Theory — 21, 22, 23, Mar 24, 2018

The conference Studium Generale (21 – 24 March 2018) and the coinciding presentation Rietveld Uncut 2018 focus on touch in artistic, philosophical, and political terms to conceive how the haptic – relating to or based on touch – is thought and experienced in life, art and design, and theory.
Price
€ 3,- (excl. museum entrance) / Rietveld students free with registration
Location
Teijin Auditorium, livestream in studio A
Time
Mar 21, 2018, 10 am until 5.30 pm
Mar 22, 2018, 10 am until 5.30 pm
Mar 23, 2018, 10 am until 10 pm
Mar 24, 2018, 10 am until 5.30 pm
Main language
English
Admission
Tickets

The four-days conference festival is curated by Karen Archey,Rizvana Bradley, Mark Paterson and Jack Halberstam. Each curator compiled a one-day discursive -and at times performative- program.

Touch is of vital importance to our emotional and neurobiological development. So how do we feel and more specifically touch in our technologically mediated dematerialized digital cultures? Do we solely stroke and swipe our screens? How are the body and its feel involved? Are we in fact cultivating different tactilities in relation to the world and others? Further, how can we trace the ways in which touch informs and reforms the body with respect to violence, gender, sexuality, democracy, and identity? If art and design have privileged sight and sound, should touch – and all the senses – be addressed and activated in order to help us stay ‘in touch’ with our bodies and the material world?

Karen Archey 

March 21

Karen Archey is Curator of Contemporary Art, Time-based Media at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. She was previously based in Berlin and New York, where she worked as an independent curator, art critic, and editor of e-flux conversations. Archey was a 2015 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. With a focus on feminist practices, art and technology, her writing is regularly featured in magazines such as frieze and ArtReview, and anthologies published by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, MIT Press and New Museum. Archey recently co-curated the survey exhibition Art Post-Internet at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014) and edited the publication Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION/DATA. A regular public speaker, Archey has recently spoken at Renaissance Society at University of Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Museum of Modern Art New York, MoMA PS1, and elsewhere. In 2018 at the Stedelijk, Archey will organize the museum’s performance program, as well as solo exhibitions of artists Stefan Tcherepnin, Catherine Christer Hennix, and the Dutch design duo Metahaven. She will curate the large-scale biannual municipal art acquisitions for the city of Amsterdam, themed around the notion “Freedom of Movement.” Archey is currently leading the museum’s initiative to form a research center centered around the collection, preservation and presentation of time-based media artwork.
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Mark Paterson

March 22

Mark Paterson is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is interested in approaches to the body and the senses, including the constructions of ‘blindness’, and technologies of touch and sensory substitution. He has conducted funded research in areas such as the use of haptic technologies within museums, and on the mixed spaces of human-robotic interaction (HRI). He is the author of The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (2007), co-editor of Touching Place, Spacing Touch (with Martin Dodge, 2012), and most recently of Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (2016). With David Parisi and Jason Archer he is co-editor of a recent
special issue of New Media and Society on ‘Haptic Media Studies’ (2017). His current book project is How We Became Sensory-Motor: Mapping Movement and Modernity. His research blog is at www.sensory-motor.com.
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Rizvana Bradley

March 23

Rizvana Bradley is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies and African-American Studies at Yale. Bradley was as an Assistant Professor at Emory University, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at the University College London. Born in Kenya, and raised in the U.K., Germany, Poland, Tanzania, and the U.S., Bradley’s research and teaching focus on the study of film and media at the intersections of literature, poetry, contemporary art and performance. Her scholarly approach to artistic practices in the fields of African-American cultural production, as well as the wider black diaspora expands and develops frameworks for thinking across these contexts, specifically in relation to global and transnational artistic and cinematic practices.  Bradley is currently at work on two new scholarly book projects. The first is a recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and offers a critical examination of the black body across a range of experimental artistic practices that integrate film and other media. Bradley guest edited a special issue of the journal Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory on “The Haptic: Textures of Performance,” and has published articles in TDR: The Drama Review, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, and Film Quarterly. She was a Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Her writing has also appeared in Parkett, and Art in America. In London, Bradley curated two international symposia related to the study of Afrodiasporic thought and aesthetics at the (BFI) British Film Institute, and The Serpentine
Galleries.
www.rizvanabradley.com
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Jack Halberstam

March 24

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of six books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and most recently, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press 2018).  Halberstam is currently working on a book titled Wild Things: Queerness After Nature on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.
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