Syllabus Growing

Week 4: This Hand is Up River, This Hand is Down River; There Are No Words for Pastled by Hendrik Wolking, then built into This week’s syllabus starts from two examples of social organizations: (1) the possibility of living on a colony on Mars without the possibility of returning, (2) a linguist who lives with the Piraha and returns with different ideas of language and repetition and repetition and the tangled relationshiping between language, space, and time. Can we understand things we don’t have words for? What if you can’t talk for ten days? A meditation. Spatio- politico systems are discussed. Theories of first societies. How Iceland does it. Beware the snakes while sleeping. Should we butcher the ones who return from the sun squealing on the shadow casters in the cave? Please make your own links. If counting on anything maybe the difference between ordinal and cardinal counting systems counts? What if you live on Jupiter and there is only one day of sun a year and then you are locked in a closet for that one day? Is a closet also a cave dwelling? Who makes the social rules for your first society and how spatial are they? Please read the simulation intro. The relationship between organization of living and the politics of space are discussed, the possibility of leaving arriving, of staying in touch. How would you describe your sense of humor? See you on the moon. (1) Please apply here to live on mars (2) ALL SUMMER IN A DAY, Ray Bradbury : “Ready?” “Ready.” “Now ?” “Soon.” (PDF) (3) shhhhh; VIPASSANA MEDITATION (4) Iceland’s ALTHING, DINGPOLITIKS, and MAKING THINGS PUBLIC, p-14-21 (PDF: Bruno Latour: How to Make Things Public) (5) Daniel Evertt: recursion and languages without words for the past (Youtube: Das glücklichste Volk der Welt) (Daniel Everett: Endangered Languages and Lost Knowledge) “Don’t sleep there are snakes” (6) THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE, Plato (7) Difference between ONE, TWO, THREE, and FIRST, SECOND, THIRD (Ordinal vs. Cardinal counting systems in Deleuze) (8) Simulation and Simulacra, Jean Baudrillard, (read introduction) (9) LOVE (2011 film), on the preservation of stories & a music album as a film (also watch the making of in bonus features) (10) WOOL ( alternatives to systems around you & living in strange spaces) (11) THE FIRST SOCIETIES, Rousseau, from The Social Contract (12) Don’t miss your chance to buy moon-estate

Week 3: TIMINGLed by Tamura Yuichiro We start with a film by the artist called FOLLOW. FOLLOW is a film in which the artist follows a monk through the same tight, long circuit of a city each day. The monk is collecting food. Donations. Daily bread. The artist shows this because he is interested in time, rhythms, rhythms, repetition. About coming back to a finished project. About comparing his piece about walking to other walks he has done. We look at works by James Bennig. At other artist’s walks. We build our daily syllabus talking about slowing down by slowing things down. We talk of rituals and dailyness, how slowing down things helps us see things differently. And speeding up. About timing. About seeing time. The times we live in. About takes. About pink crickets. The German Amazon. (Doreen Massey says to keep your eye on Amazon. The Amazon is dirty.) Below there are links to the materiality of knowledge. Bergson’s thoughts on microbes seeing across the universe. About the things the times require us to do or not. The negotiations of such. How in the public hides the personal out in the open when things go fast. When things go to fast maybe we can’t feel them. We talked a little of today’s times. What the US looks like from Germany. What Germany looks like from Tokyo. The time to stop being cynical. How old children need to get guns given to them. If the systems around us hide in the flattened space of saying things like they are outdated. How to make transparent the space in which we live all our different stories. About interruptions and hiding in the flow. The thread of the world. These links and little readings came up or came after. You make the connections. (1) WALKING CLIP: from Synecdoche, New York (2) Roman Singer, “chairs” (Trailer, link 1)  (Trailer, link 2) (3) AMAZON NAZI  (Article, independent.co.uk) (Article, dailymail.co.uk) (4) The Pink Cricket (Article, nytimes.com) (Link, crickett.com) (Article, slate.com) (5) Lana Wachowski, the materially of knowledge (5) James Benning: 10 Skies ; 13 lakes ; 20 cigarettes ; RR (6) Zabriskie Point (6) Rimini Protokoll: REMOTE X (7) Alan Rickman (8) Étienne-Jules Marey: Main, Ouverture et Fermeture. (9) TIME to stop being cynical? Difference between sarcasm, humor and being cynical. (10) Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break (Vimeo: Double Tide) (Youtube: Lunch Break) (Link, e-flux) (Article link) (11) Bergson and Einstein – Microbes seeing space time (PDF: Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment that Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations) (PDF: Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, and Henri Piéron: Remarks Concerning Relativity Theory) (12) Bombs and the Rapidtronic (Youtube: How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb) (Youtube: Slow Motion Atomic Bomb) (13) 3 SLOW FILMS: “To be oriented in the relevant sense is not just to be here or there, in front of, behind, or to the right or left of something, but to be guided by ‘the thread of the world.’” Carman, Taylor, Merleau-Ponty (PDF: The Vestibular in Film: Orientation and Balance in Gus Van Sant’s Cinema of Walking)

