Semblance And Event

Download or read book Semblance and Event written by Brian Massumi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the “occurrent arts” through the concepts of the “semblance” and “lived abstraction.” Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question. It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented—variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention—which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension.

Download or read book Semblance and Event written by Brian Massumi and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. Buthow do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much aswhat is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on thework of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of"semblance" as a way to approach this question. It is, he argues, aquestion of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: "livedabstraction." A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance toinvestigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented -- variously known asinteractive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention -- which he refers to collectivelyas the "occurrent arts." Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events oflived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement,Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aestheticdimension.

Download or read book What Animals Teach Us about Politics written by Brian Massumi and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-03 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

Download or read book Before the Dawn: An AFK Book (RWBY, Book 2) written by E. C. Myers and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the future-fantasy world of RWBY, Rooster Teeth's hit animated webseries, teens train to become warriors. Join the fight in this epic official, original novel from E.C. Myers and RWBY's head writers! A storm is coming...After their strange mission in the desert, Coco, Fox, Velvet, and Yatsuhashi are back at Shade Academy, doing some "extracurricular" work to track down The Crown, a mysterious force that's snatching up people with powerful semblances. The job should be easier with Team SSSN by their side, but The Crown continues to evade them. Out of options and worried that a bigger plot is in motion, CFVY and SSSN notify Theodore, the Headmaster of Shade Academy, but Theodore has problems of his own.Troubled by the disasters at Beacon and Haven Academies and struggling to support the flood of refugee students, Theodore declares a new initiation-including the formation of new teams to better unite the student body. Amid mounting tension at the school, CFVY and SSSN must contend with unfamiliar teammates and uneasy rivalries, all while The Crown plots their next move. Don't miss this exclusive, original story straight from award-winning author E.C. Myers and RWBY's head writers, Kerry Shawcross and Miles Luna!

Download or read book Thought in the Act written by Erin Manning and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from Thought in the Act Combining philosophy and aesthetics, Thought in the Act is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art. Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. Thought in the Act enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.

Download or read book The Neverglades: Volume One written by David Farrow and published by David Farrow. This book was released on 2021-05-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Hannigan is a homicide detective in the isolated town of Pacific Glade, located in the dense forest regions of Washington. The town is so shut off from the rest of the world that it has earned the nickname “Neverglades” from its longtime residents. The Neverglades are no stranger to bizarre and inexplicable events, and Hannigan has seen plenty of things on the police force that seem to defy earthly explanation. Enter the Inspector. A mysterious figure always seen with a cigar and fedora, this otherworldly detective knows more about the workings of the Neverglades than any human being rightly should. There’s a rip in reality around Pacific Glade, he says, making it a breeding ground for the strange and supernatural, and the Inspector is just one of many entities who have managed to slip through. In these nine interwoven stories, Hannigan and the Inspector traverse the haunted grounds of the Neverglades, where it's going to take everything they've got to make it out alive. Time paradoxes, pocket universes, giant dream-weaving crabs and star-snuffing leviathans - it's a lot for one measly little human to handle. But with an eldritch abomination by his side, Hannigan just might stand a chance.

Download or read book 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value written by Brian Massumi and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A speculative exploration of value, emphasizing practical experimentation in its future forms How can we begin to envision a postcapitalist economy without first engineering a radically new concept of value? And with a renewed sense of how and what we collectively value, what would the transition to new social forms look like? According to Brian Massumi, it is time to reclaim value from the capitalist market and the neoliberal reduction of life to “human capital.” It is time to occupy surplus-value for a postcapitalist future. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value is both a theoretical and practical manifesto. Massumi reexamines ideas about money, exchange, and finance, with special attention to how what we value in experience for quality is economically translated into quantity. He proposes new conceptual tools for understanding value in directly qualitative terms, speculating on how this revaluation of value might practically form the basis of an alter-economy. A promising path, he suggests, might involve emerging blockchain technologies beyond bitcoin. But these must be uprooted from their libertarian origins and redesigned to serve not individual choice but collective creativity, not calculations of self-interest but collaborative speculations on the future to be shared. It is necessary to grasp the specificity of our contemporary neoliberal condition and the ultimately destructive forms of power it mobilizes to better resist their claim on the future. 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value is written to galvanize a radical redefinition of value for a livable postcapitalist future.