Thematic Projects 2015-2016

THEMATIC PROJECTS

Devastatingly Experimental Sketch Komedy TV Ob-Pilot (DESKTOP), a thematic project led by Michael Portnoy in fall 2015

At the end of this 10 day course, we’ll have produced the most devastatingly experimental sketch comedy TV ob-pilot ever conceived and shot in South Central Rotterdam. Prefaced by an extremely compressed survey and analysis of both mainstream and more experimental TV sketch comedy, we’ll jump right into the making of the thing: developing the overall show concept, pitching ideas, writing sketches, rehearsing, shooting, editing and post-production. Comedy is quite easy. It’s just math. You take a known thing, break it into variables and do math on it until it cracks into an unknown that cracks you. And in sketch comedy you simply repeat the math with slight variations each time. It would follow then that experimental sketch comedy is very convoluted forms of math done to the known which produce very convoluted forms of unknowns that crack the ways you’re used to being cracked in unknown, devastating ways, which are then repeated, unpredictably. Art does the exact same thing, but usually with much fewer cracks and much less math. And its sense of timing is dreadful.

Bodies Know: Things Are in Motion. Spinoza’s Legacy: the many ways of thinking through the affective intelligence of all that brings the material world to life, a year-round thematic project led by Jan Verwoert

It’s not like we’re gazing at the world from afar. We’re part of it. Our thoughts, emotions and actions are part of earth’s living fabric, they connect us to the material world, and emerge out of that very connection. What concepts of agency, ethics, aesthetics gender politics and ecology can we develop when we understand our existence as deeply interrelated with what surrounds us?

These intuitions could be understood to lie at the heart of neomaterialist enquiries in contemporary philosophy. They find their vital inspiration in the provocative thoughts of Baruch Spinoza and his vocal translator, Gilles Deleuze. Today, this legacy is critically reworked and given a new edge by thinkers such as Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti and Beatriz Paul Preciado. The seminar will take its time, closely reading Spinoza, using his philosohy as a point of departure and touchstone to then engage the key intuitions of the thoughts advanced by Deleuze, Braidotti, Barad, Bennett and Preciado.

The seminar will be equally dedicated to a practice of close-reading and engaged in a search for new vocabularies. It will find its point of departure and point of return in the writing of Spinoza. The ‘Ethics’ will remain a travelling companion throughout the year and sessions will begin by revisiting the book, so as to engender an experience of continuous encounters with the joys and challenges of this text. In each session we will then proceed read thinkers whose ideas comment on and develop Spinoza’s ideas. In the spirit of contemporary Spinozist thinkers, the seminar itself will go beyond merely reconstructing the history of an idea. We will seek to actively rework the thinking we find in the texts we study, so as to develop our own take on how to give voice to a materialist politics of affective intelligence and impassioned embodiments today.