Topology III: Spaces of Transformation. Edges of the World @ Tate Modern, London (January 21, 2012)

Ernesto Neto
Topologic fluency on a structural camp for a high density point, yeah!  1992


Topology Spaces of Transformation Edges of the World 


Artist Ernesto Neto in conversation with physicist Luiz Alberto Oliveira, science writer and curator Margaret Wertheim and philosopher Éric Alliez. 


The participants in this panel experiment with intensive forces of philosophy, art, physics and cosmology, opening affirmative spaces of becoming porous to the outside. These experiments express different topological modes that can be understood as immersion in multiple, complex processes of transformation and flux. ‘Culture separates, bodies unify. How can we on a fragmented cultural planet, topolo-build a level of conviviality and habitability, beyond institutional skins, under a gravitational field?’ Ernesto Neto, Conviviality and Habitability at the Edges of the World ‘In recent years the application of topological concepts and methods to the study of dynamic systems has led to important advancements in our understanding of some basic aspects of the behaviour of complex phenomena appearing in different domains – material structures, living organisations and cognitive processes. Beside their intrinsic scientific importance, the new universality patterns emerging in such phenomena have significant implications for philosophy such as the venerable problem of morphogenesis, or generation of forms. Artistic endeavours, such as Ernesto Neto’s works, are pushing these formal almost abstract questions far beyond the purely intellectual realm, into a novel horizon of powerful aesthetic resources.’ Luiz Alberto Oliveira, Topology and Complexity: an Endeavour This paper focuses on Ernesto Neto’s installation at the Panthéon in Paris, Leviathan Toth (2006), which invests the Panthéon with a confrontation between the image of power (in its modern Hobbesian form) and the power of the image. Neto brings us into a semiotics of intensities that does not belong to the ‘aesthetic regime’, as described by Jacques Rancière, but rather to a diagrammatic agency addressed to site-specific art. The latter will be (re)constructed after Deleuze and Guattari – from a biopolitics of the Body without Organs to a Body without Image. This Body confers on signs a new material power of decoding, which destratifies the space (physical, symbolic, discursive, institutional) anchored around the oscillations of Foucault's Pendulum, in an energetics of forces. It thereby offers a diagrammatic alternative to the metaphor-image of aesthetics. Éric Alliez, Diagrammatic Agency versus Aesthetic Regime: Ernesto Neto's Anti-Leviathan ‘What does it mean to ‘know’? Topologically diverse and geometrically perverse, nature embraces throughout its evolutionary history structures of being that appal the most advanced mathematical minds. Knotted eels, crenellated corals and undulating sea slugs realize in their architectures spatial configurations that ‘educated’ humans long deemed impossible. Topology and geometry – the dual mathematical disciplines of form – have cascaded over the past two centuries into a series of intellectual revelations that had been physically understood in the organic realm since the Silurian age. Through an exploration of embodied knowledge in humble, sessile and brainless beings at the edges of human consciousness, this paper aims towards a rehabilitation of material wisdom, suggesting a radical, transformative alternative to modern symbolic modes.’ Margaret Wertheim, The Hyperbolic Imaginary: Topology and Geometry as Bodily Being.


This keynote conversation will be followed by a seminar led by Bernard Burgoyne on 28 January 2012. ‘The Edges of the World are constituted around pathways and contours, which grasp the spatial neighbourhoods involved in everyday life. These spaces embody the pathways or disconnections with which people are intimately engaged. They constitute the way in which spatial realities are at play in the determination of people’s lives: alternative pathways can often be found through such an enveloping space.’ Bernard Burgoyne 

Ernesto Neto is a contemporary visual artist. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro and has established over the past 20 years an international reputation for his work. In 2001 Neto represented Brazil in the Venice Biennale. In 2010, he had three major exhibitions, The Edges of the World at the Hayward Gallery, London; a survey exhibition, Intimacy, at Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo and Dengo at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil. He was commissioned for his largest installation to date at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, in 2009. Other notable shows include Leviathan Thot, Panthéon, 35th Festival d'Automne, Paris, 2006 (solo); Ernesto Neto -The Malmö Experience, Malmö Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden, 2006 (solo). In 2007, he spent six months in Atelier Calder Foundation, Saché, France on an artist residency. In 2003, Ernesto along with two other artists, Marcio Botner and Laura Lima, founded a contemporary art gallery, called A Gentil Carioca which is located in downtown Rio. He is preparing a retrospective exhibition at MARCO, México, which opens on December 8th 2011. 


Dr Luiz Alberto Oliveira is Researcher at the Institute of Cosmology, Relativity and Astrophysics (ICRA-BR), Brazilian Center for Physical Research (CBPF/MCTI), Rio de Janeiro; Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science, CBPF; Associate Researcher, Transdisciplinary Program of Advanced Studies (IDEA), School of Communication, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; Invited Lecturer, Oscar Niemeyer Office of Architecture; Scientist in residence, Dynamical Encounters International Art Workshops; and Curator, Museum of Tomorrow of Rio de Janeiro City (in development). 


Éric Alliez, is Professor of Contemporary French Philosophy at the CRMEP, Kingston University, London and Professor of Philosophie et Créations Contemporaines en Art at the University of Paris 8. His works in English translation include: Capital Times (preface by G. Deleuze), 1997; The Signature of the World. Or What is the Philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari?, 2005; Capitalism and Schizophrenia and Consensus. Of Relational Aesthetics, 2010; The Guattari Effect (edited with A. Goffey), 2011. His recent works are focused on a problematisation of aesthetics: La Pensée-Matisse, 2005; L’Œil-Cerveau. Nouvelles Histoires de la peinture moderne, 2007. Forthcoming: Défaire l’image. De l’art contemporain. 


Margaret Wertheim is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the intersection of science and the wider cultural landscape. She is the author of The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Margaret and her sister Christine co-founded the Los Angeles-based Institute For Figuring, an organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics. The IFF’s Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is the largest participatory science/art project in the world.


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Topology I: Spaces of Transformation Borders by Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra @ Tate Modern, London (Saturday 5 November 2011)

                                                   Eyal Weizman, “Intertwined Sovereignty,” 2005


For the first in this series of keynote conversations on topology, philosopher Étienne Balibar is joined by theorist Sandro Mezzadra (University of Bologna) and psychoanalyst Bernard Burgoyne in a discussion of the wider significance of borders.


Political space includes a functioning of borders: national and trans-national frontiers are structures that are both political and topological. There exist very different kinds of border, according to the different kinds of texture of space. These textures determine pathways that are available to people in their everyday lives. But the pathways may be impasses, although a way through them can sometimes be constructed.



The current proliferation of borders provides an angle on really existing global processes. A geographical disruption, a continuous process of rescaling of political, economical, legal and cultural spaces lies at the heart of globalization. A unilateral focus on exclusion, which has long characterized critical interventions of scholars, artists and activists on the topic of borders, is not able to grasp the "productive" power of borders as crucial devices of articulation of global processes. A topological approach to the analysis of contemporary borders can help in this sense to understand the mobility and elusiveness of spatial formations that are marked as much by differentiation as by connection. Stressing the relevance of border struggles for the constitution and contestation of new assemblages of power and capital leads to consider the border not only as a topic of research but also as an epistemic angle on some of the most pressing political questions of the present. Sandro Mezzadra, The proliferation and heterogenization of borders in the contemporary world


Étienne Balibar is a philosopher. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He has published widely in the area of Marxist philosophy and moral and political philosophy in general. His many works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, Roger Establet, and F. Maspero) (1965), Spinoza et la politique (1985), Nous, citoyens d’Europe: Les Frontières, l’État, le peuple (2001), Politics and the Other Scene (2002), L’Europe, l’Amérique, la Guerre: Réflexions sur la médiation européenne(2003), Europe, Constitution, Frontière (2005). He is the co-editor of the forthcoming book The Borders of Justice with Sandro Mezzadra and Ranabir Samaddar.


