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Éric Alliez, is Professor of Contemporary French Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (Middlesex University, London).
His works include: Les Temps capitaux Capital Times, preface by G. Deleuze, Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota, 1997; The Signature of the World. Or What is the Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari?, London: Continuum, 2005.
Most recent books : La Pensée-Matisse (with J.-Cl. Bonne) (Paris : Le Passage, 2005) ; L’Œil-Cerveau. Nouvelles Histoires de la peinture moderne (in collaboration with Jean-Clet Martin) (Paris: Vrin, 2007).
Forthcoming : Capitalism, Schizophrenia and Consensus. Of Relational Aesthetics ; Istanbul : Baglam Publishing ; 2010 (in English/Turkish)
He is currently working on Undoing the Image Of Contemporary Art.

Bernard Andrieu is a philosopher and faculty at UHP Nancy University in France. He researches the interaction of biology and subjectivity using concepts of hybridity, personal health and plasticity. Taking a position against technophobia and post-humanism, his philosophical project is to describe the interaction between the body and the world resisting the temptation of naturalization.
His research has been published widely and has been included in: “Touching Space, Placing Touch Edited by Mark Paterson and Martin Dodge (2010), “BiotArt And Beyond,” M.I.T. Press (2007) and Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Psychology and Arts, New York (2006).

Eric Anglès lives in Berlin and New York.

Kader Attia Lives and works in Berlin. Born in 1970 into an Algerian family in Paris, Kader Attia studied both Philosophy and Fine Art in Paris.
Attia gained international recognition at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and at the Lyon Biennale (2005), where he exhibited the work ‘Flying Rats’, an installation of life-size, birdseed sculptures of children being devoured by a flock of pigeons.
Recent exhibitions include La Force de l’Art, the Paris Triennial and the Havana Biennale. In 2010, Attia will take part in the Sydney Biennial and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program amongst other projects. Attia is also one of the winners of the 2010 Abraaj Capital Art Prize, an award granted specifically to artists working in the Middle East, North Africa or South Asia.

Elena Bajo‘s concept-generated practice is concerned with the social and political dimensions of everyday spaces, the strategies to conceptualize resistance, the poetics of ideologies, and the relationship between temporalities and subjectivities.
She has recently participated in projects at White Columns, New York (2009); Prague Festival, Prague (2009); Sculpture Center, LIC (2009); ISCP, New York (2009); Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008), co-editor of issue 2, INPUT Journal and was one of the founders of the temporary art project EXHIBITION, New York (2009). Bajo holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins School of Art in London and a MA in Architecture from ESARQ, Barcelona, in 2006 she was granted a Fellowship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Future projects include her first solo exhibition in the UK at The Woodmill, London;

Through film, performance, and various media Lindsay Benedict presents us with fragments and gestures that examine and question social relations. She received a BA from Williams College, an MFA from UC Berkeley and was a studio fellow at the Whitney ISP. Lindsay lives in Brooklyn and has shown in NYC at Rotunda, Bose Pacia, and PS 122, and performed at The Tank, Dixon Place, and in the Movement Research 2009 Spring Festival. Her work was also exhibited/screened at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Emergency Biennial, the Detroit Museum of New Art (MONA), New Langton Arts, and the Pacific Film Archive.

Dubbed by L.A. Weekly as “Eye/Ear Explorer,” composer Nicholas Chase is known for integrating popular media into chamber music. His electro-acoustic compositions have been performed across the US and Europe, and his live video work has been acclaimed as “pushing the edge of audio/visual,” while his interactive installation “Transmission” was featured at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Chase returns to the US from Germany where he taught visual media at the Bauhaus University and collaborated with the BauhausFM Experimental Radio to work toward the PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/ngoma-lungundu-voice-that/id319306003

Seth Cluett (b. 1976, Troy, NY) is an artist, performer, and composer whose work ranges from photography, and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing. Engaging the boundary between the auditory and other senses, his work is marked by a detailed attention to perception and to sound’s role in the creation of a sense of place and the experience of time. The apparent tranquility of Cluett’s work – at once gentle and un-nerving – is concerned with the rapidly shifting sensory landscape of technological development and urbanization.

Zoe Crosher is an artist living in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Vancouver, Rotterdam, Los Angeles and New York City. In addition to her exhibition practice, she has a monograph, Out the Window (LAX), examining space and transience around the Los Angeles airport, and an upcoming monograph on her newest project The Unraveling of Michelle duBois, to be published by Aperture Books. Crosher recently served as visiting faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, was an associate editor at the journal Afterall and is currently visiting faculty at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.
www.zoecrosher.com.

Krysten Cunningham earned her BFA in 2000 from University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. In 2003 she received her MFA: University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. Her selected exhibitions include: “’3 to 4′”, Ritter/Zamet, London, 2010; “Krysten Cunningham”, Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles, 2010; TANGENTAL, Dispatch, New York, NY, 2010; “Time Machines”, Thomas Solomon Gallery @ Cottage Home, Los Angeles, 2008; Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, 2008; Minimalism and After V, DaimlerChrysler, Berlin, 2007; Big Secret Cash, Angstrom Gallery, 2007; The Re-distribution of the Sensible, Magnus Muller, Berlin, Germany, 2007; Kairos, Cantor/Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles, 2007.

Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has been living and working in New York since 1994. Fiks has produced many projects on the subject of the Post-Soviet dialog in the West, among them: “Lenin for Your Library?” in which he mailed V.I. Lenin’s text “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism” to one hundred global corporations as a donation for their corporate libraries and “Communist Party USA,” a series of portraits of current members of Communist Party USA.

Dan Levenson is a multi-disciplinary artist whose central project, Little Switzerland, is an art-world mise en abîme involving painting, sculpture, photography, installation, performance and printed matter.
For this issue of Shifter he contributed the book layout and cover design and a short fiction inspired by the history of Futura.
www.danlevenson.com

Antje Majewski lives and works in Berlin. Her works have been shown internationally, including Kunsthalle Basel (Basel), Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Deichtorhallen (Hamburg), Joanneum (Graz), Galerie neugerriemschneider (Berlin), asprey jaques (London), ZKM (Karlsruhe) and Salzburger Kunstverein. She teaches as Professor for painting at Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.
“Entity” was first written for the exhibition “Dubai Düsseldorf” in Kunstverein Düsseldorf, 2009. This text is part of an ongoing body of works – paintings, objects, texts and a film – around the meaning of objects. The next part will be shown at Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt, and finally all parts of the piece will come together in the show “The World of Gimel” in Kunsthaus Graz, 2011.

T. Kelly Mason is an artist from Los Angeles. Mason has been exhibiting worldwide since 1990 and is currently spending time in St. Louis as a visiting professor of art at Washington University. The 2 projects are the result of the Centre du Monde residency on Belle-Île-en-Mer, France. This marks the second time Mason has lived across the street from a house that Claude Monet had inhabited. Though he spent a month alone on the island, he has yet to find a successful respite from everyday life and intends to keep looking.

Michele Masucci lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
Trying to make a living as an artist, writer, translator. Earning money from stipends, residencies, participaton in art shows and production of art shows and other immaterial services. Always looking to find a possible way out of an all encopassing economic mental and linguistic system built on competition, fear and generalised exploitation. Longing for the possibility of solidarity, trust and friendship through the formation of autonomous communities that manage to resist the numbing effect of capitalism and thus recreate the experience of human sensibility. Imagining an existence where mental presence and emotional vulnerability becomes a part of everydaylife.

Daniel Miller works in Israel and Palestine.

Seth Nehil is an artist, performance-maker, and composer with a practice that crosses between sound, performance-events and the visual arts. In recent years he has created large-scale sound performances, collaborated with choreographers including Liz Gerring (NYC) and Linda Austin (Portland, Ore), and has published music on various international labels, including Sonoris (France) and Senufo Editions (Italy). Seth Nehil has also been an editor of arts publications, an organizer of performance festivals and a curator of exhibitions. He currently teaches sound, video and art theory at WSU Vancouver and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Warren Neidich is an artist and writer living between Berlin and Los Angeles whose work has been exhibited internationally. He is the recipient of the Vilem Flusser Theory Award, 2010. Selected future exhibitions include Bringing Up Knowledge, MUSAC, Leon, Spain, Book Exchange, Glenn Horowitz, East Hampton, Hidden Publics, Kunsthalle Palazzo, Liestal, Switzerland, Love Letter for a Surrogate, Torrence Art MuseumTorrence, CA., and UKS-Unge Kunstneres Samfund/Young Artist Society, Oslo, Norway.
His recent monograph of drawings entitled Lost Between the Extensivity/Intensivity Exchange was recently published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Cognitive Architecture: From Biopower to Noo-power is forthcoming and will launch at this years Venice Biennial for Architecture at the Dutch Pavilion. He is currently Visiting Artist at the TU Delft School of Architecture, Delft, The Netherlands.

