Wording Complexities
This conference session is dedicated to artistic research. Irit Rogoff will present her current work on new practices of knowledge production and their impact on modes of research, or the ‘research turn’ in art and curating. Scholars and artists, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner, will talk about their new film that will address and shape the possibility of alternative narrative models capable of responding to the complexities of contemporary perceptual realities. The conference session will be moderated by Lucas van der Velden and Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou.
'Research' as we experience it now in both institutional and culturally active contexts has moved away from stable bodies of knowledge to be excavated as well as away from recognised subjects whose validity is universally recognised. ‘Research’ models emanating from practice have ceased to be the context or the preparation for work and have become the main event of activity. These have had significant impact on so many arenas of knowledge production across the humanities and the social sciences and have countered the bordering and continents of knowledge towards platforms of shared subjectivity. ‘Research’ is now the arena in which we negotiate knowledge that we have inherited with the conditions of our lives. Those conditions, whether economic, geographical or propelled by subjectivity, have become the drive (not the subject matter) of the work. Through immersion in conditions, ‘research’ transforms from an investigative impulse to the constitution of new realities. It is thus that we recognise that ‘research’ is not some elevated activity requiring a great deal of prior knowledge, nor is it simply the urge to ‘find things out’. It is in many ways the stuff of daily life. The forms of current research have equally shifted, as contemporary, multivalent ‘research’ moves between archival, documentary, conceptual and performative modes, and utilises everything from fictioning, docu-dramatising to mimicry the queer animation of archives and structural self-instituting to produce new realities of knowledge.
This talk will introduce a long-term collaborative project, Universal Syntax, by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner which seeks to untangle the human tendency to read the natural world as a text. The long and remarkably consistent history of the use of text as a metaphor for the interpretation of the natural world, present from ancient Babylonian observational practices, to Galileo’s reading of the solar system all the way to the human genome project, is ultimately the history of the human inability to experience the world unmediated. This is as much a history of media and technology as it is of science, culture and philosophy. As an entry point into the project, Litvintseva and Wagner will unpack some predominant theories of narrative structure and the metaphors they are based on, as a way to elaborate on alternative narrative models capable of responding to the complexities of contemporary perceptual realities.
