Rassegna di parole intorno alla piscina-word review around a swimming pool

Giovedì sera--30.6.05 -Rassegna di parole intorno alla piscina-word review around a swimmingpool

Tematica:

1. Su questo giovedì
About this Thursday

2. Su 5 parole
About 5 words

3. Su Chris Gilbert
About Chris Gilbert

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1. Su questo Giovedì

Cosa: Discussione intorno alla piscina, progetto di Nikola Uzunovsky
Quando: giovedì 30 giugno, h: 18.30
Dove: Magazzini Ligabue IUAV-FDA fermata S. Basilio, Venezia
Chi: chiunque possa

Ci troveremo giovedì sera di fronte allo spazio universitario dei magazzini ligabue intorno al progetto della piscina di Nikola Uzunovsky per discutere e parlare su
cinque parole tali lo spazio, il quotidiano, l'autonomia, la ricerca e la disciplina in relazione al tema dell'università come spazio libero per la sperimentazione.

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1. About this Thursday

What: Discussion around the pool, a project by Nikola Uzunovsky
When: thurday 30 june, 6.30 pm
Where: Magazzini Ligabue IUAV-FDA fermata S. Basilio, Venezia
Who: whoever can come

We will meet Thursday evening in front of the University building at Magazzini Ligabue around the pool project developed by Nikola Uzunovsky to discuss and
talk about five words: space, daily life, autonomy, research and discipline related to the theme of the university as a free and experimental space

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2. Su 5 parole

Abbiamo individuato cinque parole che caratterizzano l'università.

Se partiamo dal presupposto che l'università dovrebbe essere - e non è - uno spazio di libertà, di pratiche sperimentali, allora queste cinque parole potrebbero non assumere una grande importanza, si renderebbe necessario allora rivederne il loro ruolo nell'università di oggi o che è sempre stata.

Abbiamo inoltre pensato ad alcune opere d'arte che si mettano in relazione con ognuna di queste parole, e che possano trattare o rappresentare questi nodi intorno al tema dell'università.

lo spazio dell'università determina non solo le dinamiche interne ad essa, ma anche le relazioni che questa istituzione ha con il suo "fuori". La scelta di incontraci per questo evento intorno ad una piscina, posta davanti allo spazio universitario, è legata al progetto artistico di Nikola Uzunovski (Macedonia), che ha deciso di installare questa piscina gonfiabile per (in)trattenere gli studenti fuori dalle aule, offrendo un nuovo e più fresco spazio.

In che modo l'università influenza la quotidianità ? Nel lavoro di Johanna Billing (Svezia) appare un'aula universitaria gremita di giovani, in un'atmosfera che sta tra la tensione e l'attesa di qualcosa che deve succedere. Non c'è azione, solo scambi di sguardi. L'unico rumore è quello di una fotocopiatrice, il resto è silenzio, attesa. Il titolo sembra offrire una chiave interpretativa: Progetto per una rivoluzione.

L'università dovrebbe specialmente fornire strumenti per lo sviluppo di una critica, vale a dire la possibilità che da una posizione critica coerente si possa sviluppare un' autonomia nella conoscenza e nella teoria. Il video di Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook "The Class", ci mostra sei cadaveri distesi uno accanto all'altro mentre l'artista interpreta il ruolo di una maestra di fronte ai propri studenti. Scrivendo alla lavagna sta tenendo una lezione sulla morte. Riferendosi ogni tanto ad una definizione tratta da un dizionario, scrive la parola morte e ne spiega il significato a corpi esanimi.

La Ricerca nella sua durata, non ha limiti definiti strettamente entro un tempo universitario, l'avvio può aver luogo in questo tempo, ma essa continua oltre, in un processo che coinvolge la vita. Paul Griffiths ha realizzato un progetto utilizzando il denaro della sua borsa di studio universitaria: esso consisteva nel dar fuoco ad ogni singola banconota. Il progetto è continuato poi insieme a Cesare Pietroiusti, dando luogo ad un altro lavoro intitolato "Metodi per una trasformazione irreversibile del denaro".

