Transvaluation:
Making the world matter. Call for abstracts
In the current
measurement- and indicator-driven knowledge culture, research in architecture,
art and several disciplines within humanities and social sciences may succumb
to economic or scientific models, or be separated from important contexts of
invention, risking to reduce research largely to standardized reproduction.
Responding to the current proliferation of evaluation systems and the dominant
culture of measurement that comes with it, the Transvaluation international
symposium, May 21-22 2015, searches
for alternative, cooperative environments of knowledge, of creation and
invention, of ‘making and thinking’, and ways to trans- and re-value research
cultures from within.
The ambition is a high
quality event with top level keynote speeches, small format seminars and
collective forum discussions, with the intent to start a broad debate
addressing fundamental strategic research questions across disciplinary
borders, and to instigate possibilities for change.
Key note speakers are
international experts in social, global anthropology, Arjun Appadurai;
art researching practice and doctoral education, Andrea Phillips; and
speculative realism and material objects, Graham Harman.
The symposium will
focus two major themes, Poetics and Politics of Value,
referring to the (re-)making of values, both in artistic and architectural
practice and in human scientific research, and their related political and
systemic aspects. These themes are examined through two conceptual
lenses: Worlding (shaping the world, transforming matter)
and U-topos (space for speculative thinking and making).
We search for ways in
which architecture, art, philosophy, anthropology and other areas of research
may challenge, together, the very concept and formation of knowledge, stretching
and enriching it, hence “transvaluing” material and spiritual research cultures
from within, disclosing alternative approaches and strengthening their logics
of argumentation within the interdisciplinary frame, with potential to change
its systemic conventions.
We now invite
researchers, doctoral students and practitioners to submit abstracts for
discussion at the symposium. Abstracts will be peer reviewed and, if selected,
developed into short papers.
Keywords: transvaluation -
poetics of value - worlding - architecture - artistic research
Deadline for
abstracts: December 19, 2014. For more information
on the call and the selection process, please see end of this document or
conference website,www.chalmers.se/transvaluation .
Key note speakers
(confirmed), actively taking part in the entire event:
Arjun
Appadurai –
world famous social-cultural anthropologist, discussing cultural activity as
the social imaginary forming modernity and global cultural flows into
dimensions of e.g. ethno-scapes and mediascapes. From a critical perspective on
the global academic system, Appadurai has created the New School University,
New York, and is founder of the academic journal Public Culture.
Andrea
Phillips –
renowned designer, curator and Director of the Doctoral Research Programmes in
Fine Art and Curating at Goldsmiths College, London University. Phillips also
directs several international interdisciplinary research projects and publishes
widely on art, curating, politics and public space.
Graham
Harman –
contemporary philosopher of metaphysics and professor at the American
University in Cairo, Egypt. With outset in speculative realism and his concept
of ‘object oriented philosophy’, Harman investigates alternatives to the
linguistic turn in Western philosophy, hereby evoking extensive debate on our
hermeneutic relation to the (technological) world of objects.
Description of the symposium themes
Transvaluation:
Making the World Matter in search for alternative, cooperative environments of
knowledge, of creation and invention, of ‘making and thinking’
Challenges
and themes
Academic research and education are currently dominated by a
measurement-culture and the proliferation of evaluation systems that comes with
it. In response to this, the symposium aims to outline the possibilities
for alternative, cooperative environments of knowledge, of creation and
invention, of ‘making and thinking’. Its first and most important concern
is to start a broad debate on the following subjects: (1) the consequences of
the (monopolization of) efficiency-standards in the spheres of science and
creativity – a tendency reinforced by the Bologna educational system – and (2)
the search for viable alternatives.
Efficiency-driven systems of evaluation are less innocent as one may think.
They often hide an 'intellectual conformity', having nothing to do anymore with
'the animating spirit of discovery' and tending towards 'the mono-culture of a
discipline grown too large and the accompanying failure of imagination', in one
word: to the 'Big Creativity Deficit' (Murphy 2013). The
rapidly risen and universalized practices of evaluation-controlled
knowledge-production are thought to have led, during 'the past forty years [,
to] a significant decline [of creativity] in the arts and sciences' (Murphy
2013).
”The exhaustion of creative science and arts” seems to have a hard social and
political counterpart in different forms of exclusion, typical of this 'age
of globalization': knowledge-systems are increasingly, and anonymously,
controlling us from above, whereas we actually need a 'globalization from
below', where imagination – no longer being 'a matter of individual genius, an
escapism from ordinary life or just a dimension of aesthetics' – rather becomes
a manifold 'faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new
design for collective life emerges' (Appadurai 2000).
