A new initiative, co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Nina Katchadourian’s work has often looked at the relationship between the human and natural worlds, questioning our assumptions about those two terms and where we draw the line between them. Older works (such as Mended Spiderwebs, Natural Car Alarms, and Animal Crossdressing) will be discussed by way of providing background to the artist’s most recent animal-oriented piece, a complex multi-channel video and sound environment entitled Zoo. Shot in zoos all around the world between 2001 and 2008 (and ongoing), Zoo tries to ask what it is that we desire from and what we project onto the animal-human relationship. Both questions come under a particular kind of compression in the zoo environment.

Nina Katchadourian’s lecture follows a talk by anthropologist Laurel Braitman on September 14, also focusing on human-animal relationships.

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Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California, and grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. Her work exists in a wide variety of media including photography, sculpture, video and sound. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, the ICA Philadelphia and the Palais de Tokyo. In 2006, the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland, featured a solo show of works made in Finland and the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York, exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled All Forms of Attraction. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of recent video installation works in 2008. Katchadourian received her BFA from Brown University in Visual Art and Literature and Society, holds an MFA from UC San Diego, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Mathematics is often described as the science of patterns. This implies that it is primarily concerned with visualizing, analyzing and predicting the phenomena we observe in the physical world and in the relationships we see among numbers. But mathematics also looks at the unpredictable, the unexpected. In this talk, Jennifer Wilson explores what it means to be truly random; how the probability of unlikely events changes depending on how the question is asked; and how stable patterns can become chaotic and then stable again as we change the way we look at them.

Jennifer Wilson’s lecture is paired with a presentation on September 11, 2010, of Change Encounters, a new project on probabilities, predictions and prophecies by Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellows Lin + Lam.

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Jennifer Wilson is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Eugene Lang College. She received her B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. Her primary research interests are in mathematics applied to the social sciences, particularly cooperative game theory and voting theory, and has she recently co-authored a series of papers analyzing the Democratic Party Presidential Primary. She is also interested in the role of visualization in mathematics, and is currently working on a collaborative project to examine how illustrations are used to convey financial information.

The Vera List New School Art Collection Writing Awards are awarded annually to New School students to honor the best critical and creative essays inspired by works in the university’s art collection.

In 2010-2011, for the first time, the writing awards focus on a specific theme: In conjunction with the university-wide, week-long Noir Festival in April 2011, we seek submissions that in either style or subject matter display a distinct noir sensibility.
The term noir itself was coined in 1946 by a French film critic, who, on seeing some American films — The Maltese Falcon; Double Indemnity; Laura; and Murder, My Sweet — focused on their similarities, and labeled what he saw noir, or “black.” Noir thus became the label for a post-war genre of morally-ambiguous crime films and the novels that inspired them. Yet noir is as contemporary as the films of David Lynch, as deeply rooted in high modernist sensibilities as the plays of Samuel Beckett or the operas of Alban Berg, and as politically subversive as the art of Ross Bleckner or Adrian Piper.

The writing award celebrates nonfiction and fiction, prose and poetry. All students enrolled in The New School are eligible to submit either a critical or creative text. There is a first-place award of $400 and a second-place award of $200 in each category. Winners are selected by a rotating panel of judges. The prize-winning pieces are edited by professional art critics in collaboration with the writers and are published in a newspaper.

Winning entries will be featured in a joint celebratory and public reading with the MFA Graduate Writing Program/Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, scheduled to take place during the Noir Festival, April 1 to 8, 2011.

To download more information:

Submission guidelines and award details (pdf)

Guide to noirworks in the university’s art collection (pdf)

Essays by 2009-2010 award recipients (pdf)

Every year, the Vera List Center appoints a fellow or fellows from a pool of outstanding artists, curators, critics, and scholars who become an important part of the center’s intellectual foundation, contributing to its public programs while enjoying support in their projects from the VLC and The New School faculty. Special consideration is given to applicants whose work relates to the center’s annual theme.
The fellowship is part-time and nonresidential, and it carries a modest stipend. Fellows are appointed in the early summer for a term that extends from October 1 through June 30, during which they have access to a wide range of activities and resources throughout the university.

A selection committee drawn from The New School, former fellows and the Vera List Center Advisory Committee evaluates applications according to various criteria, such as the academic and/or artistic record of the applicant and the relevance of the proposed project to the mission and annual theme of the Vera List Center.

2009–10 Vera List Center Fellows
Lin + Lam
Since 2001, Lin + Lam have produced interdisciplinary projects that examine the ramifications of the past for the current socio-political moment. Attentive to materiality, site, and the specificities of different medium, their collaboration integrates their individual strengths and backgrounds. Trained in architecture, H. Lan Thao Lam uses photography, sculpture, and installation to address social memories of time, place and politics. Informed by critical cinema, Lana Lin has been interested in translation and the processes of identification. Their work has been exhibited at international venues including the New Museum, The Kitchen, the Queens Museum and LMAK Projects in New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, Arko Arts Center (Korean Arts Council,) Seoul, Korea, the Arte Nuevo InteractivA’07 Biennial, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Merida, Mexico, and the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China.