Se si pensa alla Disciplina, si può intendere, contemporaneamente con lo stesso termine, sia un soggetto o campo di attività, sia le pratiche ed i metodi atti ad assicurare l'obbedienza ed il rispetto delle regole. In relazione all'università la disciplina si è trasformata in una successione burocratica di leggi e comportamenti da rispettare. Dal 30 Marzo 2004, all'entrata della Facoltà di Sociologia di Trento (quella che nel lontano '68 è stata uno dei punti di riferimento rispetto ai movimenti studenteschi) sta un asino in proporzioni naturali, realizzato da Maurizio Cattelan. L'installazione è un omaggio di Cattelan, in risposta alla Laurea honoris causa che l'Università di Trento gli ha consegnato. Lui, che voleva creare l'università del fallimento, veniva premiato "per la sua ricerca artistica creativa ed impegnata, attraverso la quale egli rende le certezze usuali relative, svela i pubblici inganni, e scopre i significati nascosti delle società contemporanee."

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2. About 5 words

We have identified five words that characterize the university. If we start from the fact that the university should be but is not a space of freedom, of experimental practices then these five words might not have such an importance and would be necessary to reevaluate their role inside what the university is today or has always been. We have also thought about a work of art we think could be related to one and each of these words so to analyze how the theme of the university is

treated and represented.

the space of the university determines not only the dynamics inside the university but also that in relationship to the outside. The decision of doing the event around a pool in front of what could be called the university space is due to the fact that Nikola Uzunovsky (Macedonia) in his pool project has placed it so to keep the students out from the classroom and into a new, cooler space.
How does the university determine your daily life ? In the work of Johanna Billing (Sweden) is presented a university classroom full of young people, in an atmosphere somewhere between tension and expectation that something will happen. There is no action, just exchanged glances. The only sounds come from a copy machine. The rest is silence, waiting, yet the title seems to offer a key of interpretation: Project for a Revolution.
The university should make emphasis in giving instruments for the development of critique, that is to say that from a consistent critical position one could develop autonomy in knowledge and theory. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's video The Class (Thailand), shows six dead bodies lying side by side while she plays the role of the teacher, standing in front of the students. She is lecturing and writing on the blackboard the lesson about death. She writes the word death explaining its meaning sometimes referring to the definition in the dictionary to the breathless bodies.
Research does not have time duration only within the limits of university, its start is within this time period but goes even further, and it is a lifetime process. Paul Griffiths (Great Britain) developed a project with the money received for research, which consisted in burning every single bank note. The project further developed along with Cesare Pietroiusti (Italy) entitled Methods for an irreversible alteration of money.
When thinking about discipline one can mean a subject / field of activity , or as the practice or methods of ensuring that people obey rules. In relation to the university discipline has turned into a bureaucratic secession of rules and behaviors to follow. From March 30 2004 at the entrance of the Faculty of Sociology of Trento, the one that in the distant '68 stood as a godfather to the students' movement, a donkey in real proportions is boastingly shown, placed there by Maurizio Cattelan. The installation is a homage by which he repaid the University of Trento for the honoris causae degree bestowed on him. He who wanted to create the university of failure was awarded " with regard to his committed and creative artistic research by which he makes usual thruths relative, unmasks public deceptions, and discovers the hidden meaning of contemporary societies."

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3. About Chris Gilbert

Counter-Campuses within the Universal University

by Chris Gilbert

Today perhaps nothing could be more clear - if undertheorized or only beginning to be theorized - than that we live in a period of "general intellect." That is to say, a period in which the bulk of labor - of production and reproduction - is of the immaterial or intellectual variety. This condition alone, which may be associated in general with post-Fordism, was brought to quantum new heights with the service and information economies of the 1980s and 1990s, and it has explosive effects on the university, on its social position and even on the internal disciplinary divisions that it both relies on and enforces.

Consider the following thesis: whereas the university, as a site of knowledge production in a culture that produced materials or produced via materials - paradigmatically in the factory - was once a determinate space in the productive field, at present (in the Global North) we could all be said to live and operate within the expanded field of the university. It would follow that this "universal university" would be the emergent paradigm for (knowledge) production. This thought immediately raises the question of what happens to the institution of the university - call it the non-universal university - within this larger field of knowledge production. Does it become defunct? Does it persist as state of obsolescence? Or does it, perhaps along with obsolescence and various forms of dereliction, reinscribe knowledge within a community - a community that can be, on the one hand, either restrictive and class-driven or on the other hand inclusive, provisional, and emancipatory?

In this light it may be useful to consider the now vast number of artists and artists groups that have, within the field of general intellect, of immaterial production, chosen to create communities of learners. Often these learning communities operate in ways that are in marked contrast - hence in a way "counter" to - the class-based, hierarchical, arborescent communities of what is left of an increasingly corporatized (non-universal) university. They are likewise distinguished by their promoting non-heirachical, non-instumentalized, or peer-to peer learning, while at the same time engaging with broader issues concerning knowledge production, ownership, and circulation.

The following random topics may serve as useful beginning points for a discussion:

1. The expanded space of the university, which has occurred with the expansion of immaterial labor, can been understood through one of its seemingly privileged sites: information technology and especially the internet, which is both the site of much immaterial production and of open knowledge sharing among peers (such as that which sometimes occurs at hacklabs and more often on wiki pages). (Unfortunately this privileged site is often turned into fetish, that is to say, as the site rather than a site of such work). By the same token, the library, which was historically the topographic focus of the university - as is evident from looking in university campus maps such as those assembled in the Christian Phillip Mueller's project Branding the Campus - now has at best that role symbolically. It has been replaced by the internet archive, a "library" of users that are both "inside" and "outside" the university, and learning today suffers from this displacement to the extent that the internet has become regulated by commercial, consumerist forms of knowledge and dissemination (advertising).

2 . Artist-run self-institutions seem to have important points of contact with Antonio Negri's "soviets of mass intellectuality." In Empire Negri writes, "The first of these conditions derives from the tendential hegemony of immaterial labor and thus from the increasingly profound reappropriation of technico-scientific knowledge by the proletariat [italics mine]. On this basis, technico-scientific knowledge can no longer be posed as a mystified function of command, separate from the body of mass intellectuality (p252)."

Negri goes on: "The destruction of the state can be envisaged only via a concept of the reappropriation of the social essence of production, of the instruments of comprehension of social and production cooperation." Both of the above seem quite applicable the new self-institutions. Negri concludes: "Here, therefore, is where the Soviets of mass intellectuality are born."

3. The role of art today in the architectonic of the university may be compared, somewhat problematically, to the historical role of philosophy. First, it is important to note that both art and philosophy are often seen as privileged sites of pedagogy. Kant, writing more than two centuries ago about the proper architecture of the university, described philosophy as a lower faculty whose role it was nevertheless to monitor the higher faculties of law and theology. In this role, philosophy's independence was intimately related to its powerlessness. Is it possibly that art occupies a similar relation to other "higher" discourse such as politics, economics, sociology - that it is, at once their handmaiden and queen (to use Kant's terms).

5. Today, there are many signs (albeit quite non-isomorphic) of rupture with the liberal idea of the autonomous university. For example, Venezeulan president Hugo Chaves has recently embarked on an initiative to create his own "counter-campuses," university level programs that would counter the capitalist orientation of most university trained intellectuals. By contrast, in the U.S, misnamed groups operating under the banner of "academic freedom" have laid out programs to review and curtail university curicula around the country (and have promoted their cause through means that are reminiscent of 1950s blacklisting). These initiatives, the one creative - opening a new field - and the other constricting, are hardly symmetrical. The one says in effect that "another world is possible" while the other works to undermine even the ability to arrive at such an enunciation.

Chris Gilbert is a curator of the Baltimore Museum of art.

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