Being part of a larger, already functioning project, this symposium seeks to
initiate the debate, starting from the primarily architectural and artistic
experience of working with concrete 'matter' and being, as a consequence,
entirely involved in 'processes of making'. However, we believe that these very
processes of making and transforming matter are also crucial to the so-called
hard sciences, and to the human and social sciences. That is why we would like
to invite representatives of all of them to participate in this debate.
Poetics of Value. Using the – historical – familiarity with making
and transforming matter of certain disciplines, we introduce the concept of
a Poetics of Value. 'Poetics' itself refers to the ancient Greek
practice of poièsis (producing, making, creating, composing),
whereas the focus on 'values' stands for the desired reversal of systemic
evaluation-practices in Academia. Thereby, Poetics of Value isn’t merely
describing the relation between an individual (artist,
designer, philosopher, scientist) and the matter she or he is transforming; it
also takes into account the inventive collective effort
communities all over the world will have to be engaged in as a 're-' and
'transvaluing' response to the challenging problems of our rapidly globalizing
societies and economies.
Politics of Value. That is why we simultaneously call for a Politics
of Value (following Appadurai, 1988), which is concerned with
surpassing the possibly atomic relation between researchers and their objects,
towards more complex meanings and frameworks of human transactions,
attributions and motivations (Appadurai 1988, 1996). 'Practicing value' has an
obvious ethical dimension we want to explore in these 'Politics'.
The search for renewal, for originality and for the production of meaning,
relates to the quest for the unexpected in making or transforming matter. This
is essentially a culture-shaping activity which never aspires to reach stable
knowledge or a fixed state, but strives for continuous evolving perfectibility.
Hence, the creative processes involved lie beyond sheer knowledge-accumulation,
since new or unforeseen artistic forms and designs do not necessarily increase
or diminish knowledge, nor do they primarily seek to do so.
Worlding. Both the Poetics and Politics of Value are perspectives
directed towards an intensive rethinking and redesigning of human relations
with the world. In order to get a better view on both perspectives we propose
two specific 'lenses': Worlding and U-topos. They
represent a particular kind of practicing values that enables the enrichment
and stretching of the concept of knowledge and the academic culture it creates.
The idea of 'Worlding' refers to the fundamental task of research to 'think
and, somehow, start living new worldly shapes' (Spivak, Nancy, White, e.a.).
Using the lens of 'Worlding' we seek to conceptualize future alternative
knowledge-creating practices and future alternative values, instead of merely
evaluating existing knowledge procedures. This illuminates the very meaning of
the Poetics and Politics of Value: to look ahead, to discover what remains
hidden, to elaborate the speculative dimension of matter and material
manipulation, engaging reality through the material (Harman).
U-Topos. The concept of 'U-topos' on the other hand is introduced as a
place for utopian, speculative thinking. In contrast to preset images of
'Utopia', the U-topos encourages scholars and artists to think the not-yet
visible and the not-yet valuable, a thinking/making propelled by individual and
shared, collective curiosities, towards the formulation of future values and
learning needs, allowing different topics, concepts, themes, perspectives to
collide and combine. U-topos is meant to be an exercise in transforming both
the 'spiritual' and 'material' working places of the future researcher – it
represents university itself. The meaning, relevance and applicability of these
concepts will be the object of debates during the symposium, from both angles:
'matter' (making, transforming, creating, designing) and 'thought' (critique,
quest for alternatives, attempt to think the not-yet-available).
The overall project is called 'Transvaluation', designed to be an
organized and, hopefully, energizing attempt to overcome the possibility of a
scientific mono-culture that is actually threatening to sacrifice the whole of
academic inventiveness to systems of calculable, quantitative measurement
(creativity-deficit) and which is particularly harmful to many traditional
creative disciplines, such as architecture, fine arts, philosophy, literature…
The proposed debates are designed to be clear-cut: Can alternatives be
conceptualized? Can they prove to be fruitful? If so, how should they be
structured? Can architecture and fine arts, specifically, contribute to this
effort? And how? Can the science – both the hard sciences and the human and
social sciences make their contribution? And how? Can all these sciences and
disciplines be convinced to join forces on this? Can university be effectively
transformed in this sense?