Week 2: REALOMETERSLed by Eric Ellingsen Nikolai Maximenko: map showing the five gyres of the ocean How do translations work? What are you carrying. To carry something across. The roots of translation are what? What eyes look like. How do we see the things (systems) that watch, seeing what’s inside of the eye while looking out. So looking in. Your street views spied on me. Some eyes are not dotted. To see your own perceptual bubble look straight ahead, put your arms to your side, see the place your hands disappear. Your peripheral views are lines of sight. One line is a poem. Rotate your poem by rotating your arms. Your cone is a bubble. Your bubble is more an ellipsoid really. What are the realometers which we use to gauge the world outside our bubbles? The instruments by which we perceive what is real. Are we. The things by which we touch the world. Like Olafur Eliasson says about hinges connecting art to the world through touch. To have touch. Like how Ray Bradbury says about touching over and over in Fahrenheit 451, for example: The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. For example: The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. In Reader’s Block, Walter Abish says make An act which would obliterate the conditions of the options. Let’s wonder what this means. Let’s wonder why we float shit everywhere like ocean gyres. What is the etymology of fucked? Let’s wonder about the rights of things. About precision. Let the glissando effect us. Let’s be the Vibrant Matters we think. Let’s wonder about pink crickets (we will do this the week after I think). Let’s try reading the shortest poem by Kurt Schwitters: W. Let’s wonder about sociolinguists who study the R. (1) REALOMETERS: “realometer.” Thoreau’s realometer would allow an inquiring person to measure the reality of his perceptions, to push past the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … to a hard bottom.” — from Walden (2) STREET VIEWS (Article, nytimes.com) (3) SOUND ILLUSIONS: (Youtube: Sound Illusion) (Youtube: The McGurk Effect, BBC) (4) CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE : Piaget on this (5) FLOATERS in your eyes while looking at the CONTRAIL out there (6) + a lawsuit over Woody Allen’s use of William Faulkner’s famous quote: ‘The past is never dead. The past is not even past.’ (Article link, cnn.com) (7) ALL THE BIBLE I REMEMBER, OF EMMA KAY and: (Article link, Frieze.com) (Image, boxc.net) (8) FASTING: (People named after places: Indiana Jones x32) (9) SONGLINES : documentary on aboriginal songs used in mapping and moving geographies: (Link: dl.nfsa.gov.au) (quick intro to the documentary; then full documentary) (10) SOUND POETRY, elementalism, and breaking things into small parts (11) HEARING THINGS and PHANTOM WORDS: (Youtube: Misheard Song Lyrics) (Website: Diana Deutsch) (Vimeo: HEARING THINGS) (12) AGAINST EXPRESSION (PDF) (13) EVERYTHING EXHAUSTING; Perec and : (great great blog by the way) (Lili Huang: An Exhausting Attempt of Reviewing Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris) (14) FLYING BACKWARDS (15) FISH MADE OF GARBAGE (16) TURNING HEAD AROUND / seeing is past us (according to Dante) — READING examples from: Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 66-68, on now memory Eileen Myles, “The Universe in my Backyard”, from The Importance of Being Iceland Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, p.74-77, on translation and what one word can mean Jackson McLow, Representative Works, “Jail Break” Juliana Spahr, this connection of everything with lungs, intro Diana Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, “etymology of FUCK” Cecilia Vicuna, Spit Temple, intro and p.278 Craig Dworkin, Against Expression Week 2: REALOMETERSLed by Eric Ellingsen Nikolai Maximenko: map showing the five gyres of the ocean How do translations work? What are you carrying. To carry something across. The roots of translation are what? What eyes look like. How do we see the things (systems) that watch, seeing what’s inside of the eye while looking out. So looking in. Your street views spied on me. Some eyes are not dotted. To see your own perceptual bubble look straight ahead, put your arms to your side, see the place your hands disappear. Your peripheral views are lines of sight. One