Para-Academia #6: I Are Cyborg: Cyberstuff, Design, and the Great Body Remix

iarecyborg1A multimedia talk on the fiction of cyborgs with artist Ethan Gould
Date: Thursday, December 8
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: FREE! But we ask a suggested donation of $5 to help us keep Observatory’s doors open
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

[TARGET AQUIRED] {BEGIN CHARMING DESCRIPTION} >#2355> Artist Ethan Gould presents a multimedia talk on the wide-ranging design ethos of the classic science fiction trope, the CYBORG: a fictional and widely disseminated pop-melding of mechanics and human biology whose quiet shadow, the field of cybernetics, has totally transformed our world and ourselves.

The birth and weird intersections of these two ideas and their super-strong, steel-crushing grip on culture is explored in art, fiction, science, movies, and popular design, interspersed with excerpts from a lifetime of the artist’s own work, some of it dating back to elementary school and quite embarrassing!

These piles of entertaining data are used to launch much larger questions: We set out on a line of inquiry debating the separations between fiction and fact, language and object, and the sheepish nightmares and hopeful possibilities that accompany a body-as-bricolage, merged with streams of data, capable of great and terrible feats.

Class readinghttp://observatoryroom.org/files/2011/11/cyborgcourse.pdf

Ethan Gould is an artist, curator, and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from the University of Rochester with a double degree in English and film studies and a concentration in brain and cognitive sciences, he obviously immediately began working as a puppeteer. Since then he has worked as museum program developer and illustrator and is currently a fine artist.

He is the co-founder of the Hollow Earth Society and a member of Observatory. With the Society, he has co-created the Suspicious… series of books including Suspicious Anatomy and Suspicious Zoology. With fellow HES co-founder Wythe Marschall, he will be the artist-in-residence at Elsewhere in April, 2012. He is currently working a corpus of retrobiomorphic head multimedia, which seems about right.

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The Para-Academia & Theory Fiction Series
Ongoing workshops co-produced by the Public School New York and the Hollow Earth Society

A Shadow Genealogy of the Ivory Tower/Producing the Unwriteable

The para is the “alongside,” that which comments on the official or normative. While academics debate the finer points of Shakespeare and Kant, para-academics aggregate around shadow-commentators whose works do not so much categorize (striate) and enlighten (bring light into) difficult terrain, but produce that terrain, creating obscure spaces and nebulous discourses that are immune to traditional academic approaches.

Blogs, speculative medievalisms, Cyclonopedia, Charles Fort, teratology, Deleuzean-everything, print-on-demand—these and other tentacles of a polycephalic (many-headed) para-academia have entwined to produce an addendum and, finally, an ultimatum to established disciplines and practices.

We will explore these emerging ideas and modes of expression through a series of discussions and writing workshops, with audio available after each session.

The Public School NY Para-Academia Series #2: Gnostic Vertigo in Bataille and Lovecraft

lovegeorgesA class facilitated by Wythe Marschall
Date: Tuesday, June 21
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: FREE
Presented by The Hollow Earth Society

The para is the “alongside,” that which comments on the official or normative. While academics debate the finer points of Shakespeare and Kant, para-academics aggregate around shadow-commentators whose works do not so much categorize (striate) and enlighten (bring light into) difficult terrain, but produce that terrain, creating obscure spaces and nebulous discourses that are immune to traditional academic approaches.

Blogs, speculative medievalisms, Cyclonopedia, Charles Fort, teratology, print-on-demand—these and other tentacles of a polycephalic (many-headed) para-academia have entwined to produce an addendum and, finally, an ultimatum to established disciplines and practices.

The Public School New York will explore these emerging ideas and modes of expression through a series of discussions and writing workshops.

The second session of this series will consider links between two highly disparate authors whose work during the 1920s and 30s concerned, among other things, the unspeakable, the limits of philosophy, heterology (study of extreme “Otherness”), and cosmic terror.

Though they were on different planets politically, French anti-philosopher Georges Bataille and American horror luminary Howard Phillips Lovecraft shared a common concern for the foundation of a new, materialist mythology that can see beyond Reason, reconnect man to the world of things (and shit, and horrible creatures), and speak to the unutterable terror of being alive—of being trapped on a ball of mud circling a much larger ball of fire hanging in a void. (The realization of this terror produces “gnostic vertigo.”)

Following a brief investigation of each writer, we will search for the moment of gnostic vertigo in both fiction and philosophy. Organized around short texts, the class will allow for open discussions on key themes (a new materialist mythology, aporia/unspeakable-ness, the limits of philosophy, Other-ness in extremis).

We will also share brief essays of our crafting in the heterological tradition of Bataille. That’s right! You have a writing assignment (optional but recommended) to complete before class: Please write a 1–2 page essay on a single heterological theme. Bataille wrote short, powerful meditations on the eye, the big toe, human sacrifice in Aztec culture, Dali’s paintings, cave paintings, Van Gogh’s sacrificed ear, the solar anus (the sun, the anus, things you “can’t” look at), and other taboo/totally “Other” elements. Please pick some heterogeneous element and investigate it totally from the standpoint of science/materialism/use value/economics (work), society/history (taboo), mythology (archetype, literature), and religion/the unconscious (dream).

Examples include Bataille’s “Eye” and “Rotten Sun” in the course packet. Random thematic suggestions for potential Lovecraftian crossovers include tentacles, jellyfish, sponges, clay/mud, pillar cities/weird architectures, whispers/rasps, and the like.

***A reading list and downloadable PDF are available on The Public School New York website.***

Wythe Marschall is a writer and artist. He works in advertising during the week and teaches writing at Brooklyn College on the weekend. With illustrator Ethan Gould, Wythe is the founder of the Hollow Earth Society, a pacifist army, conceptual art movement, and para-academic educational network.

The Public School New York is a self-organizing educational program open to the general public.

[Note that there is a limit of 50 seats. Although we encourage participants to RSVP for the class, seating will be first come, first served. Please arrive early to guarantee a seat.]
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The Public School New York Para-Academia & Theory Fiction Series, Session 1: On Commentary

commentaryA class facilitated by Nicola Masciandaro
Date: Thursday, May 19th
Time: 8 PM
Admission: FREE!
Class limit: 50 (RSVP here)
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School

Blogs, Speculative Medievalisms, Collapse, Cyclonopedia, Lovecraft, print-on-demand: the idea of “para-academia” has arisen in recent years as an addendum and an ultimatum to established disciplines and practices.

The Public School New York will explore these emerging ideas and modes of expression through a series of discussions and writing workshops.

Questioning the concept of the ‘marginal’, this session will consider commentary as a para-academic and theory-fictional mode of thinking and writing. Specific topics to be discussed include geometrics of commentarial thought, contemplation vs. speculation, hidden writing and acontextual scholarship, philological eros, and destructive reading. A theoretical introduction will be followed by open discussion of the texts and the futures of commentary.

A reading list is available on The Public School New York website.

Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College and a specialist in medieval literature. He is founding editor of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary and co-director of the open-access press Punctum Books. For more information, see The Whim.

The Public School New York is a self-organizing educational program open to the general public.