The Void Writes

DESCRIPTION: This Workshop examines how writing is engendered by the void, and writing as the site where the void unfolds even if unfolding is its only doing. Drawing on literature and philosophy, it asks what happens when form is not assumed to impose upon nothingness but to arise from, and through, it. The Seminar explores how the void necessitates form: why there is nothing that precedes creation, or rather, that nothing precedes creation and must itself be understood as something creative.

The Workshop begins with the concept of the crushed narrative, developed through a close reading of Primo Levi's If This Is a Man, where writing is engendered by the shadow of a lost companion, through the very inability to account for them. It is this void that becomes text in not becoming text.

We then turn to Ovid's Metamorphoses, where chaos becomes both the origin and driving force of transformation in the emergence of new forms. The impossibility of narrating chaos directly creates a contradiction that generates endless variations of form, stories that are actual material forms.

The third session turns to urban suicides and examines their potential, not as mere corpses, not as reduced to "society," but as horizons through which a necessary destruction or abandonment, and a founding of a new polis, become possible. The suicides are openings to be translated into (human) language and space, while also remaining as voids within it.

The final session considers Kafka's "The Burrow" and Bernhard's Correction and discusses the impossibility of creation alongside the possibility of creation through correction. Correction is not only a destructive but a generative force, precisely in remaining destructive. Correction is the total elimination through which a text, body, or world becomes possible, an elimination that is registered as text, body, or world. This problematizes the notion of gender as a site that can only be corrected.

Participants are asked to produce a hybrid project (a theoretical reflection and a creative project) demonstrating that what cannot be said in either medium may only be addressed in a space between: a void that is not articulated but opened. The void in this sense is reshaped as a possibility for unexpected interaction.

Session 1: Crushed Narrative / Theme: Narrative and the ethical void as an embodied experience
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (selections), Emmanuel Levinas, "There Is: Existence Without Existents"

Session 2: Quem dixere chaos / Theme: Chaos as the generative principle of metamorphosis
Ovid, Metamorphoses (Books 1–8; selections)

Session 3: Dwelling as Falling / Theme: The swirling of the polis; the dialectic between dead and alive
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister" (selections), Jean-Luc Nancy, "Blanchot's Resurrection"

Session 4: Korrektur / Theme: Impossible creation; generative correction; the denial to pass and transition
Thomas Bernhard, Correction (selections), Franz Kafka, "The Burrow" (selections), Jacques Derrida, "Fors"

Final Project /The space between theory and practice; void as method, Participants produce a dual project (theoretical + creative), articulating the in-between space where meaning and embodiment emerge, attempting to articulate something within a topos of a new void, beyond (or even against) what is actually articulated.
Jean Genet, What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet

IMAGE: Graham Gillmore, Untitled (Glossary 2002), 2002

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Conspiracy Theory as Method:
Speculation and the Infrastructure of Belief

DESCRIPTION: This Workshop invites participants to treat conspiracy theory not simply as pathology or misinformation, but as a mode of world-making: a method of connecting fragments, sensing hidden structures, and producing meaning amidst chaos. Drawing on anthropological, philosophical, and artistic perspectives, we will approach conspiracy theory as both a cultural phenomenon and an epistemic practice that attempts to render the invisible visible.
Across four sessions, participants will examine key theoretical and ethnographic approaches to conspiracy theory: from Cold War anthropology and psychoanalytic accounts of projection to contemporary digital subcultures and the aesthetics of evidence. Each week will pair a short reading or media artifact with a practical task: tracing a historical or contemporary conspiracy narrative, mapping its affective economies, or producing a short speculation (text, image, sound) that reflects how conspiracy theories form.

Rather than debunk or defend conspiracy theories, we will analyze how they organize perception and belonging, how they intersect with gender, race, and power, and how they mirror methods of anthropological critique itself. The final meeting will center on participants' creative or analytical projects (mini-essays, field notebooks, zines, or experimental presentations), each exploring how conspiracy theory serves as a diagnostic lens for the present.
This Workshop will appeal to artists, theorists, and researchers interested in ethnography, critical media, and speculative inquiry. It builds on emerging conversations that treat conspiracy not as irrational deviation, but as a mirror to reason, a sensory form that reveals as much about our infrastructures of belief as about the imaginary of hidden worlds.

Session 1: The Conspiratorial Turn, Reading the Hidden / Core readings: Susan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things (Chs. 1–2); Kathleen Stewart, "Ordinary Affects" (selections); Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?"
Focus: Conspiracy as ethnographic object and affective atmosphere. Field exercise: write "fieldnotes of suspicion" from daily life or digital encounters.

Session 2: Infrastructures of Belief / Core readings: Achille Mbembe, "The Power of the False"; Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Ch. 7: "Reflexive Impotence"); Jean and John Comaroff, "Occult Economies."
Focus: The political economy of belief and the circulation of hidden knowledge. Task: map one conspiratorial infrastructure (media, algorithmic, social).

Session 3: Intimacy, Gender, and the Body of Proof / Core readings: Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Paranoia); Eve Sedgwick, "Paranoid and Reparative Reading"; Joseph Russo, "Hiding in Plain Sight: QAnon and its Seekers."
Focus: Conspiracy as moral drama and embodied knowledge. Task: produce a short audio or visual vignette on the gendered life of suspicion.

Session 4: Speculative Ethnography and Counter-Conspiracy / Core readings: David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology; Sylvia Wynter, "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being"; Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, "Bad Endings."
Focus: Turning conspiracy into method. Participants share final projects (essays, zines, installations, or speculative field notebooks), exploring conspiracy as critique, poetics, or world-building.

IMAGE: Jonathan Martin Londons Overthrow, Circa 1839

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Technological History of Fiction

DESCRIPTION: What if fiction was never opposed to science, but rather its secret double? Russian Formalism was the first declarative attempt at a "scientific" study of literature: an attempt to map the consecutive evolution of "literary facts" and even to unlock the secret engine of prose as if fiction could be diagrammed like a machine. But this initial inspiration by both evolutionism and thermodynamic physics alike produced an unexpected censorship: in defending the autonomy of its object, theory forbade any further "external" explanation and banned contact with parallel domains (science, media, technology). The laboratory became a cell. We want to dismantle the limitations of this era of "military formalism," the era when literary studies, fighting for autonomy like other scientific disciplines, fortified themselves behind disciplinary walls. Instead, we will trace a radical genealogy of how different literary techniques were infiltrated by scientific experiments and media practices.

From the 19th century's first "distant approximations" between narrative and empirical science to the latest research at the crossroads of media, technology, and the humanities, we will explore how fiction borrows not just metaphors but instruments, how storytelling becomes a technology of knowing. The microscope and the novel were born of the same desire: to see closer, deeper, otherwise. To view the histories of literature and science as parallel or even entangled is to disrupt the old academic catechism: the familiar division in literary studies between 19th-century realism and 20th-century modernism, conveniently distributed between the autumn and spring semesters, between a passion for representation and a fascination with the surface, between literature as a window into the social world and a self-constructed instrument devoted to language.

We will instead look at fiction as a continuous experiment, where the immanent logic of writing combines with attention to parallel domains: science in the 19th century, technology in the 20th. In fact, realism itself, as an attitude towards (photo)mechanical objectivity, owed much to science and technology. Similarly, the initially strange predication of the novel as an experimental enterprise would subsequently lose its connection with the physiological laboratory and become more or less a mandatory program for modernist literature. Rewriting this history means that literature, whether realist or modernist, was never autonomous but always plugged into the scientific and technical infrastructures of its time, being at the same time not a reflection of acquired knowledge, but one of the tools for constructing possible worlds, testing epistemic limits, and exposing the aesthetic fictions that science itself cannot escape. If fiction has always been an experiment, the question always looms on our horizon: what, exactly, are we testing now?

Session 1: (Media) Archaeology of Communication and the Epistemology of Fiction / The archaeology of knowledge as prolonged and radicalized by media archaeology of communication and theories of discursive infrastructures. The joint history of literature and science. Goethe as poet and naturalist. Scientific rationality and the "culture of the senses." Balzac and the inheritance of natural history in fiction. Social facts and the aesthetics of positivism. Mistranslations and the foundation of Russian literary positivism.
Readings: Honoré de Balzac. Introductions to The Human Comedy // Project Gutenberg, Kittler, F. Discourse Networks 1800–1900. Trans. M. Metteer and C. Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Session 2: Experiment and Fiction. Parallelism of Contemporary Science and Art / A parallel analysis of the "vision" of contemporary science and art, on both pictorial and conceptual levels. Photography and psychophysiology as conditions of modernist art. The experimental measurement of sensations (light, color, sound) and the birth of Impressionism. Literary semiosis in comparison and contrast with scientific semiosis. "Laboratories of ideas," "thought experiments," and laboratory knowledge. The institutional and technical setting of the laboratory vs. "the man at the writing desk." Reference to physical facts, the genre of the hypothesis, and the use of signs in narrative fiction. The "propaganda of scientific facts" in Russian radical criticism of the 1860s. Transfer of the laboratory protocol into the "experimental novel." Modernist semiosis without reference.
Readings: Vitz, P., and A. Glimcher. Modern Art and Modern Science: The Parallel Analysis of Vision. New York: Praeger, 1984.
Baudelaire, Ch. "The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography," in Modern Art and Modernism. Routledge, 1982.
Zola, É. "The Experimental Novel" (1893), in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Trans. B. Sherman. New York: Haskell House, 1964. Moser, W. "Experiment and Fiction," in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, pp. 61–80.