Lam received her MFA from CalArts and has been Assistant Professor at Middle State Tennessee University and Goddard College, MFA program. Lin received her MFA from Bard College and has been Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and the City College of New York. They have been honored with awards from the US Fulbright Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Princess Grace Foundation, among others.

Robert Sember
Robert Sember is a member of the international sound art collective, Ultra-red, which collaborates with constituencies involved in migrant rights, fair housing and anti-racist struggles, and efforts to combat the AIDS crisis. Recent projects include: SCHOOL OF ECHOES, a multi-year exploration of militant sound investigations initiated during a three month residency at Raven Row, London, in early 2009; SILENT | LISTEN, an investigation of the conditions of the AIDS crisis in the U.S. and Canada presented in partnership with, among others, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; WE COME FROM YOUR FUTURE, an investigation of anti-racism movements in the United Kingdom, presented at Tate Britain, London; and, RE: ASSEMBLY, a long-term project on migration and citizenship commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery, London.

As a researcher in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University from 1998-2006, Robert focused on sexual rights, treatment access, community mobilization, and cultural production in response to the AIDS epidemic. He has taught in the Medical Anthropology Program in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, the Department of World Arts and Cultures at the University of California in Los Angeles, the Center for HIV/AIDS Networking at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture and Society at the University of Amsterdam’s Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Recent publications include: Rhine, D.T. and Sember, R. (writing for Ultra-red) (2009) Ten Preliminary Theses on Militant Sound Investigation. New York: Printed Matter; Padilla, M., Hirsch, J.S., Munoz-Laboy, M., Sember, R. and Parker, R.G. (eds) (2008) Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. New York: Vanderbilt University Press; Parker, R.G., Petchesky, R. and Sember, R. (eds) (2008) SexPolitics: Reports from the Frontlines. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Sexuality Policy Watch; and, Sember, R. (2009) “Sexuality Research in South Africa: The Policy Context.” Vasu Reddy and Theo Sandfort, eds. From Social Silence to Social Science: Same-Sex Sexuality, HIV & AIDS and Gender in South Africa. Pretoria: HSRC Press.

The Vera List Center launches its fall 2010 season with a new lecture series, co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons. Focused on “Art and Science,” the series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Tatiana Lyubetskaya, the first lecturer, introduces the major concepts that form the basis of scientific thinking such as data, model, assumption and proof before examining specific cases of interdisciplinary scientific investigations in the fields of geology, geochemistry and geophysics illuminate. The common ground between these subjects is found in the principles of mathematical analysis, which allow processing and manipulating different kinds of information in order to construct theoretical models describing the behavior of complex systems. The fundamental problem of determining the chemical composition of the Earth and its applications in different Earth sciences serves as an example. Theoretical modeling of geological processes such as mountain building and erosion will be examined as it illuminates the ways in which a scientific problem is formulated and how possible solutions are constructed and tested.

Lyubetskaya whose own background includes the sciences as well as the visual arts – she received her PhD in geophysics from Yale and is a MFA graduate at Parsons – launches this new lectures series. The second speaker, on September 7, is mathematician Jennifer Wilson.

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Tatiana Lyubetskaya graduated from Moscow State University in 2000. In 2000-2003, Lyubetskaya worked as a researcher at the Oceanology Institute in Moscow and participated in the BEAR EUROPEPROBE project. She received her PhD in geophysics from Yale University in 2010. Lyubetskaya was awarded the William Ebenezer Ford prize for research in mineralogy in 2008 and the Elias Loomis Prize for Excellence in Studies of Physics of the Earth in 2009; her papers are published in the American Journal of Science, the Journal of Geophysical Research and the Journal of Petrology.

Comprehensive and sly, “Change Encounters” is a new project by Lin + Lam, developed over the course of the duo’s 2009-10 Vera List Center at the New School Fellowship and now making its debut.

Conceived in response to the Vera List Center’s focus theme “Speculating on Change,” Lin + Lam have collected an interdisciplinary array of cultural and historical predictive devices, appropriations from popular culture, historical sources, and academic scholarship, including original interviews with professionals from diverse backgrounds, and arranged this archive into an interactive website. “Change Encounters” offers multiple vantage points on the nature and the process of change and speculation and is accessed through a random number generator based on the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching, one of the oldest books in the world and a predictive device that is still commonly used today.

