‘Re-’ Interdisciplinary Network: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The 'Re-' Interdisciplinary Network asks how and why we repeat, revive, re-enact, restage, reframe, remember, represent, and refer – to whom, when, where and why -- and why this a topical question in a digital era. It gathers researchers, teachers, writers and artists whose interest in topics related to cultural reproduction, repetition and reference extends beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and the university/public divide.
It has long been understood that repetition in a public context is socially identifying: to repeat can never be neutral. The very concepts of culture and society -- as learned, shared, traditional -- depend on repetition. But understanding these mechanisms is a pressing issue in a technological present where repetition and recognisability are intimately related to power. From translation, adaptation, preservation, memorial and ritual to brand and social media ‘sharing’, our primary research aim is to explore whether different socially-driven practices of repetition might have meaningfully related structures, implications, and dynamics. We hope by bringing different knowledge systems and approaches together, new questions and principles might emerge: the agency of apparent consensus, for example; or the work done by label, category, and association, or how familiarity itself establishes, legitimises and persuades. What starts and changes a prevailing narrative, and for whom? How should we approach a thing that exists in reciprocity with its own notoriety?
Repetition is everywhere: embedded in human practices inevitably, as well as deliberately. “Re-“ takes a critical lens to this by asking, of any instance of repetition:
what constituencies/audiences are implied by a particular act of (re)address; what else is being performed other than the repeated thing itself: values such as status, legitimacy, commemoration, continuity, authority, participation, legitimacy, identity, nation; whether an act of repetition works to reinforce a status quo or change it - or both. The network aims to shift public attention from what artworks and other kinds of public statements are, to what they do. Its long term goal is to help equip the public with a more fluent grasp of how cultural repetition offers an identity, frames a particular worldview, implies a consensus, and performs a persuasive past.
The 2018-19 series of 'Re-' seminars at CRASSH will explore three 'Re-' topics:
Beyond Originals and Copies: (hierarchical relations of 'sources' and their versions as a western and nineteenth-century view of culture, with Margherita Laera) Technologies of Reproduction (mechanisms of reproduction and their affordances in social protest movements, with Sophie Seita, Anne Alexander and the Cambridge Centre for Digital Humanities) Iteration as Persuasion (how repetition works in the present attention economy, with Satinder Gill and Ella McPherson, co-curated by sociology graduate students Ruichen Zhang and Francesa Root) - to be published as a special issue of AI and Society Journal.
Keynote lectures
Professor Freddie Rokem (Theatre Studies, Chicago/Tel Aviv) Nov 30th Professor Richard Coyne (Architecture, Edinburgh) Feb 6th Professor. Salvatore Settis (Classics, Columbia/Pisa) Feb 12th CRASSH is not responsible for the content of external websites
Michaelmas Term 2018: Beyond Originals and Copies This series of seminars asks how ideas of original/copy differ from culture to culture. By taking both an interdisciplinary and an intercultural perspective, we hope to explore the extent to which a vision of unique authored ‘originals’ and their versions is characteristic of the West and the nineteenth century: and to ask why looking again at the values bound up in different ideas of ‘copying’ is timely in a digital era.
Lent Term 2019: Technologies of Reproduction This term we ask how different technologies of reproduction afford different types of social and political relations. From capillary one-to-one transmission, to networked sharing, to anonymous broadcast, to embodied practices - how might these different forms of repetition help us think through the varieties of digital public space?
To sign up to receive information about this network, please visit: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/ucam-re-interdisciplinarynetwork If if you want to share information about an event related to a ‘Re-‘ topic , please email the list at: Ucam-re-interdisciplinarynetwork@lists.cam.ac.uk
Administrative assistance: Networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk
Professor Andrea Pinotti (Prof. Aesthetics, Università degli Studi di Milano) will discuss his current ERC Advanced Grant ‘AN-ICON - An-iconology. History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images’
In conversation with Cristina Baldacci (Ca’ Foscari, Venice) see her recent Recirculation: The Wandering of Digital Images in Post-Internet Art and Reenactment: Errant Images in Contemporary Art.
Andrea Pinotti is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Milan. He was recently EURIAS senior fellow at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (2017/2018) and laureate of the Wissenschaftspreis of the Aby-Warburg-Stiftung (2018). His main research interests include aesthetics, art theory, art history, the morphological tradition, image theories and visual culture studies, memory studies (monuments and memorials), and empathy theories.
Roundtable Intelligences: Models
Chair: Victoria Vesna (Art|Sci UCLA, USA)
Dietrich Brandt (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
'Enlightenment: The Past, the Present, and Our Futures'
Kathleen Richardson (De Montford University, Leicester )
'Property Relations: From Companion Robots and AI to Sex Robots'
Stephen Cave (Centre for the Future of Intelligence/CFI, University of Cambridge)
'Intelligence as Ideology: Its History and Future'
A joint conference by the 'Re-' Interdisciplinary Network (CRASSH) and the AI & Society Journal
A concept that has been at the fore of discussions around the sociology of scientific knowledge, the limits of AI, and most recently the design of ‘collective intelligence’, is ‘tacit knowledge’. First coming to prominence in the 1960’s, with Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (1966), it is a concept that continues to be addressed by scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives, and applied fields of practice. This conference explores the place of the tacit in the 21st Century, where our lives are increasingly augmented by AI algorithms.
Engagement with and through social media networks and mobile apps are re-shaping the notion of community and family, and affecting wellbeing, as well as the cultures of the workplace and institutions. The exponential rise of big data flows in networked communications causes vast gaps in translation, confusion about what is true and false, and mistrust of ‘experts’. In the shadows of machine thinking we are unable to engage with difference.
This challenges us to come up with technological futures rooted in us as persons, not as numbers, parts, sensory mechanisms, genes, and individual bodies.
What alternative models might allow humans to better engage with technology? How can we reconsider the relation between a person and a collective intelligence? How can we reconceive the self as interaction in a digital age? Ideas of performance and reperformance help us reposition seemingly singular subjects and objects as collective phenomena, and help reconnect art and science after their separation in the 19th Century; but the arts in general can play a key role in questioning and reframing our understandings by directing attention to the tacit assumptions, norms, and expectations embedded in all cultural processes.
There is a supposed neutrality around technology, evidenced in the idea that human ‘intelligence’ can, in the absence of ‘person’, be artificially re-presented, re-constructed and re-produced through computation (AI). The conference explores in what ways the interplay of the arts and sciences is reconceiving augmentation, and questions what an ‘intelligence’ that is ‘artificial’ might be.
CRASSH and the Faculty of Music are delighted to facilitate the Hungarian division of the Polanyi Society in promoting Polanyian perspectives in a special workshop, which will be offered as a parallel event to the main conference on the afternoon of 28th June. On this third day at the Faculty of Music we will discuss the intersections of art, science, technology, and society, and there will be a special workshop by the Polanyi Society presenting papers covering a range of his work.
Geoff Mulgan (CEO, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts)
A joint conference by the 'Re-' Interdisciplinary Network (CRASSH) and the AI & Society Journal
A concept that has been at the fore of discussions around the sociology of scientific knowledge, the limits of AI, and most recently the design of ‘collective intelligence’, is ‘tacit knowledge’. First coming to prominence in the 1960’s, with Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (1966), it is a concept that continues to be addressed by scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives, and applied fields of practice. This conference explores the place of the tacit in the 21st Century, where our lives are increasingly augmented by AI algorithms.
Engagement with and through social media networks and mobile apps are re-shaping the notion of community and family, and affecting wellbeing, as well as the cultures of the workplace and institutions. The exponential rise of big data flows in networked communications causes vast gaps in translation, confusion about what is true and false, and mistrust of ‘experts’. In the shadows of machine thinking we are unable to engage with difference.
This challenges us to come up with technological futures rooted in us as persons, not as numbers, parts, sensory mechanisms, genes, and individual bodies.
What alternative models might allow humans to better engage with technology? How can we reconsider the relation between a person and a collective intelligence? How can we reconceive the self as interaction in a digital age? Ideas of performance and reperformance help us reposition seemingly singular subjects and objects as collective phenomena, and help reconnect art and science after their separation in the 19th Century; but the arts in general can play a key role in questioning and reframing our understandings by directing attention to the tacit assumptions, norms, and expectations embedded in all cultural processes.
There is a supposed neutrality around technology, evidenced in the idea that human ‘intelligence’ can, in the absence of ‘person’, be artificially re-presented, re-constructed and re-produced through computation (AI). The conference explores in what ways the interplay of the arts and sciences is reconceiving augmentation, and questions what an ‘intelligence’ that is ‘artificial’ might be.
CRASSH and the Faculty of Music are delighted to facilitate the Hungarian division of the Polanyi Society in promoting Polanyian perspectives in a special workshop, which will be offered as a parallel event to the main conference on the afternoon of 28th June. On this third day at the Faculty of Music we will discuss the intersections of art, science, technology, and society, and there will be a special workshop by the Polanyi Society presenting papers covering a range of his work.
Satinder Gill (Music, AI&Society, Re-Network, University of Cambridge)
A joint conference by the 'Re-' Interdisciplinary Network (CRASSH) and the AI & Society Journal
A concept that has been at the fore of discussions around the sociology of scientific knowledge, the limits of AI, and most recently the design of ‘collective intelligence’, is ‘tacit knowledge’. First coming to prominence in the 1960’s, with Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (1966), it is a concept that continues to be addressed by scholars and practitioners from a wide range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives, and applied fields of practice. This conference explores the place of the tacit in the 21st Century, where our lives are increasingly augmented by AI algorithms.
Engagement with and through social media networks and mobile apps are re-shaping the notion of community and family, and affecting wellbeing, as well as the cultures of the workplace and institutions. The exponential rise of big data flows in networked communications causes vast gaps in translation, confusion about what is true and false, and mistrust of ‘experts’. In the shadows of machine thinking we are unable to engage with difference.
This challenges us to come up with technological futures rooted in us as persons, not as numbers, parts, sensory mechanisms, genes, and individual bodies.
What alternative models might allow humans to better engage with technology? How can we reconsider the relation between a person and a collective intelligence? How can we reconceive the self as interaction in a digital age? Ideas of performance and reperformance help us reposition seemingly singular subjects and objects as collective phenomena, and help reconnect art and science after their separation in the 19th Century; but the arts in general can play a key role in questioning and reframing our understandings by directing attention to the tacit assumptions, norms, and expectations embedded in all cultural processes.
There is a supposed neutrality around technology, evidenced in the idea that human ‘intelligence’ can, in the absence of ‘person’, be artificially re-presented, re-constructed and re-produced through computation (AI). The conference explores in what ways the interplay of the arts and sciences is reconceiving augmentation, and questions what an ‘intelligence’ that is ‘artificial’ might be.
CRASSH and the Faculty of Music are delighted to facilitate the Hungarian division of the Polanyi Society in promoting Polanyian perspectives in a special workshop, which will be offered as a parallel event to the main conference on the afternoon of 28th June. On this third day at the Faculty of Music we will discuss the intersections of art, science, technology, and society, and there will be a special workshop by the Polanyi Society presenting papers covering a range of his work.
Can there be copying without loss? If so, what is the ontological difference between the ‘original' and the ‘copy’?
Collaborators Adam Lowe and Simon Schaffer in conversation about the artistic science or scientific art of copying.
Adam Lowe (Artist and Founder of Factum Arte, Madrid, Royal College of Art 1985)
Adam Lowe is an artist and founder of Factum Arte (Madrid; London; Milan). Factum Arte consists of a team of artists, technicians and conservators dedicated to digital mediation – both in the production of works for contemporary artists and in the production of facsimiles as part of a coherent approach to preservation and dissemination. Factum Arte’s non-contact methodologies are having a growing impact on the world of conservation and are defining the role facsimiles play in in the protection of our cultural heritage. Major projects include the installation of an exact facsimile of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun into a new building at the entrance to the Valley of the Kings (2004); the facsimile of Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana (2006), Marina Abramovic’s Seven Stages of Maya Dance (2018) and a proposal to save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London from redevelopment (2018). More details on the project, which Prof. Schaffer is also involved in, can be found here: http://www.factum-arte.com/resources/files/ff/project_related_materials/factum-foudation-definitive-proposal-the-resurrection-of-the-whitechapel-bell-foundry-screen.pdf
https://www.christies.com/features/Master-of-reproduction-Adam-Lowe-and-Factum-Arte-6776-1.aspx: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-29/adam-lowe-of-factum-arte-makes-the-art-of-the-world-s-superstars.
Professor Simon Schaffer (History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge) Aesthetics of universal knowledge, co-ed., 2017; The politics of technoscience 2017; The Material Culture of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences, co-ed., 2016).
Simon Schaffer is Professor of the History of Science and the University of Cambridge. He is the author and co-author of numerous books, including the Erasmus Prize-winning Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (2005) with Steven Shapin; the Aesthetics of Universal Knowledge, co-editor with John Tresch and Pasquale Gagliardi (2017); The politics of technoscience, special issue of Radical History Review 127 (2017); and The Material Culture of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences (2016). He has been a presenter on the BBC, e.g. the series Light Fantastic (BBC Four, 2004) and was editor of The British Journal for the History of Science from 2004 to 2009. In 2013 he received the Sarton Medal and in 2018 the Dan David Prize.
Professor Schaffer is a long-lasting collaborator with Factum Arte, notably with N01SE, a multi-site exhibition about information and transformation, which opened at the Whipple Museum and Kettle's Yard in Cambridge in 2000, and the proposal to save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London.
Part of the ‘Re-‘ Network series Beyond Originals and Copies.
CRASSH is not responsible for the content of external websites
Open to all. No registration required Part of 'Re-' Interdisciplinary Network series
Administrative assistance: networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk