LECTURE: JACOB GROOT
Divine Materials – The Poetics of Joy
(An introduction to Walt Whitman, a kosmos)
Jacob Groot is a poet, essayist and novelist. He published, amongst more, the cult book Gelukkige Lippen/Lucky Lips (2004), about the mystery of the ‘singing voice’ in pop music. In 2005 he coedited a collective translation of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). His most recent volume of poetry is Divina Noir (2010). Even more recent is his lengthy novel Adam Seconde, an odyssey; a libidinal quest into a summer at sea.
LAUNCH:
Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, no. 24 on Politics of Things
What Art & Design do in Democracy
General introduction to this acclaimed Amsterdam based ‘cahier’ that reflects upon contemporary public space from a cultural perspective by Jorinde Seijdel, editor in chief.
Co-editors Jeroen Boomgaard and Sher Doruff will introduce Open 24, the last issue of Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain as published by SKOR | Foundation for Art and the Public Domain and nai010 publishers.
Open 24 investigates the current state of affairs in the theory and practice of the ‘Politics of Things’. What does a thing like ‘art’ do in democracy, how does art make publics, how does a thing interact with other things and people, and how does it influence them?
ARTIST PRESENTATION: YVONNE DRÖGE WENDEL
Relational Thingness
Yvonne Dröge Wendel (D/NL) works in the field of sculpture and performance. She sets up experimental encounters that evoke questions concerning (the future of) things. Rethinking the subject-object distinction and reworking our understanding of what it is for humans and non-humans to constitute a world is the main focus point of her work.
Presently she is one of four visual artists in the Netherlands who conduct a PhD trajectory at a Dutch University with the support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Mondriaan Fund. She is also the Head of the Rietveld Fine Arts department.
SPOKEN COLUMN: WILLEM VAN WEELDEN
From Ecology Of Mind To Ecology Of ‘Self’
Or: From cybernetics to chaosophy and transversality.
A column in three parts:
- How a young and curious high school student came to understand the complexity and interdependency of vegetal and other life.
- How a scientist, at home in a wide variety of disciplines, went out to understand the ‘pattern that connects’. And while Gregory Bateson was trying to dissect the alcoholic ‘self’ he unraveled a new cybernetic epistemology in which ‘information’ is the key operant of a new idea of the ‘self’.
- How a French radical psychotherapist who, throughout his entire working life, had been engaged with schizophrenics, set out to understand how subjectivity is produced and thus how the idea of normality is reproduced within the traditional psychoanalytical practice and theory. In the quest of Felix Guattari to overcome this enslavement he set out to radicalize psycho-analysis by combining cybernetics, semiotics, and ethnology; working towards an polemical approach to the notion of what is ‘human’. This concern with the ‘quality of subjectivity’ is what holds together art and ecology.
Willem van Weelden has a background in social philosophy and visual art. He is committed to new media from 1990 onwards and has published on this topic in various magazines and catalogues. He was involved in numerous new media projects as a creative director and coach. Currently his focus is on writing and teaching.