The project takes its name from the title of René Clair’s 1944 film It Happened Tomorrow, a comedy in which a journalist longs for the ability to know the future in advance in order to get a jump on breaking news. This desire for precognition determines human behavior across many fields of experience. Many a head of state – emperors, presidents and dictators, including Napoleon, Hitler and Reagan – has turned to oracles to authorize and consolidate their power. The capacity to aspire to a different future is, as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes, critical to the possibility for the underprivileged to overcome dire conditions. Can the capacity to aspire be learned and shared? What enables future thinking that is not a product of denial, defense or mere fantasy, but is constructive to change? For contemporary forecasting on our current recession and repressions, professionals from divergent fields join Lin + Lam and present their perspectives on how the future is speculated and formed.

Program
2:00-3:00pm
Premiere Showing “It Happened Tomorrow” by Lin + Lam

3:00-4:00pm
Panel Discussion

Patricia Ticineto Clough
Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York

Mitch Horowitz
Editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

Orit Halpern
Assistant Professor of Department of History at The New School for Social Research

H. Darrel Rutkin
Independent scholar, historian of science with an emphasis on the history of medieval, Renaissance and early modern astrology

4:00-5:00
Demo with Refreshments

Presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2011 focus theme “Speculating on Change.”

British artist Ryan Gander will launch the fall 2010 Public Art Fund Talks series with one of his celebrated Loose Associations presentations. In the form of a narrated PowerPoint, the artist will string together a series of images, memories, facts, and histories in a hybrid performance-lecture. These intense and sometimes comedic presentations have taken place across Europe, most recently as part of Art Basel’s new “Art Parcours” project. Gander’s first public art commission entitled The Happy Prince will also be on view at Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park this fall, beginning September 15, 2010. This new work, reminiscent of an ancient ruin, depicts the final moments of Oscar Wilde’s beloved children’s story.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today.

Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years.

The programs have been generously supported by the CrossCurrents Foundation.

Panel Discussion I

Survival vs. Autonomy: Public Funding of the Arts, Free Speech and Self Censorship

Have arts organizations modified their programming in the aftermath of the culture wars? What alternative funding sources and strategies have they had to employ? How does the commercial market relate to the issue of decency and community standards? What is the future of government funding for arts institutions and individual artists?

The panel examines how the introduction of the decency clause and culture wars over arts funding in general have contributed to a growing distinction between conservative and avant-garde institutions. A number of alternative organizations have sprung up that simply forfeit – or are prepared to forfeit – government funding. Panelists include founders of new alternative spaces that seek autonomy from government funding, leaders of art projects that have been supported by the NEA, and key figures in public art funding.

Moderated by Laura Flanders, GRITtv.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Congressional decision to require the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to consider “general standards of decency and respect” in awarding grants, the National Coalition Against Censorship and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School collaborate on two panel discussions and a video interview project evaluating censorship and arts funding today.

Prominent artists, non-profit arts organization directors, art dealers, and founders of alternative spaces examine issues related to how the introduction of the decency clause in particular, and the culture wars in general, have affected funding, free speech and self-censorship, and how attitudes towards notions of decency and respect for the values and beliefs of the American public have changed over the past twenty years.

The programs have been generously supported by the CrossCurrents Foundation.

Panel Discussion II

Decency, Respect and Community Standards: What Offends Us Now?

This panel looks at changing attitudes towards notions of decency over the past twenty years. It addresses how representations of nudity and sexuality have changed in contemporary art, and proposes a redefinition of what is considered offensive or inappropriate under our current political climate. The panel brings together artists whose work provoked the culture wars twenty years ago and those who deal with taboo topics today.

Moderated by Laura Flanders, GRITtv.

Vogue-ology contains elements which may seem incompatible: aesthetic experience and political activism; community events and forensic activities; public manifestations and private workshops. It is an exhibition presented at Parsons The New School for Design November 17 through 29, 2010, and highlights one of the least understood creative expressions – the dance form of Vogue – practiced usually by one of the most disenfranchised segments of American society, transgender and gay African-American and Latino men and women. Assertive and thriving, vogueing epitomizes the intersection of the personal and the political.

Inspired by poses in Vogue magazine, vogueing emerged in the early sixties and is now a performance genre most commonly associated with the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” directed by Jennie Livingston or Madonna’s song and video “Vogue” of the same year. Still largely performed by the artistic and social LGBT house/ballroom community in tightly scripted competitions, vogueing enacts class, gender and racial identities. Stylistic shifts register the community’s ongoing social analysis and history of struggle.

Reflective of the curatorial triumvirate at its helm – a member of the house/ballroom scene, a curator and an artist – the exhibition is an aesthetic experience as well as a study of methodologies, in particular participatory, sound-based strategies. Through analysis and codification of vogueing, the show will guide the development of a house/ballroom archive and an advocacy and community service organization.

Curators:

Arbert Santana Evisu, member of House of Evisu
Carin Kuoni, Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Robert Sember, member of Ultra-red sound art collective, Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellow