise what those could be. It will examine why the Postwar liberal order regarded culture as a public good deserving of subsidy, and how the arts codified this status with academic accreditation and professionalization. Through conversations with invited guests behind notable para-institutional models, we will envision approaches that are responsive to contemporary creative production, examining case studies to explore the practical and ideological requirements of institution building. The final goal is that, as the Workshop moves along, participants model their own imaginary institutions, which will be prototypes reflecting the participants' philosophical and political concerns, guided by plans for para-institutional formats, including visual identities, mission statements, funding strategies, and so on.

Session 1: An overview of the Workshop topics, short history of public and private arts funding, university art departments and curricula, independent and critical study programs. The first session will also define expectations for the final project of the Workshop, in terms of the conception of an imaginary para-institution followed by a group organizing session for the initial project drafts (including names, visual identities, and mission statements for the para-institutions).

Session 2: Discussion of the global art system, markets and museums. Guests: Jügen Bock, Director, Maumaus Independent Study Programme, Lisbon, Portugal; Renzo Martens and Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC)

Session 3: Discussion on artistic research, philosophy, the humanities, illiberalism, activism, and the internet. Development of the para-institutional project in its internal aspects (funding sources, public relations strategies, flowcharts for structural components).Guest: Mohammad Salemy, Main Organizer, The New Centre for Research & Practice

Session 4: Para-institutional prototype presentations and feedback.

IMAGE: Mike Kelley, Educational Complex (Detail), 1995

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Computer Games & Hellscaping of the Unreal Engine

DESCRIPTION: Gaming is ever more important not only as a cultural form and industry but also in the artworld and contemporary philosophy. This Workshop thematizes the main aspects of this growing medium while avoiding its mere assimilation (into art or discourse) by focusing not on its current forms or narratives but on its very design. The Workshop will introduce Unreal Engine, its basic features and components, in a broader context of media culture and philosophy. We will get from the basics of gaming theory (Galloway) to more political edges of the virtual space to identity-play (Patterson), while featuring guests like Ondřej Trhoň and Alex Quicho.

The Workshop will experiment with what the virtual space of gameplay means for us, moving from the dialectics of hellscape and pastoral garden (Session 1) through dystopian realism of shooter templates (Session 2) and the “final” dialectics of play and identity (Sessions 3 and 4). In the background of this direction is a post-Marxist account of the game as the medium of the empire. Students will work themselves with Unreal Engine to create (1) a working MOD of Lyra Shooter game with base-cap functionality and their own map plus adjustments, (2) a basic walking simulator in a prepared environment with event triggers and subtitled text. The Workshop is designed to get the most from Unreal Engine without any prior experience, focusing on the ability to use its already existing assets.

Session 0 (Open Session): Discussion of gaming experience and participant's interests; Introduction to the course and explanation of approach; Literature review; Poaching with Unreal Engine (free assets, self-reliance, post-production, remixing).
Session 1: Dialectics of Hellscapes and Pastoral Garden in gamespace: Game as art-medium; Orientation in UI, creating a project, FAB and assets, blueprints, and differences between Unreal Engine and Unity; Creating a custom map for Lyra Shooter Game.
Session 2: Discussion on the reading, concepts of acceleration and dystopian realism; Ontology, worldbuiding, and worldending in videogames; Workflow reflection (asset management, materials); Adjusting the player character, map, level design, 3D assets (meshes, materials); Build of the game and multiplayer play.
Session 3: The concept of the avatar; Queer games, gender, and erotics; Discussing erotics; Creating a new project in Unreal Engine, basics of blueprint design, event triggers, basic narrative and setting composition.
Guest: Ondřej Trhoň (No Fun).
Session 4: Online and gamified subjectivities; Identity-as-play and conspiracy theorizing; Walking simulator and trauma-realism; Finishing the prototype of the game, making a build, and testing the gameplay.
Guest: Alex Quicho (Girlstack).

IMAGE: Augusto de Campos and Julio Plaza, From Poemobiles,1974

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Pop & Contemporary Music Criticism 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 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, criticism of criticism, 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 0 (Open Session): 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. We will also discuss your favorite pieces of response to music in all media.
Session 1: One-Liners – We will read and edit the outputs to your first assignment (one-liners) and discuss the conditions of critique and judgment for a piece of music, as well as learn to synthesize complex ideas into punchy, forthright, often humorous or dramatic phrases.
Session 2: Short Review – We will read and edit the outputs to your second assignment (blurb or 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: Long Review – We will discuss the output of your second assignment (conceptualization, pitching, and long-form development) and discuss the modulation of music criticism in terms of size, tone, and style. We will also discuss the main gateways for publication and how to become a music writer in a practical sense, attentive to how freelancing markets work.
Session 4: Video Commentary – We will watch and discuss the outputs to your fourth assignment (video commentary) and discuss the role of music criticism in the current landscape of low-attention-span, influencer-dominated social media, or what a music critic even is in a deeper, long durée perspective."

IMAGE: Mohammad Salemy, Record Store, 2023

To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.