[-empyre-] Art, Virus, and Immunity

[Dominguez, Ricardo]

Hola tod at xs,

The exchanges so far on the list have helped me think about shifting the curve against the flattening of critical thought on transversal scales. Thank you all and I hope all of you are extra well on your side of the screen during these dire days.

I thought I would just parasite off the excellent title offered by Dingquan, if I may, since it echos some concerns of the rapid response class I had to zoom into being in a few days-for what is "normally" a class that is focused on intense collective lab-space of dialogues and constructing speculative gestures together.

The syllabus had to be developed few days to deal with rushing waves of COVID-19 and Zooming. I thought it was important to deal with the virus. The class is the final Speculative Design Master Class for seniors in our Visual Arts Department at UCSD Speculative Design track. Like most of us teaching it on Zoom. As well as hubs.mozzila and some Riot). The class meets for 6 hours every Friday, (PST).

I am in the hot zone of NYC.

The class entitled: Artificial Viroids: Outbreak Narratives and Cultural Vaccines

It starts with 4 quotes:

It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.
 - Daniel Defoe

This whole thing is not about heroism. It’s about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.
-Camus

“The excess of biopower appears when it becomes technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and ultimately, to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive. This formidable extension of biopower, unlike what I was saying about atomic power, will put it beyond all human sovereignty.”
- M. Foucault

A Pandemic isn't a collection of viruses, but is a social relation among people, mediated by viruses.
-Ian Alan Paul

Class Description:

We will design speculative responses to artificial viroids, outbreak narratives and cultural vaccines  that can help us navigate, route around, and imagine-otherwise while living during a time of a pandemic. What gestures, technologies, social while living during a time of a pandemic. What gestures, technologies, social economies and ways of intimacy do we need to consider and expand? Our goal will be design potential responses to COVID-19 via critical fictions, new “real time” data and our tender affects/feelings of intimacy during “social distancing”. The first half the class we will read classic text, watch science fiction films, zombie tales, pandemic documentaries, consider aesthetic or speculative vaccines, molecular politics, bio-politics and paleovirology  With some of our core questions being can we breaking out from post-contemporary outbreak narratives and the current state of infodemics? Can we create cognitive maps of how societies dealt with pandemics in past? And use them now? With our speculative designs focused on how to slow down the pandemic and stop the viral futures to come in unexpected ways.

Readings by Priscilla Wald, Giovanni Boccacio, Naomi Klein, Critical Art Ensemble (I was a member)...films from Andromeda Strain to the The Strain to La Jetée...sites like flumob.org...plus prompts for making speculative gestures.

Plus: I have been writing imagined theatre plays with my kith and kin about being in lock-down and using balconies for performances. I will share those later if folks would like do an early peek and of course lots of rantee rants. 🙂


Abrazos,

Ricardo Dominguez




________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au> on behalf of Dingquan Xie <dx55 at cornell.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 10:35 PM
To: empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: [-empyre-] Art, Virus, and Immunity

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