Art as Metadiscipline. Workshop by Matthew Fuller

On 27 June, Matthew Fuller will give the Art as Metadiscipline workshop at Hangar.

In recent decades artists have increasingly worked on the problems and the modes of enquiry of other disciplines and fields. The findings, styles of thought, and habits of operation and conduct of the sciences, sociology, mathematics, literature, governance and education, amongst others, have become resources for reworking and expanding. They are used to probe questions of power, imagination and invention. This condition has multiple roots. Some are quantitative, due to the expansion of art schools and the sheer volume of people trained and prompted to rework ideas in a reflexive manner characteristic of contemporary art. Others are to do with the changing terrain of post-conceptual art and its multiple tendencies, including what is discussed as research. Some of this includes an engagement with sciences and the adoption and alteration of their working methods. Such work includes approaches ranging from treating disciplines and their objects as “found objects” or of elaborating techniques of mutual interest. Others rework the idea of art into a process of learning and becoming in education or in forms of political and ecological direct action or speculation and also, uniquely to art, a mobilisation of what is rejected or expelled by disciplines.

These tendencies suggest that art is fragmentarily emerging as something that might be called a meta-discipline: a mode of work whose operation includes both working in other disciplines and to act upon them. Mathematics and philosophy have been key meta-disciplines for a long period. They work in and on both the conditions of possibility and the working matters of other fields.

Art has historically been allocated the role of working on sensation and feeling via representation. In the present, art also works on concepts, institutions, techniques and information, including the workings of these prior-metadisciplines. This workshop will examine aspects of the genealogy and potential of this tendency. The workshop will consist of an introductory talk and then a mapping exercise, all artists, curators, organisers and anyone interested are very welcome.

Practical information
Day: June 27
Time: noon to 14 pm
Place: Antigues oficines, Hangar
Language: English
Registration here

 

Matthew Fuller works on art, science, politics and aesthetics. His books include ‘How to Sleep: The Art, Biology and Culture of Unconsciousness’ (Bloomsbury 2018), ‘How to Be a Geek: Essays on the Culture of Software’ (Polity 2017), with Olga Goriunova, ‘Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility’ (Minnesota 2019) and with Eyal Weizman, ‘Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth’ (Verso 2021). With Shu Lea Cheang, he has developed a series of short and longer term events of ‘art by sleepers, art for sleepers and art as sleep’. He is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and part of the editorial collective of ‘Computational Culture, a journal of software studies’.