Nada como o firmamento
Para trazer ao pensamento
A certeza de que estou sólido
Em toda a área que ocupo

PRODUCTS AND TEAM

research might include (products):

• translation / publication of unreleased material

• Interactive environment (streaming, CMS)

• exhibitions / festivals

• conference / debates

• Reports / dossier / magazine / Book

• archive / audio-visual collection of material produced in latin america

Equipe (bolsistas) Team (fellows):








Proponente / Proponent:
Descentro
Goldsmith College

Realizador:
Editora Descentro
??
??

PARTNERS - Possiveis Parcerias:

OBJECTIVES / AIM

Contribute to the insertion in a transversal cut among disciplines and arts through productions which symbolize the expression of a new model of knowledge, based on a creation which have its origins in the novelty of concepts, in the debut of certain practices, in the mixture of diverse cultures and in the boldness of determined politics, in the sense of opening up alternatives for the study and the knowledge of new forms of relation in the production of common goods. Those disciplines and arts embrace a sub-connection among cultural studies, language studies, philosophy, anthropology and history insofar they dialogue with artistic, media and technological production. In this sense, the aim is to search a field that reach the possible common ground in the proposition of creative thought based and reflected in creative production.


We aim to achieve, research and support

- Other knowledges in their process of using and practicing communication technologies

- How public and state policies contribute or retreat alternative models of cultural production connected to different knowledges and sensibilities

- Art work / Interventions / performances which deals with the influence of knowledge basis and pressupositions that differs from the legacy of western modern rationality

- Texts and written productions which approach technologies and material production to an epistemology based on different modes of thought

THEMES / CONTENT / FOCUS Conteudos:

- Materia analitico inedito (conceitual e politico) que pode ser Imagens, Entrevistas, Ensaios, Reportagens (Relatos, testemunhos), Resenhas

- Analytic unreleased material (political and conceptual) which could include Images, Interviews, Essays, Reports, Reviews
(Nao necessariamente textos academicos, mas preferencialmente material de cunho critico, que contenha fontes, pesquisa, analises e interpretacoes, bem como uma perspective criativa e voltada a producao (material e simbolica) dos agenciamentos e seres tecnicos e culturais latino americanos)

- Aspectos da producao cultural que diferenciam as aproximacoes latinoamericanas em relacao as tecnologias e do modo de fazer/existir/pensar do chamdo “ocidente”
- Aspects of cultural, artistic and technological production which have a different approach related to the modes of doing /existing / thinking of the so called west.

- Analises da visao historica latinoamericana que propiciam a compreensao das diversas articulacoes entre cultura e tecnologia no continente tendo como foco uma aproximacao com a estetica
- Analysis of the "historical vision" [Lezama Lima - A expressao americana] that propitiates the comprehension of the many articulations between culture and technology in the continent having as a optic, its aesthetics influences.

- Interacoes entre as relacoes de raca, genero, classe, etnia e cultura e os usos de tecnologia no contexto latinoamericano
- Intersections between gender, race, class, ethnic and cultural relations and uses of technologies in the Latin American context

- Usos de alternativas aos padroes tecnologicos dominantes que se mostram como consequencia de um modo de pensamento alternativo e de uma nova forma de compreensao do sensivel
- Uses of alternatives

- analises criticas da influencia do Meio ambiente, Religiao, Culturas tradicionais e movimentos sociais nas percepcoes dos usos e interacoes entre tecnica e cultura

- discussao de esteticas conceituais centrais para a analise da sociedade, que compreendem termos, linguagem, vocabulario, nomes e rotulos que advem de uma entrada das tecnologias nas relacoes culturais e como a especificidade latino americana lida com eles

- buscar os mitos que tornam historia, o imaginario que se torna producao, os afetos que tornam relacao, as sensibilidades que tornam materia, as esteticas que se tornam conceitos, atraves de conhecimentos transferidos para os campos da arte, tecnologia e comunicacao e que encontram na politica e na cultura sua apresentacao.

CONTEXT - THEORETICAL APPROACH

It has already been said that the great impulse for European modernity and world wide Capitalism lies in the 1492 fact [Blaut, Jim – 1492]. But we know that both modernity and capitalism encompass a spirit, a symbolic structure which might sustain or quake its inner basis. Concerning the economic sphere, we can mention the accumulation of wealth retrieved from the American nature and the double role played by colonization, accelerating the cultural and economic ground as well as halting many possible evolutions elsewhere outside Europe [Amin, Samir – Eurocentrism]. In the cultural field (in a broad sense) the path from renaissance to enlightenment and hitherto modernity also was shaped by notion which became familiar in Europe after the discovery and creation of America. The “marvellous landfall in an unimagined hemisphere that blocked access to the eastern end of the known world” [Stephen Greenblat – Marvelous Possesions], besides a scientific and technological achievement which expanded the European borders, cosmology, biology, geography, anthropology and language, was also a challenge for the imaginary production, “forcing the strange to become familiar” [Karen Kupperman – America in European consciousness]

Dear notions within the recent cultural debate are still being developed from an historical, linear, eurocentric perspectives. Hybridity, Identity, Mestisaje, third worldism, universalism, colonialism and the question of the "other", landmarks for the foundation of many current analysis, are written from a perspective that does not challenge the regular comprehension and methodologies of disciplines of science used to impose modes of thoughts, ways of doing and manners of expressing (through rules, ratios, cognition, and hierarquization). And even when theories do so, they crash into the impossibility of a cultural production which reveals its perspectives.

The present moment of society, a late modernity, info-finance-capitalism and a mediate cultural complex raise as the edge of a process on which its beginning can be traced from the moment of expansion of mind and nature that happened with the conquer and submission of america. The art, tecne, everyday life, politics and material production had never lost its connection with that fundamental astonished and moment of break that illustrated the fabrication of a concept to picture a landscape of reality. Since then, a new language was formulated to embrace the novelties and surprises of a reality never seen. The "bewitchment" of the castellano, the imposition of names which worked as a baptism (a forced affiliation to foreign faiths), and the absence of words to describe this new reality, created an image of a displaced continent, a land without a place, a self without an own.
Since then, the expression and the becoming of america has been a chronical of conflict and junctions, discovery and hides, creativity and repetition, reflection and debuts of a continent in search of a concept. Many attemps were made within art, science, cultural production and social thought, and many innovative and radical ideas were builted. But there are occasions [Sociology of occasion] when one must re-start thinking in order to create and determinate its destiny and emancipation.

Conversions and changes oblige a culture to re-exist and re-invent its manners of doing (desvio de funcao tipico da expressao da tecne)

That language enigma cause of the clash of modes of expression, life, culture and knowledge occurred also as consequence of a sensitive experience. The abundance of landscape matched the absence of words. Within this process, a kind of synesthesia twisted the regular perception of reality, acquiring another level of interpretation and comprehension which would, from then, include terms as marvellous, tropicalism, transculturation, bricolage and so on, to refer to the cultural crossroad that represent Latin America. The language becomes a broad notion of self creation due to forms of production and expression necessary to "translate" a reality.

Over the last decades, Aesthetics has been broadly related with forms of mediation and objects of representation. The notion of a interrelation between being and non-being, expression and production, mind and body, gave place to a more practical notion of artistic and technological phenomena. Although always connected to art sphere in a broader sense, aesthetics has become more a shape of a form than an element for understanding different ways of knowledges and modes of thought.

As an element for the understanding many of the complex relation in the current analysis of culture and society, aesthetics has been object of debate in fields as philosophy, art, sociology, cultural studies and politics. Its elements cover aspects of body/sensuality/sexuality, craft/skills/tackling, architecture/ material/urbanism and nature/landscape/ecology, grasping all alternatives each kin of aspects could potentialize. In this sense, relating material production with the start up of spiritual faculties, aesthetics could determine many forms of engaging the relation of concrete and spiritual, challenging the present knowledge of subjective and objective construction.

Aesthetics should bring more an idea of movement, dynamics and exchange then contemplation, vision or

In a time where the cultural production through technology increases geometrically and technique penetrates in all fields of material and symbolic worlds, aesthetics seems to require a rearrangements or, at least, new analytical optics.

Insofar art, technique, politics and culture float in a haze of multiples perceptions, the acknowledgment and self-awareness seem to be also volatile in terms of constructing idealities and concepts able to twist the current epistemology of social and artistic studies and political praxis.

Latin America, as a fruitful laboratory of experiences, has an opportunity of presenting also a new perspective of the junction between politics and aesthetics as a alternative mode of understanding the increasing relations between technology, culture, nature and language. The analysis of late capitalism presented a language turn which seems to find a fertile receptacle in Latin American culture. The discussions about the overcoming of modernity, disappearance of borders, shifts in temporality and universality of cultures, hits the continent, again, with few production and participation of a creation of its own.

America as a Lab - exemplos de experiencias latino americanas na busca de uma alternativa epistemologica para a compreensao da tecnica

The idea consists in the sedimentation of a new ground for understanding perceptions and material production through a new kind of point of departure. Exploring the manners of the sensitive contained in the landscape, ecology, rituals, affections, beliefs and (...) the project aims to point an alternative logos for technology and conceptual practices. Pushing thinkers and producers to a common projection, the idea is to propose the examination of covered knowledges and points of inflection which translated the novelty as the "most ancient trace of the new world".


http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/KTFS%20guidance%20notes.pdf

http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Documents/knowledge%20catalyst%20scheme.pdf

http://www.britac.ac.uk/funding/guide/srg.cfm

http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Pages/KnowledgeCatalystScheme.aspx