| psl_2018_booklet_.pdf |
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)
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)
