Seminar 7: June 1-3, 2016

In this special DAI-week Open! COOP Academy Publishing Class will launch an extra printed publication. This publication, entitled Between and Beyond – A Posthuman Bestiary, is an offshoot of the research group Between Animals or Beyond Being Human. A bestiary is a compendium of beasts or a collection of stories providing physical and allegorical descriptions of real or imaginary animals along with an interpretation of the moral significance each animal is thought to embody. This experimental bestiary considers and represents new relationships and entanglements, questioning old hierarchies, crossing boundaries and introducing new subjectivities and narratives. It asks: If ‘man’ is not the measure of all things, what are we becoming? Between and Beyond is a joint project with image and text submissions of students and tutors, and designed by Open! designer Niels Schrader. On June 3 with the launch at DAI each ‘ animal’ wil be introduced by its creator in a lecture /performance-miniature. On June 1 and 2 will will work on developing, discussing and practicing the presentations.

Seminar 6: April 28-29, 2016

For this DAI week we will be joined by artist, critic and curator Mohammad Salemy. Assuming that humans have always already been posthuman, Mohammad will discuss with us technology as an expanded concept and go into the ongoing cybernetic revolution to shed some light on the technological underpinnings of the larger social fields. To be prepared for this seminar we will read and talk about  Jacques Lacan’s lecture Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the nature of language. In the evening we will watch and discuss the documentary Google and the World Brain. On Friday Mohammad will have face to face meetings with some of the students about their individual publishing projects. Other students will meet up with Open! designer and image editor Niels Schrader and all will meet with tutors Florian Göttke and Jorinde Seijdel. 

Seminar 5: March 17-18, 2016

On Thursday afternoon we will have a seminar with Chicago based artist and writer Kayla Anderson as a guest tutor. Kayla will tell about her practice and discuss with us Vilém Flusser's Vampyroteuthis Infernalis. Originally published in 1987, this notable posthumanist treatise or philosophical fiction asks "How far apart are humans from animals—even the “vampire squid from hell”?” In the evening program we will listen to and discuss a 2014 lecture by Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene—Staying with the Trouble. We will also watch Outlandish: Strange Foreign Bodies, a film by Phillip Warnell and a remarkable collaboration with J.L. Nancy. On Friday, Kayla Anderson and core tutors Jorinde Seijdel and Florian Göttke will have face to face meetings with the students to talk about their publishing projects in progress. 

Preparatory reading:

- Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis

- Kayla Anderson, Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene  

Kayla Anderson is an artist, writer, and organizer based in Chicago, USA. Using a playful approach to methods of excavation, her work engages with cultural artifacts of the past in order to propose parallel worlds. Her work has been shown at museums, galleries, and itinerant spaces in the US and abroad. Her writing has been published by Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), The Royal College of Art, and MU Art Space, Eindhoven (NL), and presented at SIGGRAPH, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the UCSB, and the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She holds the position of Manager of Library Special Collections at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she curates exhibitions, lectures, and mentors students in the history, theory, and creation of artists’ publications. In her spare time, she organizes a monthly critique group for feminist media makers called Media Grrrl. See: http://www.kaylanderson.com/ 

Seminar 4: February 11-12, 2016

We will continue working on the overarching subject matter (critical posthumanism, new materialism) of the Open! Co-Op Academy publishing class. We will also pay attention to cultural issues of digital publishing and to the development of the individual (image) essay projects. On Thursday afternoon we will have a seminar with Rick Dolphijn, teacher and reseacher in media theory and cultural theory at Universiteit Utrecht and editor (with Iris van der Tuin) of New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Open Humanities Press, 2012). In the evening we will meet with Janine Armin, writer and editor for Open! and Casco, to discuss relevant examples of artist publications. On Friday Janine, and also core tutors Jorinde Seijdel and Florian Göttke, will have face to face meetings with the students to talk about their publishing projects in progress. 

Literature to read for the afternoon seminar:

- R. Dolphijn, "The Revelation of a World that Was Always Already There. The Creative Act as an Occupation", in: This Deleuzian Century. Art, Activism, Life, ed. R. Braidotti & R. Dolphijn, (Brill/Rodopi, 2014), p. 185-205

- Spinoza:  Ethics 2, proposition 13-18 (http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/Spinoza/build3.htm#TOP?/gary_zabel/Courses/Spinoza/Texts/Spinoza/ethcnt1.htm)

Seminar 3: January 7-8, 2016

In the first coming together of 2016 Open! Co-Op Academy publishing class will concentrate on the progress of the individual publishing assignments with designer Niels Schrader. Schrader developed Open!’s digital publishing archive and platform and is also it’s image editor. In a seminar on Thursday he will as well go into cultural online publishing in general as demonstrate the possibilities of publishing text and image contributions on Open!. How can text and image create extra meaning by linking, cross linking and hyperlinking? How can the reader be engaged in new ways? On Friday Schrader and core tutors Jorinde Seijdel and Florian Göttke will have face to face meetings with each student to discuss everyone’s individual project. In addition, we will further explore the topics of Between Animals or Beyond Being Human by reading and discussing the introduction of Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman.

Seminar 1: 15-16 October 2015

This first session of Between Animals or Beyond Being Human will include an introduction to the course with tutors Jorinde Seijdel & Florian Göttke. We will try to get a clear idea about what is meant within the context of the course with the idea of the posthuman and other relevant notions. We will discuss Open! as an overarching publishing framework and talk over this years assignment to create a posthuman bestiary or taxonomy in text and/or image to be published on Open!. Florian Göttke will tell about his project Anthroprosaic. Furthermore we will look more closely at the reading list and lay out the year ahead as much as possible. On Friday we will have a first series of face to face meetings with Jorinde and Florian. Study materials: Donna Haraway’s seminal essay A Cyborg Manifesto and Francesca Ferrando’s article Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms.