Conversation, Seminar

“When we were planning this event, we weren’t sure what to call it. The fluorescence distracts. Content moves like freight from one port to another. A cart drawn by two oxen is near a crane, presumably used for loading stone. Large blocks of stone lie in the foreground. Leafless trees line the river in the background. Well at least half the picture is given over to the sunset. You know that the sun is not setting. You know that the earth is revolving to obscure the sun, but you see the sun set. Heaven up, hell down, what other dimensional relationship could there be? Just as circles, ellipses, and hyperbolic curves in the plane can be obtained as sections from a three-dimensional double cone, so too various (aperiodic or periodic) arrangements in two and three dimensions can be obtained from postulated hyperlattices with four or more dimensions.

Fire is an informing presence. While that discovery was important, you saw no practical applications— mud into brick, sand into glass, ore into metal— why go out and quarry more stone? It is the days after the revelations. Film noir without the cellphones. You are on a river but you only get a faint sense of the river on either side. You are a ghost, you are an angel, you are a supernatural force. You have an anchor but the current still goes. There is a bust. They laugh as you try to unlearn rock, paper, and scissors. If you walk through in the next millennia, you will be able to see the ice melt in the next few days.

I was surfing in an opposite direction . . . a thousand selves doubled and discharged . . . people loved to ridicule weather forecasters. Is it possible to make meaningful probability judgements of events that occur essentially once? Should a surfer trust the ocean? Proximity? Distance? Battle gravity or, so, the moon? The question had rather to do with the discontinuous relations of influence that linked these two utterly isolated phenomena. It’s a series of windows . . . with themes like rivers and coasts and so on. First cloud acquisition: pretty much exclusively flowers and garden scenes. The idea of a new structure was the necessary paradigm shift to break the impasse. I was stunned. I talked in circles about a series of avoidances and I excused myself over and over again. “What about your deferred maintenance on this building?” I didn’t want to laugh. Development, construction, demolition, re-development, re-construction, re-demolition, un-re-development, re-un-construction, de-un-remolition . . . the silence is broken by silence, like growing infinite space.

The infinite player lives horizonally. Arbitrary is a feeling beyond unaided perception. End of vision never ending. A round trip. Why would you not be able to spin it? I’m still dreaming about it, I guess I remain unsatisfied. This is nonstop:

The last line of this video, which reads:

‘The introduction quote from Hardt and Negri’s book reads:

“People fight and lose the battle.
And the thing that they fought for
comes about in spite of their
defeat. And then it turns out not to
be what they meant. And others
have to fight for what they meant
under another name.”

‘This is Nonstop. We’re Antiochians. We’re still here. And it’s not over yet.
Thank you.’

Thank you.

Thank you.”

We would like to invite you to share food and a presentation with text, image and conversation about what it means to create community in crisis. Bring yourself, your thoughts and, if you’d like, a dish. Casey Gollan and Victoria Sobel are 2015-2017 Vera List Center Fellows whose fellowship project is part of the Vera List Center’s Post Democracy cycle of programs. Continuing to address what they refer to as incisive mission-creep of cultural institutions, particularly at their alma mater Cooper Union, Sobel and Gollan LARP a means of building culture that is activated, distributed, and durational. In the face of corporate restructuring of cultural institutions, they entertain both the inevitability of financialization and expansion, as well as the possibility of resituating these educational and cultural systems.

As part of their fellowship Gollan and Sobel have organized two public events with the Vera List Center: an “encounter” and a “presentation.” The first of their presentations, Post-Democracy Paradise-Lost, took place at The New School on September 8, 2016, and the first encounter, Explained Pictures with Jeffrey Scudder, took place on October 6, 2016. This is the second in the series of public presentations. Gollan and Sobel will present in non-linear ways on asynchronous events and fictions related to the notion of the “nonstop” and its articulations at Antioch College and Cooper Union.