Session 3: Psychophysiological Aesthetics and the Origins of Formalism / Physiological experimentation and the "destruction of aesthetics" in Russian radical thought. Aesthetics as a "branch of applied physiology" (Nietzsche). "Physiological aesthetics": from metaphors to experimental settings. The materiality of language as an object of experimentation. Psychophysics and the psychophysiology of perception (auditory sensations). Experimental phonetics and laboratory equipment in avant-garde poetry. Formalism vs. impressionistic criticism and the "parallel series." Experimental psychology in cultural history. The positive science of literature in the history of ideas (early 20th century). Defamiliarization of Formalism.
Readings: Valéry, P. "On the Literary Technics" [1889], in The Art of Poetry. Trans. D. Foliot. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989, pp. 314–323. Tolstoy, L. What Is Art? Trans. R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky. Penguin Classics, 1996. Shklovsky, V. "Art as Technique" (aka "Art as Device"), in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. J. Rivkin and M. Ryan. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2004, pp. 3–24.

Session 4: The Mechanization of Grammar and Psychoengineering in Fiction / The "revolution of language" as linguistic technology and the "factory of literature." Word invention and word building. The poetic avant-garde and the new media of the time. The material and technical basis for the "mechanization of grammar." Soviet programs of literary industrialization and collectivization. The industrial avant-garde and the history of psychotechnics.
Readings: Platonov, A. "Factory of Literature." Trans. A. Kalashyan, from Oktyabr 10 (1991): 195–202. Tretiakov, S. "The New Leo Tolstoy," in October 118 (Fall 2006): 45–50. Stephens, P. The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

IMAGE: Hortensia Mi Kafchin, Religions on the Genitals

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Category Theory for Arts and Humanities

DESCRIPTION: Whether orders, morphisms, algebras, or mappings, the appearance of categories in pure and applied mathematics is ubiquitous. Because of its synthetic nature, its acceptance has foreshadowed the set-theoretic foundational approach to mathematics: that which would otherwise have been a behemoth construction using purely an "analytical" method like set theory, or subject-specific techniques, has become a dynamic foundational medium. Its diagrammatic appeal is undeniable—this is why we see its importance more and more outside of a purely mathematical context.

By Cx Tx, we mean a placeholder: Critical Thinking, Culture Theory, Cybernetics Theory, Conspiracy Theory, CosmoTechnics, Cthulhuism, etc. Attendees are required to devise an input for Cx Tx.

This Workshop is an introduction to category theory as a thinking tool. Attendees are required to showcase their learnings through an interdisciplinary project. Participants are guided to complete a mixed media: categorical formality ⊕ Cx Tx. Be it a 3D animation or an academic essay, the work must be accompanied by proper formality and an improper Cx Tx, respectively.

Session 1: Categories and Functors / Objects, arrows, and functors through formality and intuition, basic literature and tools, category-theoretic building blocks, functoriality as translation tool, Cecilia Vicuña's Palabrarmas (arm-words), breadcrumbs for project development
Readings Spivak, Category Theory for Scientists, pp. 15–22, 69–101, 113–128 (recommended but not required)

Session 2: Natural Transformation through Cybernetics / Adjunctions and natural transformations, formalizing autopoietic systems using category theory, systems theory and cybernetics, Cartesian closed categories, relational biology, Allende's cybernetic vision for Chilean politics
Readings: Louie, "Relational Biology" (2017), Louie, "Essays on More Than Life Itself" (2011)

Session 3: Categories of Models / The abstract notion of model from the semantic approach in logic, model theory and mathematical logic, relational, classical, paraconsistent, and paracomplete models, Badiou's reading of materialist epistemology, semantic link to abstract logics, interdisciplinary construal of model theory
Readings: Badiou, The Concept of Model, chapter 2 (p. 9) and chapters 4–10 (pp. 14–55)

Session 4: Set Theory co-contra Category Theory / The foundational dichotomy between set theory and category theory, NBG and ZFC formalizations, Zalamea's synthetic approach, Kantian reading of analytic versus synthetic, Vopěnka's Hypothesis, toward a full synthetic approach to foundational projects
Readings: Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, introduction (pp. 3–18), chapter 1 (pp. 21–48), chapter 3 (pp. 109–129)

IMAGE: A Thousand Plateaus, First English Translation, University of Minnesota Press, 1987

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