Susanne Neubauer is a curator and art historian. She was curator at Museum of Art Lucerne 2002-2009 and has curated numerous monographic exhibitions, including Anton Henning, Minnette Vári, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven as well as thematic exhibitions such as Documentary Creations, Projection (on the slide projection in art since the 1960s), Paul Thek Lucerne 1973/2005 and The Big Scene. Her recent and upcoming essays on Paul Thek and Ree Morton are published with MIT Press (2008), Generali Foundation Vienna and Whitney Museum of American Art (2010). She runs the online platform www.ptproject.net on the environmental work of Paul Thek and is currently finalizing a dissertation on the documentation of ephemeral spacial works of the 1970s.

Hans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zurich in May 1968. He became Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in April 2006, joining Julia Peyton-Jones, the Serpentine Gallery Director. Prior to this he was Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris since 2000, as well as curator of museum in progress, Vienna, from 1993 to 2000.
Obrist has curated and co-curated over 200 solo and group exhibitions and biennales internationally since 1991, including: World Soup, 1991; do it, 1994; Take Me, I’m Yours, 1995; Manifesta 1, 1996; Laboratorium, 1999; Cities on the Move, 1997; Live/Life, 1996; Nuit Blanche, 1998; 1st Berlin Biennale, 1998; Utopia Station, 2003; 2nd Guangzhou Triennale, 2005; Dakar Biennale, 2004; 1st & 2nd Moscow Biennale, 2005 and 2007; Lyon Biennale, 2007; and Yokohama Triennale, 2008.

Chloe Piene lives and works in New York City. She has exhibited internationally. In 2010 she has shows in galleries including: Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv; Susanne Vielmetter Projects, Los Angeles; Rotwand Gallery, Zürich. She has also shown in Barbara Thumm Gallery, Artforum Berlin, Berlin; Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris; Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nimes, France; Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc., New York.
Her work in included in the collections of: Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco among others.

Recent interests in Linda Quinlan’s practice lend themselves to formation. She considers what we move through on the way towards the center of something, be it an action, form or utterance. Her work touches on the pleasure gleaned in the meeting of elements, allowing them to become molten, soften and stretch out, reaching for meaning and recognition and embracing new substances that emerge. Quinlan is Irish and studying at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Recent exhibitions include the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, AutoItalia, London, CareOf Gallery, Milan and the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. In 2006 she was awarded the Allied Irish Bank Prize.

Patricia Reed is a Canadian artist living and working in Berlin. She has participated in the residency programs of the Centre for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan; CCA Jeleni, Prague; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include: They go round and round, 0047 Projects, Oslo; First Nations/Second Nature, Audain Gallery, Vancouver; Territories of the In/Human, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. She has contributed texts to the following publications: Shifter Magazine, Fillip, Art Papers, C Magazine and Framework: The Finnish Art Review.

Silva Reichwein is a painter. She was born in Zurich and lives and works in Berlin and Zurich. She studied at the Ecole Superieure d Art Visuel, Geneva, and at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. 1993 she received her diploma as master scholar with Anna Oppermann. The artist`s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands and Hungary. She has received various scholarships and her work is present in various public and private collections.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews at Artforum. His recent collection of poems is Book Left Open in the Rain (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail). His poems in this issue of Shifter are part of a new project for which he has asked fellow poets to give him their “failed” or abandoned poems to work on.

Gemma Sharpe has a background in literature and art history. She is a writer and critic based in London, currently undertaking an MFA at Goldsmiths. Her recent work is concerned with experimental practices of art writing, collaborative writing methods and political and Feminist philosophy and theory. She is a founding member of art writing platform, antepress.

