Gabriel Kuri, Black Beans in Hand, 2007
Expected Applause Duration: 46 seconds
A Seminar Organized by OCA Artist in Residence Gabriel Kuri
Date: Thursday, 28 June, 2007
Time: 14:00–18:00
Location: ISP Studio 2
Wergelandsvn. 17
Back entrance
Refreshments will follow the seminar.
Please be so kind to R.S.V.P. to office@oca.no.
A Statement from the Artist:
"The discussion is an invitation to participate in my ignorance. A hopefully generous attempt to share my selfishness. Certain notions and topics have been haunting my — mainly sculptural — artistic practice. These revolve around temporality, space and experience. Or rather than revolve around, they are attempts to try to come to terms with the thing or circumstance and its portrait in negative, to try to grasp something when and where it appears to be absent or strongly reticent.
Three inspiring starting points for this discussion come from having read Lars Svendsen's book A Philosophy of Boredom, having peeked into Fernando Esponda's theory of the negative representation of information, and my unwillingness to surrender to the fact — with the help of Mikkel Astrup — that I need to carry on waiting to get to know what Samuel Beckett's allusions to waiting are all about."
The Programme
Waiting for Nothing
Mikkel Astrup
University of Oslo, Norway
Mikkel Astrup's presentation will discuss how Beckett's mediation of nothing through waiting is linked to a desire for radical individuality. Beckett's writings are arguably constructed for the reception of nothing. There is an active waiting process for nothing, constituted by his composition and language. "Nothing is more real than nothing", he writes in Malone Dies. The explicit waiting in Waiting for Godot is an organizational premise that allows the text's linguistic procedure to mediate nothing. Slowing down, de-visualisation, non-arrival at finite conclusions, are amongst the endgames that construct such waiting-conditions.
Negative Representation of Information
Fernando Esponda
Yale University, New Haven
The process of elimination is a familiar reasoning technique, its tenet is that once all "negative" options have been discarded whatever remains must be the fact or object sought. An underlying suggestion of this thought is that a given object has two alternative ways of being described: as the object itself and as everything except the object. In this presentation, Fernando Esponda will discuss how data can be depicted negatively in the context of digital databases — think of storing all possible names and addresses not in your address book. He will explore how the surrogate representation can be generated efficiently and argue that it exhibits different properties in terms of how the information it contains can be exploited.
Boredom
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen
University of Bergen, Norway
Lars Svendsen focuses his presentation on boredom as a distinct lack of quality. It is a negation — or the presence of an absence. It informs us that one of the fundamental human needs, the need for personal meaning, is not being met. Analogously with the symptoms of drugs withdrawal, one can describe boredom as meaning withdrawal.
The Contributors
Gabriel Kuri (b. 1970, Mexico City, Mexico, based in Brussels and Mexico) is an artist whose mainly sculptural practice addresses issues of coding experience, temporality and space. His work encompasses an array of media grounded on the grammar of everyday lexicon and exchange. His vocabulary of forms places emphasis on process and the open and unstable nature of meaning. He studied at ENAP UNAM Mexico (88–92) and Goldsmiths College London (93–95). Recent solo shows include 2006 Govett Brewster National Art Gallery New Zealand, 2004 and 2006 Galleria Franco Noero Torino, 2004 MuHKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, 2003 and 2007 galeria kurimanzutto Mexico. Recent group shows include 2006 Brighton Photo Bienale, 2004 State of Play, Serpentine Gallery London, 2003 Interludes L Venice Bienale.
Mikkel Astrup (b. 1973, Oslo, Norway) is a Ph.D fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway. His current research: Beckett, sickness and desire affiliated with the Infectio project on medicine and literature. His other main project is on societies of control and capitalism. He has taught on 20th century literary theory and literature and presented recent papers on Beckett, sickness and capitalism internationally. Astrup co-organized the Global Beckett conference at Syddanske Universitet October 2006. (Den globale Beckett Morgenbladet, 2006). His is currently editing Global Beckett anthology and working on an article for the forthcoming anthology Thinking under Capitalism.
Fernando Esponda (b. 1969, Mexico City, Mexico) holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of New Mexico with a Bachelors in Computer Engineering at the Technological Institute of Mexico. He is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Computer Science in Yale University in New Haven. Dr. Esponda's work was featured in The Economist magazine's article The non-denial of the non-self September 2–9, 2006 issue. Two representative papers of his work are: Fernando Esponda, Elena S. Ackley, Paul Helman, Haixia Jia, and Stephanie Forrest, Protecting Data Privacy through Hard-to-Reverse Negative Databases, In proceedings of the 9th Information Security Conference (ISC'06), pp. 72–84 2006; Fernando Esponda, Negative Surveys, ArXiv Mathematics e-prints: math/0608176, 2006.
Lars Fr. H. Svendsen (b.1970, Moss, Norway) holds a Ph.d. and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Norway. Svendsen has published numerous books, among them A Philosophy of Boredomand Fashion: A Philosophy, and has been translated to 20 languages. Svendsen will release an upcoming book about fear in Summer 2007.
Office for Contemporary Art Norway
The International Studio Programme Oslo (ISP Oslo)
International artists participate in OCA's International Studio Programme Oslo by invitation. The programme, for which information is available on www.oca.no, comprises four studios located in the city centre of Oslo. Incoming artist residents in the next weeks include Helen Mirra, Claire Fontaine and Pierre Bismuth. This particular seminar organized by Gabriel Kuri, has been made possible with funds from 03, a particular branch of OCA's funding supplemented by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.