STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR BRAIN?
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ART & LIFE IN TIMES OF COGNITIVE AUTOMATION
Was a conference-festival organized by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie that took place on March 22, 23, and 24, 2016 at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Studium Generale Rietveld Academie invited André Lepecki, Melanie Bühler, and Warren Neidich to each inaugurate a discursive and performative program of one day.
March 24
On Making Collective Heads: Performance, Choreography, Theory and the Social Body
curated by André Lepecki:
The third day of the symposium gathers together a renowned group of artists and scholars from fields such as contemporary choreography, experimental performance, affect theory, queer and neurodiversity studies, and performance studies whose groundbreaking work has helped expand our understanding of the relations between brain and body, brain and art, and brain and the social-political sphere. Their different social, theoretical, and artistic practices challenge normative notions of the brain as a tightly encased organ governing a self-contained, self-possessed and autonomous agential subject, suggesting instead that the brain is never quite where it is supposed to be. Continuously spilling out across space and time, aggregating, and splitting up – and also being aggregated by other bodies, affects, and matters, including the brains and affects of non-human species and their singular modes of being – a brain’s location must necessarily then be always in a collective head (to paraphrase the title of a 1975 participatory work by Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, Cabeça coletiva). Combining lectures, intensely participatory performances, and plenty of time for dialogue, the four guests will experiment with variations on this hypothesis in differently embodied, theorized, composed and choreographed ways. The session thus offers discursive as well as artistic propositions to help us understand how artistic practices build embodied and performative technologies for making collective heads.
With: André Lepecki, Patricia Clough, Mette Edvardsen, Leon Hilton, and Anne Juren.
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