Amy Sillman is an artist who lives in Brooklyn. Her most recent solo show, “Transformer (…or, how many lightbulbs does it take to change a painting?)” will be on view at Sikkema Jenkins & Co in NY from April 15-May 15, 2010.

Francesco Spampinato is a visual artist and art theorist who works with painting, performance, installation and sound. He holds two degrees in Art History from the University of Bologna and an MA in Modern Art: Critical Studies Track from Columbia University in New York. He regularly contributes to contemporary art magazines Flash Art, Impackt and Artlab and is visiting professor of Performance Art at NABA, Milano. Lives and works between Bologna and New York.

Tyler Stallings is the director of University of California, Riverside’s Sweeney Art Gallery. He was chief curator at Laguna Art Museum from 1999 to 2006. Since arriving at Sweeney in 2007, he has organized Your Donations Do Our Work: Andrea Bowers and Suzanne Lacy (2009), Absurd Recreation: Contemporary Art from China (2008), Truthiness: Photography as Sculpture (2008), and The Signs Pile Up: Paintings by Pedro Álvarez (2008), among others.
www.sweeney.ucr.edu.

Laura Stein has exhibited in the States and abroad, in both museums and galleries. She has been in over 80 group exhibitions including Aldrich Museum and the New Museum. She has had 9 solo shows in New York and Los Angeles as well as a project at PS1/Moma. She installed a public commission at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany and 2 large-scale projects at the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio. Her work is represented in numerous private, museum, and corporate collections including Disney and the Eli Broad Corporate collection. She has taught workshops at the school of the Museum Fine Arts Boston and the Staatliche Hochschule in Frankfurt. She has also lectured internationally at universities as well as museums.

Clarissa Tossin is an artist based in Los Angeles and São Paulo. Her work synthesizes place, economy, history and narrative into sculptural objects, installations, videos and performances. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and BFA from FAAP, Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2000. She attended the Skowhegan residency in 2009. Her work has been shown at Redling Fine Art, Compact Space and Redcat, in Los Angeles, Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo, Brazil, La Ferme du Buisson, in Noisiel, France, and Kunsthalle Wien, in Vienna, Austria.
www.clarissatossin.net

Brindalyn Webster is currently living in Göteborg, Sweden, through the Independent Study Program at Valand Konsthögskolan. In 2009 she attended Skowhegan School of Art in East Madison, Maine, after receiving her MFA in Social Practice from California College of Art in San Francisco. In 2001 she received her BFA in Sculpture from Parsons School of Design in New York City. The output of each of Webster’s projects is slightly different, but providing space and attention through listening is an essential part of her work.
http://www.brindalyn.com

Lee Welch is currently undertaking an MFA at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. His work has been exhibited widely, including the solo exhibitions: At the still point of the turning world, Galway Arts Centre, Galway; Never Odd or Even, The LAB, Dublin and has been featured in the Clifford Irving Show, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; MISSING LINK, Andreiana Mihail Gallery, Bucharest; Non-knowledge, Project Arts Centre, Dublin; COE, Claremorris curated by Lizzie Carey-Thomas. Welch has received the Dublin City Council Bursary, an Arts Council Bursary and Travel and Training Award as well as supported from Culture Ireland. He recently received the Banff Residency at The Banff Centre, Canada.

Olav Westphalen is a German-born artist. He currently lives in Stockholm, where he is a professor in performance art at the Royal Art Institute.

James Yeary lives in Portland, from where he co-publishes the My Day zine series, & curates readings & events for the Spare Room collective. He is also an experimental/ambient priest, & does weddings & fune

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SHIFTER13 : INDIRA SYLVIA BELISSOP

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Editors: Sreshta Rit Premnath, Avi Alpert

Shifter’s 13th issue focuses on the importance and impact of this philosopher, who, though unknown, seems to have been one of the most important thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st century. Belissop’s thought has been instrumental in changing the entire terrain of intellectual, artistic and activist practice over the past seven decades of her immense production. Her revolutionary work in activist “interventionism,” and her Marxist, materialist commitment never seemed to conflict with her important contribution to experimental poetry. Her philosophical treatises managed to comfortably accommodate both psychoanalysis and neuro-psychology while simultaneously problematizing both disciplines. Her expertise and influence in so many varied disciplines made her something of an Aristotle of our age. Of course, like Aristotle, she was not right in everything she said, but that she said it made so much of our own work possible.

