On June 11th the Centre for Disruptive Media hosted the second seminar in the Disrupting the humanities seminar series. This seminar was entitled ‘The aesthetics of the humanities: towards a poetic knowledge production’, and featured fantastic papers by Erin Manning, Søren Pold, Johanna Drucker and Silvio Lorusso.

Erin Manning (Concordia University) – Against Method

This paper will explore how a radically empirical approach opens up the relationship between making and thinking.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEUZ6PWzJqU?list=PLBETsJUz5E2OpwR7pJ6imCv2HUbsr1l6N]

Søren Pold (Aarhus University) – Ink After Print.­ Literary Interface Criticism + Discussion panel 1

Currently literary media are changing ­ again ­ with the read-write controlled consumption interfaces of e-books, smart phones, tablets and web 2.0 reading-writing platforms. In this short talk, I aim to sketch out how we can apply an interface criticism to these changes in order to find out how the contemporary literary and cultural interfaces are structured and how they can be explored critically and reflexively in art practice.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTk9MR3__RE?list=PLBETsJUz5E2OpwR7pJ6imCv2HUbsr1l6N]

Johanna Drucker (UCLA) – Diagrammatic Form and Performative Materiality

Theories of materiality include attention to the literal, forensic, formal, and distributed–to which categories the “performative” adds another dimension, one that is premised on the instantiated and situated experience of an aesthetic work rather assuming its existence as a self-evident, autonomous object defined by inherent properties. The idea of performativity is also crucial to diagrams–drawings that work, that are generative in their activity because of structural features that spatialize semantic relations and make spatial relations semantic. Because diagrams are exemplary–even paradigmatic–they offer a way to reconceptualize approaches to design and reading/viewing aesthetic artifacts across a broad range of artistic works and practices. This paper proposes that the “diagrammatic” and “performative” concepts offer a way to think aesthetic practice from a theoretical perspective that draws on non-representational and new materialist perspectives that embody crucial principles of humanistic epistemology relevant to the creation of knowledge in the digital environment. Examples from the history of information visualization, poetics, book arts, and digital arts will be used to illustrate these principles.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRgkkF97XCA?list=PLBETsJUz5E2OpwR7pJ6imCv2HUbsr1l6N]

Silvio Lorusso (IUAV) The P—DPA: An Inventory of Speculative Strategies + Discussion

Recently launched, the Post-Digital Publishing Archive (P—DPA) is an online platform to systematically collect, organise and keep trace of art and design experiences at the intersection of publishing and digital technology. Filling a gap in the discussion, which is generally led by the narrative of innovation, P—DPA focuses on projects that investigate the social, cultural and economic dynamics of publishing through a DIY approach, custom tools and counterintuitive employment of popular platforms. Like every archive, P—DPA embodies a specific attitude that is mainly expressed by the criteria employed to select the works and by the multiple relations among them. How can the materiality of such works be properly defined through a categorisation system? What technological, processual and signifying aspects need to be taken into account? By acting as an inventory of speculative strategies, P—DPA aims to become a reference point for designers and artists interested in publishing and indirectly extend its very notion.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r8SovExypw?list=PLBETsJUz5E2OpwR7pJ6imCv2HUbsr1l6N]