Here are abstracts for the seminar: The Word becoming Flesh in Copenhagen (see programme below).
Carsten Friberg
The Word becoming Flesh – the Flesh being Word.
The word becoming flesh has a theological implication as well as a philosophical. One could with Hegel say, that the incarnation of God is the mythical explanation of the necessity of spirit being »out of itself« in order to »come to itself« – that self-understanding is only possible through confrontation with the products of the self. The words are the imperfect product of reason by which we act on the distance (Blumenberg). The word is the expression of the spirit acting on the distance, an imperfect attempt to articulate the knowledge already present in our actions and productions. In order to grasp what is immediate and present for us it seems necessary to keep it at a distance, place it somewhere – cf. under-stand, ver-stehen, in order for it to be present and immediate for us again. In this movement back and forth, there is a tendency to stop at the distance – to believe in the pure spirit and the word being independent from the matter. However, the outcome of this, the mechanical and dualistisc world-interpretations are in conflict with our practice, overrated in contemporary thinking, and the posthuman consequences definitely problematic. Our relation to matter and flesh is intimate and the word becoming flesh is more than the instrumental interest in protesis, techonlogical fictions, and designed bodies. It is a matter of being a sensible object among objects, a matter of recognizing the intimacy of spirit and flesh. The sensible and intimate approach is largely what aesthetics concerned with the sensuous can offer.
Anette Højlund
Why is Drawing and How?
Starting from Henri Michaux´s experiments with mescalin, drawing and text, the presentation will discuss genesis, subject and language. Michaux´s descriptions and experiments will be looked upon from a viewpoint focusing on Giorgio Agamben´s ideas about potentiality and infans. Through that drawings why and how is searched for.
Lars Ylander
The flesh becoming written word: Ludwig Klages’ theory of graphology and the practical investigation of personal character
In his graphological works, German philosopher and father of the ”Charakterkunde” Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) claims that a person’s handwriting can be seen as expressing the individuality of his or her character based on specific modes of experience. Thus, Klages’ graphology is basically an existential phenomenology. On a practical level it can serve as a tool for personal analysis and psychological therapy (in opposition to the emerging psycho-analysis in his time for which Klages had very little admiration).
The theory behind his graphology is a speculative philosophy of life, where striving forces of body/soul and spirit are at work. On a personal level they are what may result in written letters and words of certain forms that can be analyzed and interpreted. Ultimately, therapeutical attention is aimed at disarming the person’s spirit so as to restore the benevolant polar connection between body and soul. This is necessary in order to reinstall an authentic mode of life-embracing experience, which is ecstatic in nature.
Living, as we supposedly do, in an experience society, my intention is to go back to a radical and original metaphysics of experience like Klages’ and look for utilizable – and almost forgotten? –ideas.
Victoria Sjøstedt
The programmatic approach in planning and architecture
Troels Degn Johansson
Programmatic Failure: On Failure as a Performative Tactics in Design Practice and in Cultural Production in General
Failure, mistakes, mistakes, mishaps, errors, etc. are something that the modern designer usually seeks to avoid and eliminate in his/her practice. In a sense, Modernity as a “program” is fundamentally about the systematic elimination of mistakes from the systems of production, organisation, communication, etc. However, whereas designers obviously have good reason to eliminate mistakes in respect of developing functional products that may perform well on markets, failure may also lead designers (and consumers) to think differently about designed objects and indeed the role of design and consumption in contemporary societies. This function could be seen as a creative and indeed critical address of failure. This presentation will present the preliminary results of a research project on failure in design and art that has been undertaken at Denmark’s Design School in association with the art collective Superflex’ temporary affiliation as artists-in-residence during 2006-07. This project sought to develop an approach to design practice that may be captured with the term “programmatic failure”. Here, the designer should “confess” own failure of his/her own choice before a community of practising designers and to “oblige” him-/herself to possible failure in the future of own his/her own practice. This ethos should aim at using possible failure as a creative element in the design process rather than something that could haunt a project and lead to the abandonment of otherwise important resources, methods, etc. In my paper, the project will be presented in the context of a broader analysis of failure as a theme in the context of Modernity and in contemporary culture. The thesis is that whereas historical Modernity may be seen as an attempt to eliminate of sources of possible failure, failure has emerged as a theme that seems to characterize what I take for a performative tactics in cultural productions in general. This analysis identifies and compares parallel tendencies within such disparate fields as stand-up comedy, cinema, and fine art.