line is a poem. Rotate your poem by rotating your arms. Your cone is a bubble. Your bubble is more an ellipsoid really. What are the realometers which we use to gauge the world outside our bubbles? The instruments by which we perceive what is real. Are we. The things by which we touch the world. Like Olafur Eliasson says about hinges connecting art to the world through touch. To have touch. Like how Ray Bradbury says about touching over and over in Fahrenheit 451, for example: The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. For example: The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. In Reader’s Block, Walter Abish says make An act which would obliterate the conditions of the options. Let’s wonder what this means. Let’s wonder why we float shit everywhere like ocean gyres. What is the etymology of fucked? Let’s wonder about the rights of things. About precision. Let the glissando effect us. Let’s be the Vibrant Matters we think. Let’s wonder about pink crickets (we will do this the week after I think). Let’s try reading the shortest poem by Kurt Schwitters: W. Let’s wonder about sociolinguists who study the R. (1) REALOMETERS: “realometer.” Thoreau’s realometer would allow an inquiring person to measure the reality of his perceptions, to push past the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … to a hard bottom.” — from Walden (2) STREET VIEWS (Article, nytimes.com) (3) SOUND ILLUSIONS: (Youtube: Sound Illusion) (Youtube: The McGurk Effect, BBC) (4) CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE : Piaget on this (5) FLOATERS in your eyes while looking at the CONTRAIL out there (6) + a lawsuit over Woody Allen’s use of William Faulkner’s famous quote: ‘The past is never dead. The past is not even past.’ (Article link, cnn.com) (7) ALL THE BIBLE I REMEMBER, OF EMMA KAY and: (Article link, Frieze.com) (Image, boxc.net) (8) FASTING: (People named after places: Indiana Jones x32) (9) SONGLINES : documentary on aboriginal songs used in mapping and moving geographies: (Link: dl.nfsa.gov.au) (quick intro to the documentary; then full documentary) (10) SOUND POETRY, elementalism, and breaking things into small parts (11) HEARING THINGS and PHANTOM WORDS: (Youtube: Misheard Song Lyrics) (Website: Diana Deutsch) (Vimeo: HEARING THINGS) (12) AGAINST EXPRESSION (PDF) (13) EVERYTHING EXHAUSTING; Perec and : (great great blog by the way) (Lili Huang: An Exhausting Attempt of Reviewing Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris) (14) FLYING BACKWARDS (15) FISH MADE OF GARBAGE (16) TURNING HEAD AROUND / seeing is past us (according to Dante) — READING examples from: Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 66-68, on now memory Eileen Myles, “The Universe in my Backyard”, from The Importance of Being Iceland Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, p.74-77, on translation and what one word can mean Jackson McLow, Representative Works, “Jail Break” Juliana Spahr, this connection of everything with lungs, intro Diana Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, “etymology of FUCK” Cecilia Vicuna, Spit Temple, intro and p.278 Craig Dworkin, Against Expression

Syllabus GrowingStarting from what you can’t stop thinking about. Choreographed by Eric Ellingsen Herald Gatty, diagram from Finding your way without map or compass; sketch from Darwin’s 1837 notebooks. This is the syllabus of the class. (1) Ask one or two different participants each week to show things that really matter to them. Pick things that can be watched, read, and listened to together. Try to put the things into the space so they can be experienced together in some way. (2) Ask everyone in the class to start building associations between things. (3) Take notes on the associations. (4) Generate conversations in the associations while talking about not only what is shown but why the associations seem relevant. (5) During each class ask, what are we really talking about here? How does what we are talking about touch the world, connect to our work, why we feel we are here, what we are trying to learn and do? We start each class from the things we cannot stop thinking about. From ignorant schoolmasters. By not starting with a prefixed syllabus but rather a way of syllabusing. From co-produced knowledge. Reach space is the zone in which a tide grows and recedes. The robust ecology of things that overlap. Living systems like like the messy edges of overlapping things. The idea of overlaps as a class space. To choreograph as a form of teaching. A learning space. To grow a form from content which resonates starting from the participants. To believe content is how things are linked and felt, not merely the things themselves. The things are also important. To know that knowledge is constructed by doing and then doing and then doing again. To build the tool of linking like and unlike things. Together over and over by linking like and unlike things together