Belissop was an untimely thinker – indeed a thinker whose true time has not come and perhaps never will. We are using this occasion as an opportunity to reflect on critical practice at the present time. The invention of Belissop (and her inventiveness) gives us the opportunity to explore concepts that have yet to be named or written, to test out ideas, to question the history of critical theory that has swept all fields of practice, to engage in a dialog with someone so capacious, so brilliant, that they could never really exist.

In this issue we present aphorisms, essays, interviews, letters of friendship and admiration, poems and artwork that grow out of the possibilities opened by her analyses. The aim of the issue is simply to continue Belissop’s legacy – to explore the multifaceted themes that her work touches on and helps animate within our own lives.

Contributor Bios:

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SHIFTER14 : On Certainty

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This issue of Shifter was released in conjunction with a group show and series of lectures titled "On Certainty" curated by Sreshta Rit Premnath.

"Lack of clarity in philosophy is tormenting. It is felt as shameful. We feel: we do not know our way about where we should know our way about. And nevertheless it isn’t so. We can get along very well without… knowing our way about here."

"…In any serious question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem."

-from "Remarks on Colour," Ludwig Wittgenstein

“On Certainty” includes a group show, a new issue of the magazine Shifter (co-edited by the participating artists), and a series of public dialogues with economists, neurologists, physicists and writers. The participants contemplate the notion of certainty and its sibling, uncertainty: How and why do we constitute a unified self from which to speak and construe meaning in this world? When we say, "I know…" with certainty, what do we mean?

The title of the show, lifted from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumously published book, signals our attempt not only to investigate knowledge and factuality, but furthermore, to interrogate the statement "I saw it with my own eyes." What is the position of the witness (who represents an event) and the authentic subject (who represents a group) in knowledge production?

The interdisciplinary programming of the lecture series reflects the curatorial desire to use the gallery as an intellectual commons. As Edward Said has said, specialization sometimes “means losing sight of the raw effort of constructing either art or knowledge,” and by opening up an interdisciplinary conversation we hope to investigate the “choices and decisions” that produce these knowledges, and their certainties.

The artists are: Lindsay Benedict, Joshua Hart, Abhishek Hazra, Pat Palermo, Sreshta Rit Premnath and Kiran Subbaiah.

Through film, performance, and various media Lindsay Benedict presents us with fragments and gestures that examine and question social relations. In her work, affect and raw emotion are often deployed to disrupt and destabilize any simple reading of human connections. A wide ranging temporality, from more deliberate and slowly conceived films and sewn texts to the more immediately gestural drawings allow a dense layering of material and narrative to unravel and intertwine simultaneously.

Pat Palermo‘s comic books and paintings often ruminate on the question of how and whether it is possible to communicate. Vacillating between the autobiographical subject and the object as subject we are placed within narratives and structures where the criteria for meaning production are, at best, trying. Although always at the center of artistic production, the autobiographical subject remains unsure of, and ever startled by his own position.

Like Kafka’s Josef K, Kiran Subbaiah‘s protagonists, are always caught in a narrative of paradox. Each time he (the protagonist? Subbaiah? The simulacrum presented to us on a screen?) attempts to unravel the knot of representation within which he is bound, we find that it only tightens. Ever more self-reflexively we are seduced through humor, narrative and visual trickery into this paradox of representation only to be reminded again and again: this is only a video.

In Joshua Hart‘s drawings and sculptural assemblages, forms slip and tumble down the chain of signification, constantly shifting from one thing to another – a camel becomes a soldier, a printed pattern mimics a reflection. Yet the object asserts its base materiality as if to also say, "I am only this." This mirage he draws us into not only makes his objects difficult to fix but also shakes the ground that stabilizes our view. When the body that names is itself unstable how does it go about naming?

Sreshta Premnath is engaged with forms of interrogation and representation. Often using fragments of historic material as anchors, he pieces together found or fabricated images, texts, video and film into installations. He employs strategies of negation, erasure, fracture, displacement and fiction, to explore moments of slippage – those cracks in language where meaning and representation, memory and history split.

Abhishek Hazra‘s close yet idiosyncratic study of the historiography of science has led him to examine various technologies of knowledge production and dispersion. His projects often settle on moments of technological dysfunction as nodes for narrative exploration. Taking the form of video installation, performance, prints and items for sale on ebay, his projects further complicate his questions by themselves engaging in various modes of production and dispersion of knowledge.

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March 14, 3pm
John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse

John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse presented a polyvocal performance reading with image and text projections from their collaborative book Seismosis (1913 Press). The book features drawings by Stackhouse and text by Keene in dialogic response to each other. The presentation is part performance, part lecture/reading. The audience has the opportunity to experience the drawings, text, and vocalizations of both writer and artist in this immersive setting.


Christopher Stackhouse



John Keene



John Keene & Christopher Stackhouse

March 21, 3pm
Christopher Perkins

The basic problem of looking for the unknown leads to questions regarding where to look and what to look for. New discoveries in the field of physics are based on previous discoveries but the problem remains of which leads to follow and which to abandon. Even once an avenue for further research is chosen, the scientists involved must design an experiment and decide whether or not this experiment is capable of finding what they are looking for, even before they know what they will find. All that can be done is to choose a subset of the parameter space that offers the possibility of new discovery. We will lead a discussion on the process that precedes the reporting of scientific results and how scientists believe an avenue of research is valid.


Christopher Perkins & Joshua Hart – ‘Guess and Check is Valid Math’ Pt. 1


Christopher Perkins & Joshua Hart – Guess & Check is Valid Math Pt. 2 Guess and Check is Valid Math –

March 28, 3pm
Arjun Jayadev
"We are seeing things that were 25 standard deviations moves, several days in a row". This was the comment that David Viniar, CFO of Goldman Sachs offered as his explanation for the crisis. In other words, bad luck– an awful lot of it– has brought the world to the edge of a recession.. How accurate is this statement, and what made Viniar, one of the central players in the financial system believe this to be true? How does one understand the crisis from the viewpoint of uncertainty in financial markets? And what does this mean for the future?



Uncertainty, Confidence and Crises – Arjun Jayadev, Pt 1


Uncertainty, Confidence and Crises – Arjun Jayadev, Pt 2

Uncertainty, Confidence and Crises – Arjun Jayadev, Pt 3

Saturday, April 4, 2pm-5pm
Organized by: Christopher Stackhouse
Thom Donovan
John Keene
Stuart Krimko
Katy Lederer

Thom Donovan coedits On: Contemporary Practice, a magazine for writing on one’s contemporaries, edits Wild Horses of Fire blog, curates PEACE events series and is an active participant in the Nonsite Collective. His poems, criticism, and scholarship have appeared variously.



Thom Donovan – Readings ‘On Certainty’

Stuart Krimko is the author of Not That Light (2005) and The Sweetness Of Herbert (forthcoming), both published by Sand Paper Press, Key West. In 2005 he received a grant from The Fund for Poetry.


Stuart Krimko – Readings ‘On Certainty’

John Keene is the author of the award-winning novel Annotations (New Directions, 1995), and of the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), with artwork by Christopher Stackhouse. He has published his fiction, poetry, essays and translations in a wide array of journals, including African-American Review, AGNI, Encyclopedia, Gay and Lesbian Review, Hambone, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and Ploughshares.



John Keene – Readings ‘On Certainty’

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collection, Winter Sex (Verse Press, 2002) and the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year and Esquire Magazine named one of its eight Best Books of the Year. Her second poetry book, The Heaven-Sent Leaf was published by BOA Editions in the fall of 2008.


Katy Lederer – Readings ‘On Certainty’ Discussion:


Discussion ‘On Certainty’: Thom Donovan, John Keene, Stuart Krimko, Katy Lederer, Christopher Stackhouse Click here to read Thom Donovan’s statement



Discussion ‘On Certainty’ (contd.): Thom Donovan, John Keene, Stuart Krimko, Katy Lederer, Christopher Stackhouse

April 11, 3pm
Lawrence Liang
Truth technologies at the service of law from the Lie Detector to Narco-Analysis have made a sudden reappearance in the world after 9/11. In the Indian context, high profile cases including Abu Salem and Telgi’s have centered on highly performative extractions of the truth, which are often televised on television. This paper attempts to provide a philosophical and cultural history of technologies of lie detection. It looks at the ways in which truth and lies were rendered technologically accessible, and how the body simultaneously becomes the archive of the soul and in turn produces a new regime of physiological truth. Popular discourse on crime and detection are vital to the legitimacy of these technologies of truth, and in many ways lie detectors were legitimized through popular culture before the found acceptance in law. This paper will locate the re-emergence of lie detectors within the dynamics of secrets and lies in the hyper mediatised world that we live in.



Lawrence Liang – Rewiring the Soul: Technologies of the Truth (Part 1)


Lawrence Liang – Rewiring the Soul: Technologies of the Truth (Part 2)

April 18, 3pm
Kenneth Perrine (followed by discussion with Arani Bose)
In his presentation Dr. Perrine will discuss language and certainty, weaving together the questions posed by philosophers from Western (e.g., Wittgenstein, Bateson) and Eastern (Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism) traditions regarding language and subjectivity, with his research findings from performing the Wada test in which a sedative is injected into one hemisphere of the brain at a time. The effect is to shut down all functions in that hemisphere in order to evaluate the capabilities of the other, “awake” hemisphere. During this period of anesthesia he probes the neural mechanisms of memory, language and thinking in each hemisphere separately. He also performs Cortical Stimulation during awake neurosurgery to localize language and other cognitive processes by selectively disabling small (1 cm) cortical areas during cognitive testing. These procedures allow testing of hypotheses relating the neural bases of language, certainty, self-awareness and other mental functions to the questions posed by philosophers for millennia.


‘On Certainty’ Presentation #6 : The Neuroscience of Language and Certainty (Intro.)


Kenneth Perrine – The Neuroscience of Language and Certainty (Pt. 1)


Kenneth Perrine – The Neuroscience of Language and Certainty (Pt. 2)


Kenneth Perrine & Arani Bose – The Neuroscience of Language and Certainty (Discussion Pt. 1)


Arani Bose – On the difference between Animate and Inanimate reality (Discussion Pt. 2)


Kenneth Perrine & Arani Bose – The Neuroscience of Language and Certainty (Discussion Pt. 3)

Abhishek Hazra is a visual artist based in Bangalore. His work explores the intersections between technology and culture through animated shorts and performance pieces that often integrate textual fragments drawn from real and fictional scenarios. He is also interested in the social history of scientific practices in colonial India. A brief overview of some of his works can be found here: http://abhishekhazra.blogspot.com/

Joshua Hart (b. 1976) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from Bard College in 2007. www.joshuahart.org

Kiran Subbaiah (http://www.geocities.com/antikiran) was born in India. He has studied and worked at various art institutions in India and Europe.

His creative production consists of 3-dimensional objects, site/context-specific texts, short stories, videos, and proposals for utilitarian objects. He has been making computer-specific art-objects since 1999. http://www.geocities.com/antikiran/

Lindsay Benedict was born in Port Jefferson, New York, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She received a BA from Williams College, an MFA from UC Berkeley and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. Working in film, sound, performance, sewn text and photographic essay, her projects request exploration of social connections that demand a further examination of contemporary life. Often emotionally raw, the work is presented as a fragment, question, or gesture. Benedict has recently shown at PS 122 in Manhattan, the Berkeley Art Museum, and in the Emergency Biennial; she has screened at the Detroit Museum of New Art (MONA), New Langton Arts in San Francisco, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA.

Pat Palermo is an artist and cartoonist currently living and working in Brooklyn. He received a BFA from Ohio State University and an MFA from Bard College in 2005. His comic book, Cut Flowers, was a 2005 recipient of the Xeric Grant for self-publishing cartoonists. His work has been exhibited at Monya Rowe Gallery (New York), Edward Mitterand (Geneva), and Sutton Lane (Paris). He is currently writing and drawing Live/Work, a serial comic book set in the contemporary art world.

Sreshta Premnath lives and works in New York City. He is the founder and editor of the magazine Shifter.

He received his BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art, his MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Art at Bard College and was a 2008 studio fellow at The Whitney Independent Study Program.

His work has been shown at Gallery SKE, in Bangalore (India), Rotunda Gallery, Art in General, Bose Pacia Gallery and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York City. http://www.circumscript.net

Vijay Iyer is a New York-based pianist, composer, improviser, producer, and occasional academic. He tours worldwide with his various projects, and has released twelve albums as a leader or co-leader. Most commonly associated with jazz, he has also composed orchestral and chamber works; scored for film, theater, radio and television; collaborated with poets and choreographers; and joined forces with artists in hip-hop, rock, experimental, electronic, and Indian classical musics. Iyer received the Alpert Award in the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, Creative Capital, the Cary Charitable Trust, American Composers Forum, Chamber Music America, and Meet The Composer. His writings appear in Music Perception, Current Musicology, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Journal of the Society for American Music, and the anthologies Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies and Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture.

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SHIFTER1 : JETLAG

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SHIFTER2 : POST-MORTEM

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SHIFTER3 : KOSMOPOLITES

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SHIFTER4 : ON TRANSLATION

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Participants:
Laura Marsh
Paolo Javier
Babu Eshwar Prasad
Carlos Motta
Sreshta Premnath
Sonia Jose
Sunoj D.
Kristin Baumlier

Editor:
Sreshta Premnath

‘Everything we do is translation, and all translations are in a way creations.’ – Octavio Paz

Translation, in its traditional sense is an activity comprising the interpretation of the meaning of a text in one language — the source text — and the production of another, equivalent text in another language — the target text. The goal to establish a relationship of equivalence between the source and the target texts (that is to say, both texts communicate the same message), while taking into account the various constraints placed on the translator. (These constraints include context, the rules of grammar of the source language, its writing conventions, its idioms and the like.)

In contrast to the notion that the source text is always the primary text and the translation an inferior duplicate, Borges held the view that a translation can in fact improve an original, that contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid, and that an original can be seen as unfaithful to a translation.

What “On Translation” is however concerned with is neither the source-language/text nor the target-language/text, per se, but rather the meaning that is generated through translation – the friction between languages that generates a third text that is concerned with the function of language as a seemingly transparent generator of meaning.

Again and again we are faced with the fabric of language as a tactile translucent entity that persuades and contradicts. The texts that follow function by baring the process of language – its structure – and the meanings that arise through contrasting juxtapositions, “bad translations” and contextual shifts.

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SHIFTER5 : DESIRE & THE OTHER

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Participants:
Caleb Larsen
Matthew Bollinger
Barbara Jane Reyes
Alison O’Daniel
Sue Havens
Jason Yoh
Ana Prvacki
Crispin Webb
Baron
Benjamin Grasso

Editor:
Sreshta Premnath

Desire and the Other

The Other, is that ambiguous space which exists as a conceptual field only in order to reinforce the ego. It is the vacuum that sucks up the detritus of knowledge – conflating those disconnected fragments of meaning and information that defy acceptable explanation, so that the mere act of their conflation/circumscription reconstitutes the I. The I invokes the Other, the Other constructs the I. It is an imaginary relationship of absence and presence, the primary division that constructs language.

Presence<>Absence, Object<>Representation. The I is constructed through exclusion. The I is all that is not the Other. The Other is all that the I is not, that the I cannot be.

The Other is what the I is but cannot be. Desire, is this vacillating relationship of simultaneous dependence and inconsonance.

Desire depends on incompatibility.

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SHIFTER6 : SURFACE TENSION

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Participants:
Kristin Anderson
Bethany Wright
David Rothenberg
Shinsuke Aso
Nora Schultz
Kerry Downey
Jean Alexander Frater
Heather Nagami
Dorothy Albertini
Todd Ayoung
Carlos Andrade
Jonathan VanDyke
Dylan Graham
Ana Prvacki
Isaac Payne

Editor:
Sreshta Rit Premnath

A further exploration of liminality that was embarked upon in the previous two issues (“On Translation,” “Desire and the Other”).

Surface Tension
n.
A property of liquids arising from unbalanced molecular cohesive forces at or near the surface, as a result of which the surface tends to contract and has properties resembling those of a stretched elastic
membrane.

Once again I am interested in the idea of a linguistic surface or skin that is constructed to order and define; and liminality as a threshold point where this order can potentially become problematized or disrupted. Mistranslation, erasure, disjunction, amputation.