Kristine Samson
Matters on the Move: Performative geographies and non-representational tendencies in spatial plannning
Hlynur Helgason
The Narrativization of Refurbishment as a Model for a Futuristic Design Ethics
In view of the contemporary situation in global economics it is adamant that a shift from an economy of waste and renewal has to be supplanted by an economy of recycling and refurbishment. While the general strain of capitalist economy has moved in an ever-increasing pace towards more and more wasteful practice, we can discern a growing, if unconscious, strain of examples in art and popular culture that point the way towards a project for a future based on re-use, and especially refurbishment. The examples of those are seldom thought out or in any way conscious, but rather provide us with a visual model for a futuristic project where the old and archaic is incorporated into the new, instead of being thrown away and replaced. This paper examines examples of this trend in cinematic tradition as well as attempting to ground these in philosophical discourse respinsive to the post-modern condition.
Ulla Strange-Hansen
Den æstetiske repræsentation af Holocaust og det kollektive, tyske skyldtrauma i det urbane rum
Flemming Tvede Hansen
Capturing Transient Phenomena. Experimental Use of Digital Media within the Field of Ceramic.
Capturing and shaping using transient phenomena inspired by nature such as wind, gravity, and liquids in the creative process of shaping 3d physical form is often difficult. The aim of this study is to explore Dynamics in 3d digital software packages through practical experiments as a tool to support the ceramic artist working with the phenomena in question. Dynamics cover a range of tools in 3d digital graphic software to simulate effects related to reality such as wind, gravity, liquids etc. Instead of capturing transient phenomena from the physical world, Dynamics allows you to simulate the transient phenomena in question, making it possible to work with physical representations of these. Techniques for transforming 3d digital form into 3d physical form are well developed and still in a rapid progress. This means by now that the potentials in 3d digital software packages can be used in an interaction with conventional methods within the field of ceramics.
The experiments in this study shows a potential in “Dynamics” as a tool for 3d physical form to capture, while shaping the phenomena in question. The result of the experiments also shows a dynamic interaction between the use of conventional methods with materials such as clay and the form raised in the 3d digital graphic, which clarifies and accentuates the different potentials within the two media. By that an expression in ceramics is given, which could not have been fulfilled without the use of digital media.
This study reflects an on going practice based Ph.D. project about experimental use of digital media within the field of ceramic.
Steen Christiansen
Soft Machines and the Design of Perception
We humans have become soft machines in the way we extend our bodies and abilities into technological devices. I have a hard time remembering phone numbers since getting a cell phone; it remembers them for me. Likewise, much of my academic work is externalized through blogging it. This external, (im)material form of my thought is my blog, which is not part of me. My mind is no longer confined to my body, my though process becomes virtual, so is it still me? Gray Kochar-Lindgren writes in TechnoLogics that we, as free ideal beings, are not captured against our will to be machine-assemblages but that today daily life consists of being cyborg.
But there is more to this situation than the discussion of a cyborg existence. More important is the fact that the design of technology determines to a large extent how we as humans can use it. As David Porush argues in his book The Soft Machine, technology designates instructions for the production of the signified. In other words, we need to pay close attention to how technology is designed because with it comes also a mode of perception, a way of making sense of the world. We can paraphrase Andrew Feenberg, and say that the design of technology is a site of struggle.
My paper proposes to examine this site of struggle by looking at the explosion of mobile devices such as cell phones and iPods which distinctly break down traditional notions of space as divided between public and private. The design of these devices is geared to make them ubiquitous and even constitutive of personal identity.
Thure Munkholm
Jean-Luc Godard: Words becoming image
Erik Steinskog
How Michael Jackson Became Posthuman: Re-designing “the body” / Questioning “the human”
There can be no doubt that today’s pop-stars are designed. The sound of their music is one thing, but images and videos have made their looks equally important. Designing these images, the body becomes crucial, although body-modifications have been part of the pop-music industry at least since Fanny Brice’s nose-job in 1923, and is thus not as new as one might expect. Redesigning the body also implicitly questions “the human.” In this paper I want to discuss different borders of “the human” related to the case of Michael Jackson; from the Jackson Five’s 1974-hit “Dancing Machines” to the moonwalk; from the werewolf and vampire of “Thriller” to the black panther of “Black and White”; from the E.T-connection (“Michael Jackson is E.T.!” [Elizabeth Taylor]) to Jeff Koons’s sculpture “Michael Jackson and Bubbles”; from the Diana-Ross-look-alike version by way of Grace Jones to the, arguably, post-human post-gender look of more recent years. In this questioning of “the human” and the alteration of the human body, Jackson might be seen as a “self-made (post-)(hu-)man” thus opening up issues of redesigning “the body” and of becoming “flesh” in a new way.
Per Bäckström
Tight Pants. Iggy Pop and the In-/Anti-Aesthetics of Voluptuous Flesh
The word becoming flesh, nowhere is it more true than for rock’n’roll. I will therefore look at the “fleshiness” of rock’n’roll with the help of the example Iggy Pop, since his stage performance very early was developed into the same extremes as his lyrics. My prime goal is to investigate the relation between an aesthetics of the ugly (flesh), and how it is developed by Iggy Pop, who, if one, is the inventor of the anti-aesthetics in rock’n’roll and especially the punk movements influenced by him – finally decentring beauty as cultures highest value 4 real. This decentring was also put forward by the different avant-gardes in the 20th century, of which rock’n’roll in some peculiar way has taken part since the 1960s – through some artists immanent singularity. The main aesthetic expression, or genre, of rock’n’roll is performance, where the criteria for a successful act always has been presence and sincerity. What interests me is how an artist like Iggy Pop has inverted the value of beauty, but still is acknowledged for his presence and authenticity on stage. Even today when the flourishing reunions of old codger bands meet but contempt, the reformation of Iggy & the Stooges is seen as a sincere and authentic event, in line with the rules of “true” rock’n’roll. From the title of my paper one can also deduce that I will try to use Alain Badiou’s notion of inaesthetics, if possible, to further elaborate on the anti-aesthetics of Iggy & the Stooges and the role of this aesthetic in late modernity – maybe as an education of teenagers?
Tau Lenskjold
Meet the Bodyhammers – Tactics of survival: From the iron freak to the modern protester
Claus Krogholm
Carnography: The Writing on the Flesh
In David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises the life-stories of the Russian mafiosi is written on their bodies with tattoos. Words and signs literally come to incarnate identity. It is significant that knives are the only weapons used in the film. In the notorious fight-scene in the Turkish bath, Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) is attacked by two men with knives: ”It’s almost like they’re using their knives to re-tattoo Nikolai and change his identity by changing the marks on his skin.” (David Cronenberg). Identity, it seems, is only skin-deep.
This paper will discuss the relation between word, writing and flesh in the films of David Cronenberg in general and in Eastern Promises in particular. In his writings on the mimetic (“On the Mimetic Faculty”, “Doctrine of the Similar”), Walter Benjamin noticed how the magical similarity between for example the stellar constellation and the moment of birth – as described by astrology – has decayed through the centuries. The mimetic faculty has not disappeared altogether, according to Benjamin, but has transformed into a ‘non-sensuous similarity’. In Eastern Promises (and in Cronenberg in general) we see how there is at once a non-sensuous similarity between tattoos and identity – writing and flesh – and a re-enchantment of the signs on/of the body.
Jon Rostgaard Boiesen
Køn og cumshots – om pornoens køn
Med internettet har pornoen fået en udbredelse, der langt overgår 1970′ernes såkaldte porn chic. Desværre er meget af debatten om pornoen blevet stående i ufrugtbar for-og-imod-diskussion, sådan som den bl.a. er kommet til udtryk i debatten mellem på den ene side Andrea Dworkin og Cathrine MacKinnon og Ronald Dworkin på den anden.
Jeg vil i mit paper med udgangspunkt i Linda Williams’ klassiker indenfor feltet, Hard core fra 1989, samt feministiske og postfeministiske positioner som Luce Irigaray og Judith Butler søge at karakterisere pornoens kønskonstruktioner samt diskutere hvorvidt og i hvilket omfang pornoen er mandschauvinistisk.
