Art & Knowledge

This is the abstract for a talk I am due to give with Mel Jordan as part of the programme of events (also featuring Emily Seghal and Joanna Drucker) organised to accompany the Bibliotech exhibition, Liverpool, May 5, 2022. The exhibition includes installations by Erica Scourti, Anna Barham, Silvio Lorruso and Diagonal Press.

 ---

Mel Jordan and Gary Hall, Art & Knowledge

For us, the arts and humanities are a site for the invention and testing of new knowledges, new practices, even new subjectivities, not least for the artist and author. Working with a range of different collaborators we carry out such tests in spaces traditionally associated with the institutions of the university and art school. We do so by reimagining various media-material aspects of the creation, circulation and sharing of art and knowledge, including books, journals, pamphlets and presses. See the Freee art collective’s choral reworking of pre-existing manifestos, or the processual texts of Open Humanities Press's two liquid and living books series. But we are also concerned to conduct such tests in the public sphere by collaborating on the reimagining of galleries, libraries, archives, museums and other elements of municipal infrastructure. In both cases we operate very much in terms of those social movements dedicated to radical open access, peer production, internet ‘piracy’ and the anti-privatised knowledge commons. We are now working on the following question: can the collaborative, performative approaches to art and knowledge we have developed with initiatives such as the Partisan Social Club and Media Gifts be translated to cities? The idea is to help reinvent them, too, through the provision of a diverse repertoire of counter-institutional alternatives to those galleries and libraries that are currently being provided by the state and corporate realms, often under the rubric of 'smart'. In the era of AI, blockchains and NFTs, do such counter-practices have the potential to generate a more socially just and environmentally sustainable way of living and learning in cities in the future?

Announcing the Open Humanities Press reading group

We are currently in the process of organsing an Open Humanities Press reading group. The idea is to gather a group of people who are interested in discussing continental philosophy and critical theory. The group will meet every month via Zoom. We will host two meetings per text: the first with the author present to discuss their work with the reading group's participants; and the second to discuss material related to the primary text, this time without the author present.

The programme, put together and led by Slyvie Makower,  currently includes:

Claire Colebrook discussing Death of the PostHuman;

Daniel Ross, discussing The Neganthropocene;

Nathan Jones discussing Glitch Poetics;

Noah Roderick discussing The Being of Analogy.

Details of more names and texts will follow soon, along with conformation of dates and times.

The reading group is open to anyone who is interested. If you wish to join please enter your email address here.

Más allá del derecho de autor: Otros términos para debatir la propiedad intelectual

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication, in Spanish only, of Más allá del derecho de autor: Otros términos para debatir la propiedad intelectual (Beyond the Author's Rights: Debating Intellectual Property in Other Terms)

editado por Alberto López Cuenca and Renato Bermúdez Dini

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Más allá del derecho de autor is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/mas-alla-del-derecho-de-autor/

El 1 de julio de 2020 entró en vigor una reforma a la Ley Federal del Derecho de Autor (LFDA) en México que respondía a las exigencias prioritariamente económicas del renovado tratado de libre comercio con Estados Unidos y Canadá, el T-MEC. Frente a estas reformas, un conjunto de colectivos, asociaciones e individuos mexicanos e internacionales levantaron la voz por las numerosas implicaciones que suponían para la libertad de expresión, el debido proceso judicial, el acceso a la cultura y a la educación, la soberanía tecnológica y el impacto medioambiental, entre otras. Para rastrear el profundo alcance que en nuestros días tiene la LFDA en detrimento de otros derechos y prácticas ya afianzadas, desde el Centro Cultural de España en Ciudad de México nos propusimos inscribir estas preocupaciones y debatirlas en un plano sociocultural más amplio, a partir de cuatro nodos conceptuales: 1) saberes originarios; 2) conocimiento abierto; 3) autoedición y reescrituras digitales; 4) hacktivismos. Este libro reúne contribuciones de Alberto López Cuenca, Anamhoo, David Cuartielles, Diana Macho Morales, Domingo M. Lechón, Eduardo Aguado-López, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Irene Soria, Leandro Rodríguez Medina, Marla Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, Mónica Nepote, Nika Zhenya, Renato Bermúdez Dini y Víctor Leonel Juan-Martínez.

On July 1, 2020, reforms to the Federal Copyright Act (LFDA, for its acronym in Spanish) entered into force in Mexico responding to the primarily economic requirements of the renewed free trade agreement with the United States and Canada, the USMCA. Facing these reforms, a group of Mexican and international associations and individuals raised their voices due to the numerous implications that they entailed for free speech, due judicial process, access to culture and education, technological sovereignty and their environmental impact, among others. In order to trace the deep reaching that the LFDA has today to the detriment of other rights and already established practices, from the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico City we proposed to inscribe these concerns and debate them on a broader sociocultural plane, starting from four conceptual nodes: 1) native knowledges; 2) open knowledge; 3) digital selfediting and rewriting; 4) hacktivisms. This book brings together contributions from Alberto López Cuenca, Anamhoo, David Cuartielles, Diana Macho Morales, Domingo M. Lechón, Eduardo Aguado-López, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Irene Soria, Leandro Rodríguez Medina, Marla Gutiérrez Gutiérrez, Mónica Nepote, Nika Zhenya, Renato Bermúdez Dini and Víctor Leonel Juan-Martínez.
Sobre los editores

Alberto López Cuenca es profesor titular de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (México), donde imparte teoría del arte contemporáneo. Sus intereses de investigación son la teoría del arte contemporáneo, la propiedad intelectual y las nuevas formas culturales, y el trabajo creativo y el posfordismo. Ha publicado y dictado conferencias sobre estos temas, especialmente en América Latina. Sus contribuciones han sido publicadas, entre otras revistas, en Afterall, Parse, Culture Machine, Third Text y Revista de Occidente.

Renato Bermúdez Dini es maestro en Estética y Arte por la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (México). Sus investigaciones giran en torno al activismo artístico y los estudios visuales en Latinoamérica. Actualmente se desempeña como profesor de arte latinoamericano contemporáneo en la Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla (México) y es estudiante del doctorado en Filosofía de la Universidad Iberoamericana (Ciudad de México).

This City Does Not Exist

Back in December Mel Jordan and I gave a joint talk called ‘This City Does Not Exist’ at the City, Public Space & Body conference, Institute for Creative and Culture Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London.

‘The city’ for us (as for this conference) is not something that can be known in advance and thus taken-for-granted. Each city contains a pluriverse of cities. In this sense, the city does not already exist, having been created by architects and planners, say. Such an approach risks limiting responses to the city to critiquing or otherwise tactically engaging with it – as famously with the flaneur, the derive, and the male citizen who psycho-geographically walks through a pre-given urban space. The city, for us, is neither mass nor abstract, formal nor technical. Instead, we see the city as something that has to be invented and called forth in relation to specific contexts and situations: artistically, practically, theoretically.

For anyone interested, Mel and I are in session 11: The Making of Cityness, which is here and below:

But you can now access all of the recorded sessions and presentations of the conference here

Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative Edited by Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Collective

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Bifurcate: There Is No Alternative
Edited by Bernard Stiegler and the Internation Collective

Edited and translated by Daniel Ross

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Bifurcate is available to download for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/bifurcate/

Bifurcating means: reconstituting a political economy that reconnects local knowledge and practices with macroeconomic circulation and rethinks territoriality at its different scales of locality; developing an economy of contribution on the basis of a contributory income no longer tied to employment and once again valuing work as a knowledge activity; overhauling law, and government and corporate accounting, via economic and social experiments, including in laboratory territories, and in relation to cooperative, local market economies formed into networks and linked to international trade; revaluing research from a long-term perspective, independent of the short-term interests of political and economic powers; reorienting digital technology in the service of territories and territorial cooperation.

The collective work that produced this book is based on the claim that today’s destructive development model is reaching its ultimate limits, and that its toxicity, which is increasingly massive, manifest and multidimensional (medical, environmental, mental, epistemological, economic – accumulating pockets of insolvency, which become veritable oceans), is generated above all by the fact that the current industrial economy is based in every sector on an obsolete physical model – a mechanism that ignores the constraints of locality in biology and the entropic tendency in reticulated computational information. In these gravely perilous times, we must bifurcate: there is no alternative.

Editor Bio

Bernard Stiegler is a French philosopher who is director of the Institut de recherche et d’innovation, and a doctor of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He has been a program director at the Collège international de philosophie, senior lecturer at Université de Compiègne, deputy director general of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, director of IRCAM, and director of the Cultural Development Department at the Centre Pompidou. He is also president of Ars Industrialis, an association he founded in 2006, as well as a distinguished professor of the Advanced Studies Institute of Nanjing, and visiting professor of the Academy of the Arts of Hangzhou, as well as a member of the French government’s Conseil national du numérique. Stiegler has published more than thirty books, all of which situate the question of technology as the repressed centre of philosophy, and in particular insofar as it constitutes an artificial, exteriorised memory that undergoes numerous transformations in the course of human existence.

Editor and Translator Bio

Daniel Ross has translated numerous books by Bernard Stiegler, including most recently Nanjing Lectures 2016-2019 (Open Humanities Press) and The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism (Polity Press). With David Barison, he is the co-director of the award-winning documentary about Martin Heidegger, The Ister, which premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was the recipient of the Prix du Groupement National des Cinémas de Recherche (GNCR) and the Prix de l’AQCC at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Montreal (2004). He is the author of Political Anaphylaxis (OHP, 2021), Violent Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and numerous articles and chapters on the work of Bernard Stiegler.