over and over. To rhythm by rhythming. Of seemingly disparate threads. To structure a control of letting go. One of the ideas is to construct a critical confidence that connections can be made in the spontaneous listening in the room. That all listening also lists, sways, swerves. One of the ideas is to translate ideas and being critical into a tool for a practice. One of the ideas is to start experimenting with on-line formats for courses. (Not just to record lectures and listen to people talking somewhere else which say join.) One of the ideas is that we can experience something and reflect on the experience at the same time. One of the ideas is to generate an awareness of the systems which inform and condition and constrain the things seen. One of the ideas is that the ideas can change. Each of the weeks is followed by suggestions to watch, read, listen. These are the weeks that we are growing. These suggestions are here merely to provide a collection of starting stones around which anyone can construct their own classes from the energy and interests and particular ecologies of the people sitting in a room different than the room we are now in. These links and little readings came up during or came after. You make the connections. Readings: Russell Crotty: The Universe from My Backyard Juliana Spahr: This Connection of Everyone With Lungs We started the first week seing Blindsight. This was from: Youtube: Ramachandran on blind-sight Youtube: The Boy Who Sees without Eyes Link: Blindsight the movie PDF: Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster   Syllabus GrowingStarting from what you can’t stop thinking about. Choreographed by Eric Ellingsen Herald Gatty, diagram from Finding your way without map or compass; sketch from Darwin’s 1837 notebooks. This is the syllabus of the class. (1) Ask one or two different participants each week to show things that really matter to them. Pick things that can be watched, read, and listened to together. Try to put the things into the space so they can be experienced together in some way. (2) Ask everyone in the class to start building associations between things. (3) Take notes on the associations. (4) Generate conversations in the associations while talking about not only what is shown but why the associations seem relevant. (5) During each class ask, what are we really talking about here? How does what we are talking about touch the world, connect to our work, why we feel we are here, what we are trying to learn and do? We start each class from the things we cannot stop thinking about. From ignorant schoolmasters. By not starting with a prefixed syllabus but rather a way of syllabusing. From co-produced knowledge. Reach space is the zone in which a tide grows and recedes. The robust ecology of things that overlap. Living systems like like the messy edges of overlapping things. The idea of overlaps as a class space. To choreograph as a form of teaching. A learning space. To grow a form from content which resonates starting from the participants. To believe content is how things are linked and felt, not merely the things themselves. The things are also important. To know that knowledge is constructed by doing and then doing and then doing again. To build the tool of linking like and unlike things. Together over and over by linking like and unlike things together over and over. To rhythm by rhythming. Of seemingly disparate threads. To structure a control of letting go. One of the ideas is to construct a critical confidence that connections can be made in the spontaneous listening in the room. That all listening also lists, sways, swerves. One of the ideas is to translate ideas and being critical into a tool for a practice. One of the ideas is to start experimenting with on-line formats for courses. (Not just to record lectures and listen to people talking somewhere else which say join.) One of the ideas is that we can experience something and reflect on the experience at the same time. One of the ideas is to generate an awareness of the systems which inform and condition and constrain the things seen. One of the ideas is that the ideas can change. Each of the weeks is followed by suggestions to watch, read, listen. These are the weeks that we are growing. These suggestions are here merely to provide a collection of starting stones around which anyone can construct their own classes from the energy and interests and particular ecologies of the people sitting in a room different than the room we are now in. These links and little readings came up during or came after. You make the connections. Readings: Russell Crotty: The Universe from My Backyard Juliana Spahr: This Connection of Everyone With Lungs We started the first week seing Blindsight. This was from: Youtube: Ramachandran on blind-sight Youtube: The Boy Who Sees without Eyes Link: Blindsight the movie PDF: Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster