Ashley Hunt

February 15, 2013 by tedxcalarts

Ashley Hunt is an artist, activist and writer who engages the ideas of social movements, modes of learning and public speech. His work is often concerned with questions of power and the ways that some people have more, others have less, and what can be done about that. Ashley’s works include the performance, Notes on the Emptying of a City, a ‘dismantled film’ that recounts his time in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Communograph, a multi-platform project of community authorship through Project Row Houses in Houston; 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, the collaborative video installation produced for documenta 12 with Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Katya Sander and David Thorne; On Movement Thought and Politics, an interdisciplinary collaboration with dance and performance artist, Taisha Paggett; and the ongoing Corrections Documentary Project, a body of work addressing the politics of growth in the largest prison system in the world — that of the United States. Recent exhibitions and performances include the 2012 Live Arts/Philly Fringe Festival, the 2012 Biennial in Sinop, Turkey, the Museum of Modern Art, the Made in LA, 2012 biennial of the Hammer Museum and LAX Art, and Woodbourne State Prison in upstate New York. Ashley co-directs the Photography and Media Program at California Institute of the Arts and just planted a peach tree.

Brian Massumi and Erin Manning

February 14, 2013 by tedxcalarts

Brian Massumi is a Canadian social theorist. Massumi’s research spans the fields of art, architecture, political theory, cultural studies and philosophy. He received his Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University in 1987. His publications include Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation and Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts. He is also known for English-language translations of recent French philosophy, including Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (with Geoffrey Bennington), Jacques Attali’s Noise and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.

Massumi collaborates with Erin Manning, director of the Sense Lab, a research-creation laboratory affiliated with Hexagram: Institute for Research/Creation in Media Arts and Technology in Montreal. They co-edit a book series at MIT Press entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction and are founding members of the editorial collective of the Sense Lab journal Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation.

Massumi is currently teaching at Université de Montréal, in the Communication Sciences Department.

Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the director of the Sense Lab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Her current art practice is centred on large-scale textile installations that facilitate emergent collectivities. She presented Stitching Time at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012, will present Stitching Time – Traces at the 5th Moscow Biennale in 2013 and is preparing a work entitled The Knots of Time for the opening of the new Flax Museum in Kortrijk, Belgium. Publications include Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2007) and Ephemeral Territories: Representing Nation, Home and Identity in Canada (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003). Her forthcoming co-written manuscript (with Brian Massumi) is entitled Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP).

Franco Berardi Bifo

February 12, 2013 by tedxcalarts

Born in Bologna, Italy in 1949, Franco Berardi Bifo is a writer, media-theorist, and media-activist. As a young militant he took part in the experience of Potere operaio in the years 1967-19073, then he founded the magazine A/traverso (1975–81) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976–78).

Involved in the political movement of Autonomia in Italy during the 1970s, he fled to Paris, where he worked with Félix Guattari in the field of schizoanalysis.

He has been involved in many media-projects, like Telestreet, and Recombinant.org.

Bifo published the books Poetry and finance (1912) After the future (2011) The Soul at Work (2010), Felix (2001), Cibernauti (1994), Mutazione e Cyberpunk (1993) and contributed to the magazines Semiotext(e), Chimères, Metropoli, and Musica 80.

He is currently collaborating with e-flux journal.

Coordinator of the European School for Social Imagination (SCEPSI), he has been teaching at Ashkal Alwan in Beirouth, PEI-Macba in Barcelona, Accademia di Brera in Milano, and has been lecturing in social centers and Universities worldwide.