Liminal Lives & Para-SitesTHEME
|
The 2nd Pelion Summer Lab on Liminal Lives & Para-Sites took place between June 28-July 8, 2018 in Chania.
This theme addressed new aspects of an ‘old’ issue. In our digital contemporary, liminality -- as a situation, experience, quality, subjectivity -- keeps expanding, unfolding itself over vast territories. In camps where intense refugee flows set down for indefinite time periods, in refuge and asylum sites where relations of care, kinship, community, confinement/freedom and nature/culture are reassembled, in public squares occupied by unpredictable political crowds and flash mobs, in bodies demonstrating new somatic possibilities and unboxing gender regimes, in hybrid monetary units and deterritorialized fiscal products, in new materialities, relationships, voices and images of self generated by digital machines and algorithmic systems, liminality increasingly claims and defines organic lives, social spaces, technological networks and material artifacts. This year’s summer lab will center on the liminal lives and parasitic/viral networks of the early 21st century through a genealogical perspective, which brings out the constitutive power of experimentation as a way of reshaping the world from early modernity to today. Indeed, liminality does not just speak to our historical situation, but also to our intellectual, methodological and institutional positionality in a neoliberal university structure, the contemporary ‘knowledge economy’ and an age of digital unschooling and DIY maker culture, affecting how we might work, talk and play. Our intent at PSL 2018 was to move beyond manifestos and nostalgia regarding the ‘crisis’ of the humanities to inhabit and explore a liminal humanities. What more appropriate, then, than to make Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Mary Shelley’s ur-text of monster tech and experimental novel par excellence, one of the touchstones of our investigations. Joining others around the globe celebrating the novel’s bicentennial, we discussed aspects of experimentation -- both ‘scientific’ and grammatological -- from the threshold of industrial modernity to digital capitalism, in search of revisiting experiment as a robust and productive methodology provoking critical engagement. The public experiment was first inaguarated at PSL 2018 -in fledgling form- and consisted of a prompt to problematize the idea of refuge and asylum (after we visited the nearby ruins of the historic Sanatorium) in dialogue with Mary Shelley's novel. The cohort produced and performed an Escape Room. The organizing committee for PSL 2018 consisted of Penelope Papailias, Mitsos Bilalis (who could not attend due to illness), Christina Mitsopoulou, Petros Petridis and Pantelis Probonas. The following seminars were presented by PSL 2018 faculty: Animation Laura Kunreuther (Bard College) Spectropolitics: Posthuman Death and Hybrid Bodies Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly) Aestheticizing Monsters Leandros Kyriakopoulos (Research Centre for the Humanities) The 'Monster' Within: Αbjected Psychic Spaces and Affective Encounters Eirini Avramopoulou (Panteion) Figures of Speech Daniel Karpowitz (Bard College) Frankenstein: A Publishing History Anna Karakatsouli (University of Athens) | ||
EXPERIMENT
|
What we do in the ShadowsThis year's students engaged in a collaborative experiment around the ideas percolating from our lab on Liminal Lives and Para-Sites, combining the diverse modes of expression the group has at its disposal and drawing on the evocative landscape in which they were dwelling - by sketching, collecting and recomposing audio, scavenging and disturbing waste, sewing, mapping, programming, acting, writing, photographing, filming, animating objects, etc.
Moving performatively, critically and collectively between physical and virtual spaces, audiovisual and multimedia formats, the low-tech and the high-tech, WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS aimed to interfere and disrupt habitual modes of framing, seeing and connecting the liminal lives that populate and define our contemporary situation. We hoped in this way to carve out a shelter for contemporary humanities thought that, at the same time, is not a retreat into solipsism, but an untimely and provocative intervention: a para-site, in other words. In response to the prompt to create a refuge or shelter, the cohort designed an interactive, multi-sited “escape room” that made use of the entire campsite. They did so by dividing into smaller groups, where each group designed their own multimodal interactive installation as one “room” of the larger “escape room” space. Each group installation was informed by a particular theme drawn from the cohort’s collective reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in relation to corresponding lab seminar discussions. While each group produced a stand-alone installation, all installations were linked and mapped across the camp site in such a way that outside participants would have to navigate one installation to proceed to the next, but not in a straightforward manner. The route taken through the escape room space was in part a function of the way participants engaged each installation’s particular prompts, which variously explored the embodied and performative dimensions of voicing and silencing, the local ecologies of plastic waste and their reanimation, the multisensorial haunting of a nearby abandoned sanatorium, to name but a few. Likewise, “dead ends” were staged less as design flaws than as a way to elicit deeper participant involvement and discussion with the themes of liminality that each of the installations interfaced in their own distinctive ways. DESIGN, PERFORMANCE, ANIMATION by PSL Cohort 2018 Simon DeBevoise Cal Fish Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins Ty Holtzman Anna Joos Lindberg Aria Machairidou George Mantzios Nikos Paschoulis Herbert Ploegman Eleni Tsatsaroni |
PEOPLE
|
Organizers
Penelοpe Papailias George Mantzios Pantelis Probonas Christina Mitsopoulou Mitsos Bilalis |
Cohort
DeBevoise Simon Fish Callan Goodwin-Hawkins Bryonny Holtzman Ty Joos Lindberg Anna Mantzios George Paschoulis Kalliolias Nikolaos Ploegman Herbert (H.B.) Tsatsaroni Eleni |
Faculty
Athena Athanasiou Eirini Avramopoulou Mitsos Bilalis Ada Dialla Laura Kunreuther Penelope Papailias Elena Tzelepis Vassiliki Yiakoumaki Yiannis Papatheodorou |
CO-ORGANISED WITH THE SUPPORT OF
