MentorSeminar

Lens-Based Mentor Seminar

Beginning Mid-September 2022

Aim of Mentor Seminar:

to encourage ongoing research into the final project; to support the students in their work toward a graduation project. To set up a consistent work flow for graduation project research which can be regularly peer reviewed.

Structure and method of Mentor Seminar:

Bi-weekly seminar in which the mentor meets with the small student group (6 max); discusses self directed research (work on the final project); achievable aims are set at the end of each session and reviewed in the subsequent session.

Frequency of Mentor Seminar:

the rhythm runs 1 week GRS, 1 week Mentor Seminar &c.

Liaison with Graduate Research Seminar: At the beginning of the year, and at strategic points thereafter, the MS tutors meet with the GRS tutors to discuss how the two seminars can cooperate. Progress and workflow of individuals and groups is reviewed.

Group Reading & Annotation Sessions

These sessions are open to all Xpub and Lens-Based students and are an extension of the RW&R Seminar.

In the Group Reading and Annotation Sessions we take time to read and discuss texts that inform our current research.

Method:

The text is uploaded onto a pad.

The seminar leader* introduces the text and places it in its broader context.

The group read the text together, pausing to discuss it and make annotations on the pad.

The group begins with a key text chosen by the seminar leader. Further reading is suggested by members of the group (which may form the basis for subsequent sessions).

Steve will lead the first four sessions.

Session one:

Session leader: Steve Rushton

Focus:

The carrier bag theory of fiction and critical fabulation

Annotating texts:

Ursula K. Le Guin - THE CARRIER BAG THEORY OF FICTION [1986], in Women of Vision: Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction, ed. Denise Du Pont, New York: St Martin's Press, 1988

http://web.archive.org/web/20180124050208/https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/works/leguin/carrier-bag.htm also https://hub.xpub.nl/bootleglibrary/book/68 and https://hub.xpub.nl/bootleglibrary/book/276

Supporting texts:

Ursula K Le Guin - 'A Rant About Technology' http://ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html

Ursula K. Le Guin - 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds' . A story about ant literacy. The text written by a group of ants is analysed by linguists of the future.

Donna Haraway’s introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin’s TCBToF (Terra Ignota 2019);

Background -

Elizabeth Fisher, Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society; ( 1975) Fisher coined the term ‘carrier bag theory of human evolution’- it is derived from the discipline of anthropology. Haraway based a feminist reading of hominid social interaction on this theory.

D. Smith: Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling: Smith, D; Schlaepfer, P; Major, K; Dyble, M; Page, AE; Thompson, J; Chaudhary, N; 2017. Another text which

Peter Kropotkin. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. He posits that evolution is only possible through cooperation. Kropopkin refutes the notion common in 19th century evolutionary theory and theories of social evolution that adaptation depend on 'the survival of the fittest. To survive, Kropotkin argues, animals of the same species must cooporate. Later it was argued that in ecological systems mutual aid is essential to survival (mycelium and root systems for inst')]

Session two:

Critical fabulation.

Session leader: Steve Rushton

Focus: Critical fabulation. A method.

Saidiya Hartman – "I think of my work as bridging theory and narrative. I am very committed to a storied articulation of ideas, but working with concepts as building blocks enables me to think about situation and character as well as my own key terms." (On Working with Archives)

Texts:

Annotating text:

Saidiya Hartman – On Working with Archives - An interview with Saidiya Hartman

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives/

Saidiya Hartman.- Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Supporting texts:

Ursula K Le Guin – She Unnames Them

Session three:

Photography as a technology of self.

Session leader: Steve Rushton

Focus: This reading group will consider how, historically, photography shapes our identity. Taking Foucault’s idea of “technologies of self” as a starting point, this reading and annotation session will consider how the apparatus of photography has produced the subject from the age of the camera obscura to the age of the mobile phone.

Steve will contextualise Michel Foucault’s Technologies of Self and outline how this idea can be applied to our understanding of photography; discussing photography as a technology of self through an introduction to Daston & Galison’s Objectivity (2007) and John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation (1993).

Annotating text:

Hito Steyerl- In Defense of the Poor Image (2007)

https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

Supporting texts:

Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison : Objectivity (2007)

John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation (1993)

Jonathan Crary: Techniques of the Observer (1992)

Background text:

Michel Foucault Technologies of Self (1988)

Session four:

Writing Machines

Session leader: Steve Rushton

Focus: Writing Machines: Can reading and writing be described as technologies?

Can the alphabet be described as software?

This session will consider the interrelation between the reading and writing of machines and humans.

Annotating:

Daniel Punday - Computing as Writing (2015)

Supporting texts:

N. Katherine Hayles ¬ My Mother Was a Computer - Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005)

N. Katherine Hayles – Writing Machines (2002)

Espen J. Aarseth - Cybertext - Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997)

Italo Calvino- Cybernetics and Ghosts (1967)

Kenneth Goldsmith - Uncreative Writing : managing language in the digital age, Columbia University Press, New York (2011)

Session. Five:

From the analogue to the digital image.

Session leader: Steve Rushton

Annotating:

Vilém Flusser -Toward a Philosophy of Photography (1984)

Supporting texts:

Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

Jos de Mul - The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Recombination

http://www.demul.nl/nl/item/412-the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-digital-recombination