[spectre] crisis of imagination

[Florian Schneider]

WEIYTH SEMINAR 2

Crisis of Imagination [lectures, workshop, film screenings]

Friday-Saturday / 12 –13 November 2010 Zagreb Architects Society Ban
Jelacic Square 3/I, Zagreb

Editor: Anselm Franke Concept and direction: Anselm Franke and Florian
Schneider

Organiser: DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and Variables

///////

The time seems to have come to identify the crisis, not to consolidate
things as they gain stability, given that we are surrounded by idlers
living off private incomes who placidly exploit outdated rebellions that
have become innocent, surrounded by people who wish to live without
being dead. (Carl Einstein)

The backdrop to much of the recent debates on the relation between art
and politics is a an erosion of art's utopian horizon, upon which its
power to generate counter-concepts was based. Art's power lay in the
ability to imagine things differently, in the rejection of the given,
and in the subversion and transgression of the boundaries of a
disciplinary modernity and its hegemonic rationality. Under the
parameters of the disciplinary regime, the utopian imagination was
fueled by ideas and practices of transgression, subversion and
unbounding, based on the ideas of an "outside", a "beyond" and
progression. These ideas gave shape to an entire economy of the
imaginary, in which creative imagination and the ideas of an
emancipatory politics were fused.

With the rise of what has been called cognitive capitalism and the
society of control, in which the creative imagination and the modulation
of the imaginary are put to the service as productive force and
resource, the dialectics of affirmation and negation and the parameters
of critique are subjected to tectonic shifts. This effects a crisis in
the economy of the imagination itself, in the very ability to imagine
things differently. Today, the static boundaries against which a
dissident imagination was shaped, are on the move, subjected to
management, calculation and evaluation, giving rise to novel
configurations of power, in which the imaginations power to negotiate
the limits of the possible is itself at stake.

The workshop CRISIS OF IMAGINATION sets out to explore the role of
imagination in both, the discourse of contemporary art as well as
creative industries. The goal is a revaluation of various different
notions of imagination as the power to make an image. Such images cannot
be fixed, since they only have meaning as long as they are in permanent
movement, as sources of energy and intersections of decisive
experiences, characterized by a rupture or a crisis that constitutes the
way how we are making world, rather than seeing the world.

Is imagination the new labor force of cognitive capitalism? What kind of
value is produced in these settings? Is there a subversive potential of
imagination, no matter whether old or new, that would interfere with the
uninterrupted fabrication of reality?

The seminar begins on FRIDAY with an introductory double-lecture by
Florian Schneider and Anselm Franke, introducing theoretical, political
and artistic positions and genealogies that help identifying the
tectonic shifts currently underway in the economy of the imaginary,
drawing on sources as diverse as Carl Einstein, Spinoza, or Michael
Taussig and Bruno Latour.

The second part is conceived as a day-long collaborative workshop with
subscribed participants. It will include film screenings, discussions,
and a process of collective note-taking, the results of which will be
edited and made public as a document. The workshop will be concluded at
7 pm with the screening of the film "Moses and Aaron" (1973) by Daniele
Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.

The workshop is the first in a series of short seminars under the title
Crisis of Imagination that are loosely connected, organized as modules
and will take in several places across Europe.

Program: Friday, 12.11, 7 pm: INTRODUCTORY LECTURES (Anselm Franke and
Florian Schneider), open for public Saturday, 13.11 12–2 pm  & 4-7 pm:
WORKSHOP with subscribed participants 7 pm: FILM SCREENING: "Moses and
Aron (1973), directed by Daniele Huillet i Jean-Marie Straub, open for
public

** Please confirm your participation at the workshop by sending an email
to: delve at delve.hr.

///////

WEIYTH seminars are part of the project Where Everything Is Yet to
Happen, initiated with an international exhibition SpaPort 2009 in Banja
Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and developed through the collaboration of
DeLVe and a team of international curators and artists. Continuation of
the collaboration with a team of co-curators this year takes the form of
seminars series that focus on individual topics opened through the first
exhibition, among which are: non-essentialist models of community,
ethnopolitics, complicity, cooperation, belonging, politics of memory,
culturalization of politics, all seeking to articulate some of the key
issues of post-traumatic and transitional socio-political realities in
the region.

//////

Supported by: Ministry of Culture, Republic of Croatia; City of Zagreb -
City Office for Education, Culture and Sports

..... DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and Variables DeLVe |
Institut za trajanje, mjesto i varijable Vukovarska 224, Zagreb, HR t.+
38598350860, + 385981904556 www.delve.hr
http://www.facebook.com/pages/DeLVe-Institute-for-Duration-Location-and-
Variables/157880327566590 delve at delve.hr