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)

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

Well, we got one done! Here, finally, is the transcript for one of this year’s past AIC lunchtime discussions. This was an especially engaging event on the question “What is Criticality?” held last semester on 07 December 2006. Ann Holder, Director of the Critical and Visual Studies Program and Associate Professor of History in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, and Scott Lundberg, principle of the design firm [Make] and faculty in the Department of Industrial Design at Pratt, shared some prepared remarks. Here are two excerpts:

Scott Lundberg: Form follows function, but which function are you talking about? Are you talking about how the buffet will hold the snacks? Are you talking about its ability to fly off the shelf and create money for the client? Are you talking about how well it recycles itself? Are you talking about the function of how much value it can bring a person who receives it as a gift? You know each and everything around us is filled with so many functions so a lot of time these little phrases like “form follows function” are really more hurtful than helpful.

Ann Holder: There is this notion in the educational establishment that critical thinking is this great thing. Everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon of critical thinking, but I find students aren’t really in touch with what that is. Why would we assume they have a propensity to be critical anyways? And would the results really be as rosy and bright as everyone seems to think — like creating better market competition, keeping the US ahead in the thought game? So I have a lot of questions about critical thinking.

Read the entire conversation here, saved as a pdf.

-M. Eng

I’m pleased to introduce Charlotte Noruzi as the Exhibition Designer for the AIC’s upcoming exhibition Perspicuous. Charlotte will be joining Exhibition Curator Kimberly Lamm and Matt Howard, the Research Assistant in Academic Initiatives in organizing the exhibition. She will be bringing her impressive experience to bear on the design of the exhibition space and the exhibition’s catalogue.

Charlotte is a professor of graphic design and illustration in the Communications Department at Pratt Institute. She has participated in portfolio reviews at Pratt Institute and at Parsons School of Design and has also judged the Society of Illustrator’s student illustration show and the RX Club medical advertising competition.

Charlotte is a member of a creative partnership called Studio1482, and design director of “Go Do It”, the Studio’s semi-annual magazine. Additionally, she has art directed at some of New York’s premiere agencies, including Bates Worldwide, Publicis Groupe, and Grey. At Chermayeff and Geismar, Charlotte was able to work in all aspects of graphic design, from corporate identity and packaging to exhibition design and signage. Independently, she created the exhibit graphics for the Police Museum’s 9/11 anniversary tribute called, “Stronger than Ever”. Charlotte’s illustrations can be seen on book jackets and in advertising and her self-promotion campaigns are featured in The Art of Promotion, published by Rockport.

Charlotte’s interests are wide and varied and include art, culture, history, and mythology, language and literature. The combination of these led her to create several children’s books and currently, she is going back to her fashion roots, experimenting with sewing and weaving.

-M. Eng

AIC Perspicuous Representations Lunchtime Discussion Series

What: “What is Space?”

Where: Alumni Reading Room

When: Mon., March 19, 12:30-1:45

Please join us for the next AIC lunchtime discussion in the Perspicuous Representations series. We will be dedicating our discussion to the question “What is Space?” We are pleased to have faculty presentations by:

Emily Beall, Dept. of English and Humanities

Suzanne Verderber, Dept. of English and Humanities/Program in Critical and Visual Studies

Prof. Beall will be speaking on the relation between poetry and space, and Prof. Verderber will offer a short presentation on Baroque conceptions of space.

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

What is Space? What is the history of the concept of space? When did space become a concept ‘proper to’ certain disciplinary and artistic formations? Is there a phenomenology of space? That is to say, is space something experienced? Or does space make experience possible? How is space conceived differently according to different artistic practices? Is space in painting the same as space in architecture? Is space in poetry the same as space in sculpture? What is the relation between ‘digital space,’ so called, and ‘real space’ (so called)?

Emily Beall is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington.Currently on leave, she teaches freshmen English at Pratt. Her primary research interests include 20th century experimental poetries, contemporary poetics, and the relationship between modern dance and contemporary poetry.

Suzanne Verderber has taught courses in medieval,Renaissance, and baroque culture, as well as in critical theory, literature and writing. She has published on French medieval author Marie de France, French essayist Michel de Montaigne, and is currently working on a book entitled Power, Repression, and the Emergence of the Individual in the Middle Ages. She has also recently translated two books, Jean-Michel Rabaté’s The Ethics of the Lie, and Charles Enderlin’s, The Lost Years: Radical Islam, Intifada, and Wars in the Middle East, 2001-2006.

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: communication; criticality; practice, and; interdisciplinarity. The AIC is currently in the process of organizing an Institute-wide exhibition based on this program of questioning, titled Perspicuous, to take place Fall 2007.

On the weekend of the 27th of January, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, one of the foremost figures in continental philosophy, died from respiratory failure at the hospital Saint-Louis in Paris. His work was well-known by those working in the continental tradition in the United States.

Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg at the time of his death, he was the co-author with the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy on a number of important studies, including The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (1973), The Literary Absolute (1978), on German Romanticism, and Le Myth nazi (1991). But he is distinguished by his own work on Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Celan, producing foundational readings of their individual thought and their relation to one another. The thesis he wrote for his doctoral d’etat, for example, which was translated into English as Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (1988), was one of the first attempts to respond to the “Heidegger controversy” then emerging in France. His reading is marked, however, by a refusal to either offer an apology for the relation between Heidegger’s thought and his participation in National Socialism or dismiss it outright.

It could be said all of Lacoue-Labarthe’s work engages in some way with the problem of mimēsis, which he linked to the problem not of imitation, as it has been commonly translated in the history of western thought, but “presentation” (Darstellung). His encounter with Heidegger’s text, and the role of what he characterized as the mythic in his thought, led him to formulate the notion of “onto-typology.” Speculative thought, whose origin he traced to the space between German Idealism and German Romanticism, grounds itself, Lacoue argued, in the attempt to capture Being in representation (an act he called “figuration”) and then lose itself in this representation. Speculative thought is what becomes captured, so to speak, in its attempt to capture the event of Being; its speculation involves a fundamental relation to making a spectacle of Being, but especially that aspect of Being that allows no mastery, namely, death.

I never had the opportunity to come to know Lacoue, but his thought has been influential–even formative–for my work in philosophy. My dissertation on Heidegger, Blanchot, and Deleuze was very much framed in large part by his thematization of the figure and the debate he carried on with Nancy on the “necessity of the scene.” I devote an “excursus” to this debate in the text of my dissertation, in fact. It is remarkable, nonetheless, how close one can become to someone through their writing. His death struck me with a profound sadness.

But I felt proximate to his thought in another way, since he was both friend and mentor to my own mentor, Christopher Fynsk, Director of the centre for Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Fynsk offers a moving commemoration to Lacoue on the Centre’s blog, found here.

In addition to obituarties found in Libération and Le Monde, one may find a note Nancy wrote to Lacoue (literally written “a toi”) published in the latter as well. Sadly, there was very little mention of Lacoue’s passing in Germany, and absolutely none, save notices on blogs, in the U.S. –M. Eng

I am pleased to introduce Kimberly Lamm as the Exhibition Curator for the AIC’s upcoming Institute-wide exhibition Perspicuous. Kimberly is completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington and is an assistant professor of English at Pratt Institute, where she also teaches in the Program in Critical and Visual Studies. Her dissertation examines literary and visual portraiture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture. A former Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, Kimberly has published essays on the poetry of Juliana Spahr, the art of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. –M. Eng

Call for Participation and Submissions:

Perspicuous:
An Institute-wide exhibition of student and faculty/staff-student collaborative work

Dear Pratt Faculty and Staff:

The Academic Initiatives Committee is planning an Institute-wide exhibition of student work, as well as faculty/staff-student collaborations, dedicated to this year’s AIC theme, Perspicuous Representations. The exhibition, entitled Perspicuous, will take place at the beginning of the Fall 2007 semester and feature panel discussions with the participating artists, a catalogue, and a prize to be judged by an outside critic.

A description of the exhibition follows below and can be downloaded here. We would like to hear from you if you would like to participate in the exhibition’s organization, including serving as a member of the exhibition jury, or as an exhibiting artist.

Have you seen or produced work that could be part of this exhibition? Do you know students who create work that represents, in compelling ways, their engagement with concepts such as “space,” “visuality,” “narrative,” and “perception”? Do you know students who can — and wish to — reflect on the ideas at work in their projects in clear and interesting ways? Please send them our way.

We plan to begin considering work 01 February 2007.

Michael Eng, Chair
Academic Initiatives Committee

Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Department of Social Science
& Cultural Studies
meng@pratt.edu

Kimberly Lamm
AIC Exhibition Curator

Assistant Professor of English
Department of English
& Humanities
klamm@pratt.edu

Perspicuous
An Institute-wide exhibition of student and faculty/staff-student collaborative work

A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. —Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ’seeing connexions’.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

This exhibition comes out of the Academic Initiatives Committee program, Perspicuous Representations, which identifies fundamental concepts affecting the Institute, such as: What is Interdisciplinarity? What is Critical Thinking? What is Practice? The AIC’s aim is to present a clear overview, or “perspicuous representation,” of the different forms these questions can take in artistic and intellectual work at Pratt Institute.

Perspicuous presents work from all disciplinary areas of the Institute that reflect on the forms concepts can take. Space, visuality, narrative, and perception are possible concepts artists participating in the show will be engaging. Displayed work will not ‘make statements’ but pose ideas, and then develop and complicate them so that the work will relate to contexts beyond the boundaries of the work itself.

The exhibition will present approximately 15-20 works. It will be complemented by panel discussions featuring the participating artists and faculty. The exhibition organizers hope to offer a prize, juried by a critic outside the Institute.

Commentary:

The Cosmic Landscape: String theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design
(Lecture Given at the Hayden Planetarium, Museum of Natural History)
Leonard Susskind – Stanford University
Monday, December 11, 2006 7:30P.M.

Blurb (from the Museum of Natural History):

The father of string theory reinvents our concept of the known universe and man’s unique place within it stating that an “elegant-theory” no longer suits our understanding of the Universe, and that our narrow 20^th-century view of a unique universe will have to give way to the much broader concept of a gigantic cosmic landscape—a megaverse, pregnant with new possibilities.

Review:

Leonard Susskind gave a talk geared toward the scientific community and generally stuck within an approach and a language that respected disciplinary boundaries. His discussion of this new concept of an inelegant megaverse, however, bore fingerprints of both complex systems and classic topics of philosophy. Interestingly, where theoretical physics has in the recent past influenced philosophers such as Deleuze, here particle physicists are being influenced by the ideas that have been popularized by Stephen Wolfram and Ray Kurtzweill’s recapitulation of the big bang in his The Age of Spiritual Machines. Susskind seemed to run with Wolfram’s notion that enormous ranges of delicate and complex conditions observed in nature here on earth are attributable to basic combinatorial logics that when run repeatedly give rise to enormous complexity. Susskind, from what I observed, seemed to take this idea wholesale and apply it to particle physics and extrapolate an entirely new understanding of our universe. His presentation literally contained a slide comparing atomic components to DNA. Susskind name dropped Darwin in the service of dispelling lines of thinking that would assume that incredibly complex and balanced systems are the result of design rather than coincidence within a long string of chance combination.

While there was a lot of time spent on supporting details, this theory supposes that our Universe is but one “successful” condition in a field of vast conditions where, for instance, the universal constant may not hold electrons in orbit around atomic nuclei. Imagine regions in the fabric to which our own Universe belongs that do nothing but reduce atomic organizations into a diffuse and unorganized mist of sub-atomic particles. Perhaps there are still others that have different atomic organizations that give rise to more or different types of complexity than our own.

Now, it seems, mathematicians and computer scientists are posing the questions. Susskind indicated that experimental physicists were finding evidence to support the position and pointed to artificial black holes produced in super colliders at Brookhaven. It will be interesting to see what level of acceptance his theory receives in the field of Physics, especially now that the flow of ideation is no longer coming from inside .

Leonard Susskind is on a lecture circuit to support the release of a paperback edition of his book, The Cosmic Landscape

It’s my honor as AIC chair to announce Matt Howard as the Research Assistant in Academic Initiatives. Matt is a fourth-year student in architecture at Pratt and has served previously as the teaching assistant for Pratt’s International Summer Seminar in Architecture and Urban Design.

Matt currently interns at Hanrahan Meyers Architects and was recently invited to attend the Wolfram Science organization’s New Kind of Science Summer School. He has had his work published in journals within the school of architecture and has had work submitted for publication in 30 60 90 Magazine. His work has also been exhibited in shows put on by Pratt in Brooklyn and in Beijing.

Matt’s work for the AIC will be focused on researching the relationship between technology and practice. An area he has been exploring for some time, Matt is interested in asking about how new technological methods and tools influence our understanding of practice. With the prevalence now of digital imaging in design, for example, is our understanding of what counts as ‘architectural practice’ changed?

Matt’s strength as a researcher is his ability to identify current trends in practice and present them with a critical eye. An example of this may be found in his essay, “The Dream Life of Home Electronics,” which is forthcoming in tarp, a journal of the Pratt School of Architecture. Here’s an excerpt:

As we witness the evolution of spatial imagination and construction fueled by digital technologies, static geometries, governed by classical mathematics, give way to a logics underpinned by advanced forms of calculus. This kicking away of the Cartesian scaffolding warrants a more thorough understanding of the history of digital production environments, the topologies facilitated by their generative biases, and the new relationship of architecture to site in light of the placement of topographical form in the context of a topography. Technology, as it permeates these areas, both flattens the difference between individual practitioner and industry as well as breaks down differences between disciplines. More importantly, it acts as a bridge between the virtual and the real.

Written with his colleague, Lucas Chung, for a course he is taking this semester named From Form Generation to Form Adaptation taught by Jordi Truco, is an essay “Form Generation and Implementation: A Question of Directionality.” The paper’s abstract reads as follows:

An integral provocation of this seminar is the claim that function follows form. The inversion of this modernist principle is seductive in that it affords a new approach with never seen before formal possibilities and a prodigious and efficient production of the ineffable. The technology, philosophy, and technique of genetic algorithms, however, are late arrivals architecture and come with histories of their application that are sometimes at odds with our practices as architects at least within this seminar. After researching these applications, I’ve identified two among possibly many approaches to the implementation of genetic algorithms. Their difference stems mainly from the direction they pass through computation, that is to say whether the genetic algorithm is used as a search of all possible conditions based on a criteria, or an engine to generate all possible conditions based on a genome (see figure 1).

The interest of the paper is then to investigate the difference between these techniques, and to identify instances both inside and outside of architecture, in hopes that a disambiguation of these applications will deemphasize the polar hierarchies of form and function and interrogate the level of compliance to the principles of evolutionary algorithms.