Sandro Mezzadra is Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of Bologna. He is editor of DeriveApprodi and is on the editorial boards of Studi Culturali, Scienza & Politica andFilosofia Politica. He is the co-editor of the forthcoming book The Borders of Justice with Étienne Balibar and Ranabir Samaddar. He has written widely on the areas of migration, capitalism, colonialism and post-colonialism, Italian workerist and autonomist Marxism. He has held a Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Turin (1994–6), the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Research Scholarship at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (1997–8) and the Max Planck Gesellschaft für Rechtsgeschichte, Frankfurt (1999).


Bernard Burgoyne has a background in psychoanalysis, philosophy of science and mathematics. He is a practising psychoanalyst – and Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis – who founded the Centre for Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University. He was at one time Research Assistant to Professor Sir Karl Popper, and works on questions of the scientific foundations of psychoanalysis in a way that does not exclude questions of classical political philosophy – as witnessed by the participation of Étienne Balibar in the Jury of Burgoyne’s Doctoral Thesis in Paris. Burgoyne will be publishing a book on these themes in the new year, and is simultaneously working on a second book, on the relation of scientific method to the work of Lacan and Bion. The topological formalisation of subjectivity is at the centre of his work, and he has given over 300 public lectures on this theme at Harvard, the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association, Tate Britain, the Southbank Centre, the Rijksdakademie for Fine Art, Amsterdam, the Royal Irish Academy, and many other clinical and academic institutions across the world.


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Topology: Secrets of Space - Seminars @ Tate Modern, London, by Bernard Burgoyne

Topology

Secrets of Space Seminars

© Science Museum / SSPL

Saturday 12 November 2011, 14.00–16.00
Saturday 28 January 2012, 14.00–16.00
Saturday 10 March 2012, 14.00–16.00
Saturday 5 May 2012, 14.00–16.00

Topology investigates the fabric of space. It looks into the texture of not merely physical space, but of all conceivable other spaces – spaces of phrases, spaces of colours or sounds, spaces of moods and passions, all spaces of operations on the human soul. Topology resolves the problem of what it is that holds a space together: of what it is that ties a point to its neighbouring regions. Human subjectivity is investigated using concepts of pathway, frontier or boundary; many formulations are possible – neighbourhood; limit; region; inside; outside; openness or closure – all of these can be used to formulate the secret of space.
These seminars will investigate a variety of spatial attributes appealed to by the cultural and political theories discussed in the Starr Auditorium during the Topology: Spaces of Transformation keynote conversations. They will give participants a familiarity with the texture of space. Their aim is that of reformulating the socio-cultural questions by bringing them into parallel with the spatial realities that they presuppose. Rather than allowing the question of space to fade into the background, these seminars draw topology into a relationship with these wider politico-cultural questions, in this way giving them a firmer orientation, while presenting them in a new light.

Bernard Burgoyne has a background in psychoanalysis, philosophy of science, and mathematics. He is a practising psychoanalyst – and Emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis – who founded the Centre for Psychoanalysis at Middlesex University. He was at one time Research Assistant to Professor Sir Karl Popper, and works on questions of the scientific foundations of psychoanalysis in a way that does not exclude questions of classical political philosophy – as witnessed by the participation of Étienne Balibar in the Jury of Burgoyne’s Doctoral Thesis in Paris. Burgoyne will be publishing a book on these themes in the New Year, and is simultaneously working on a second book, on the relation of scientific method to the work of Lacan and Bion. The topological formalisation of subjectivity is at the centre of his work, and he has given over three hundred public lectures on this theme at Harvard, The Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association, the Tate Britain, the South Bank Centre, the Rijksdakademie for Fine Art, Amsterdam, the Royal Irish Academy, and many other clinical and academic institutions across the world.


Read more @ Tate website