Formalism Roundtable

The Academic Initiative Committee of the Academic Senate will be hosting an evening discussion on Monday, April 9, from 6:30 to 8:30 PM in the Alumni Reading Room of the Pratt Library, Brooklyn campus.

The goal of the discussion is to offer faculty members from different disciplines a forum for a collegial exchange on key issues with regard to “Formalism in 2007,” the title of the event. Each participant will present about ten minutes of material on the role of formalism both in their academic work and in their teaching, followed by a general discussion. We are looking for the ways in which formalism can be regarded as a unifying element between the disciplines in a school of art and design and a point of departure for interdisciplinary discussion, in particular with regard o the critical relationship between formalism, technology and humanism.

Presenters:

Jon Beller, Associate Professor of English and Humanities and Critical and Visual Studies, author of The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle

Karl Chu, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture

Michael Silver, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture

Suzanne Verderber, Associate Professor of English and Humanities, Coordinator of Freshman English Program

Moderator:

Jeffrey Hogrefe, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture, English and Humanities, Coordinator of Architecture Writing Program: Language/Making, Research Associate: Academic Initiative Committee

All faculty members, administrators and students are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

About the Program:

The roundtable on Formalism is part of Art, Design, Architecture, Liberal Arts and the Future of Formalism in 2006-2007, a research group founded and coordinated by Professor Jeffrey Hogrefe and inspired in part by faculty interest in exploring issues of interdisciplinary methodology among the areas of art, design, architecture and liberal arts.

-Jeffrey Hogrefe (jeffreyhogrefe_at_earthlink.net)

Technology and Artistic Practice

AIC Perspicuous Representations Lunchtime Discussion Series

What: “Technology and Artistic Practice”

Where: Alumni Reading Room

When: Tuesday, April 03, 12:30-1:45 pm

Please join us for the next AIC lunchtime discussion in the Perspicuous Representations series. We will be dedicating our discussion to how technology is affecting artistic and design practices. We are pleased to have presentations by:

Timothy Mohn, Director, Digital Arts Research Laboratory

Morgan Silver-Greenberg, Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Students, staff, and faculty are all invited. Lunch will be served.

What is the relationship between technology and artistic practice? How does technology influence our understanding of what practice is? Does technology subvert originality even as it makes possible new forms of creativity? Where is the artist in the technological process? Is technology a means to realizing an artistic end, or is it an end in itself?

Timothy Mohn (b. 1969) is an artist and computer scientist. He is the Founding Director of the Digital Arts Research Laboratory at Pratt Institute in New York City. He graduated from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, as a Tisch School of the Arts Fellow where he studied with Red Burns. His current research is focused on the relationships between artist, viewer and artifact and focused on expanding and redefining these systems of interrelation through artifacts, computational aesthetics and kinetic painting. He is also interested in the creative act as digital artists, digital art conservation, curating of digital art, and what it means to be working within these roles at the intersection of art, design, technology, science, and culture.

He has worked collaboratively with Ben Fry and Casey Reas at MIT on Processing and has worked professionally for such organizations as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yurba Buena Center for the Arts, Sony, Intel, Yahoo!, Macromedia, AT&T, and Lucent Technologies. His work has been featured in Wired, Art Forum, New York Times, and Forbes, and has been recognized by the Art Director’s Club New York, ID Magazine, Critique Magazine, Communication Arts, the MUSE awards and the AIGA.

Morgan Silver-Greenberg is an honors student at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He studies complex systems from a broad and interdisciplinary perspective. Concerned with understanding the relationship between structure, system principles, and system dynamics, he explores these issues from multiple disciplines including sociology, linguistics, culture and communications, philosophy, computer science, architecture, and design. Professionally, Morgan has worked as a consultant for a small creative agency in Manhattan that deals with sophisticated urban countercultures.

About the Series:

A “perspicuous representation” is a “clear overview.” Coined by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is a practice of showing how a concept’s meaning takes on different forms according to the context in which that concept is used. Wittgenstein thus defines meaning ‘as use.’

Perspicuous Representations is a series of discussions dedicated to investigating basic concepts in the life of the Institute, concepts that lie at the heart of our practice but are seldom defined. The AIC’s goal is to show how these basic concepts take on different–sometimes antagonistic, yet legitimate–meanings in different disciplinary contexts. The aim is to make visible the life of the concept and the practices in which it is created, crafted, and worked on. Previous concepts treated include: interdisciplinarity; criticality, and; space.

Further information can be found on the AIC blog:
perspicuous.wordpress.com

–
Matt Howard
Research Assistant in Academic Initiatives