Sources:
Biggs, Michael, and Henrik Karlsson, eds. 2010. The Routledge Companion
to Research in the Arts. London: Routledge.
Dunin-Woyseth, Halina. 2006. “The ‘Thinkable’ and ‘Unthinkable’ Doctorates.
Three Perspectives on Doctoral Scholarship in Architecture.” In Building
a Doctoral Programme in Architecture and Design, edited by Jan Michl, and
Liv Merete Nielsen, 149-174. Oslo: Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Murphy, Peter (2013). Inaugural Lecture at James Cooke
University, Australia, School of Creative Arts (Wednesday 25 September 2013).
Schiesser, Giaco. 2013. “A Certain Frustration…”. Paradoxes, Voids,
Perspectives in Artistic Research Today. In Practices of Experimentation,
edited by The Department of Art & Media, Zurich University of the Arts,
97-110. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Appadurai, Arjun (1996, 2005). Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions
of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; (2000), Grassroots
Globalization and the Research Imagination. In Public Culture,
vol. 12, #1, pp. 1-19.
Harman, Graham, ed., 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press.
Symposium format
The
symposium aims to be a ‘call for debate’, therefore the emphasis is on
conversation and discussion rather than paper presentations. Participants will
be invited to cooperate in exercises of speculative thinking, aiming at
creating new places and new spaces for future fundamental research. The ambition
is to form this as a 'high quality conversation' centered on statement-lectures delivered
by top level keynote speakers, small salons where participants
discuss each other’s papers (the grouping will be done beforehand and members
of a group receive each other’s papers for reading and commenting), and forum
debates on the key themes.
The
statement-lectures (providing the input for debate and topics for the
conversation) and the forum debates are plenary. The Salon is organised in
small groups of maximum 5x5 participants, with discussions moderated by members
of the planning and review committee. The keynote speakers have already
expressed their concerned interest for the themes and confirmed to take active
part in the activities of the entire event.
Preliminary
schedule, May 21-22, 2015:
May 21:
09.30 Coffee + registration
10.00 Intro
10.15 statement lecture 1
11.00 Salon 1 (maximum four groups of 25)
12.30 Lunch + walk
14.00 Salon 2 (groups of 25, A-D)
16.00 Coffee
16.30 Forum debate 1
18.15 Statement lecture 2
19.00 Mingle + dinner
May 22:
09.00 Statement lecture 3
10.00 Coffee
10.30 Salon 3 (reshuffled groups)
13.00 Lunch + walk
14.00 Critical connections of discussions + wallpapers (to feed into Forum
debate 3)
15.30 Forum debate 3
17.00 Summing up
17.30 End of symposium
Submission process
Please
submit abstracts of maximum 500 words (references may be added) before 19th of
December to transvaluation.arch@chalmers.se. If accepted for the
symposium, a short paper (maximum 7 pages including images) shall be delivered
to the same email address by the latest on 20 April 2015.
December
19 Deadline for abstracts
January
26 Notification on abstracts
April
20
Deadline for full papers
April
24
Groups formed, papers distributed, and participants notified
May
21-22 Symposium
Review
group:
Nel
Janssens, KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture, Campus Sint-Lucas Brussels &
Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Architecture.
Peter
De Graeve, Faculty of Fine Arts University of Leuven & Chalmers University
of Technology, Department of Architecture
Catharina
Dyrssen, Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Architecture
Mattias
Kärrholm, University of Lund, Department of Architecture and Built Environment.
Hélène
Frichot, KTH, School of Architecture, Division of Critical Studies, Stockholm
Rolf
Hughes, Stockholm University of the Arts
Andrej
Slavik, University of Gothenburg, Department of Literature, History of Ideas,
and Religion & Chalmers University of Technology, Department of
Architecture.
Core planning group: Nel Janssens, Peter
De Graeve, Catharina Dyrssen
Planning assistance: Julia Fredriksson
(symposium contents), Nidal Yousif (facilities)
Vänliga hälsnigar | Kind regards
Lotta
Särnbratt
Informatör
| Communications
Officer
Institutionen för arkitektur | Department of Architecture
+46 31 772 2445
+46 76 125 7039 (mobile)
lotta.sarnbratt@chalmers.se
Chalmers tekniska högskola | Chalmers
University of Technology
Institutionen för arkitektur |
Department of Architecture
412 96 Göteborg | 412 96 Gothenburg,
Sweden
