AG4xKANSAI Talks 2022

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Conference Panel at AGxKANSAI 2022 4th Intl Conference on Arakawa and Gins

PANEL PRESENTATIONS in English w/ Japanese translation

Conference Website (incl. videos): https://www2.kansai-u.ac.jp/agx2022/

Title: ANOTHER KIND OF KNOWING – on the Work of Arakawa and Gins

Speakers: Don Byrd, Alan Prohm, Jondi Keane

PANEL

Abstract: The three members of the panel will discuss the work of Arakawa and Gins as the project of another kind of knowing – one that overturns epistemological assumptions deeply embedded in the history of culture and the human as usual. This other kind of knowing displaces discourse and practice from logics of self-consistency and closure to logics of process and procedure. It pursues a radical pragmatism with the radical imperative: Always act so there are more ways to act next.

PRESENTATIONS

A RADICAL REORDERING (OF, WELL, EVERYTHING): Notes toward a Book to be entitled, Another Way of Knowing

Don Byrd PhD – poet and theorist

Don will speak to the scope of Arakawa and Gins’ project viewed as an elaboration on The Mechanism of Meaning, a work which unpacks notions of intelligibility and meaning into constituent process and procedures. The move from logic to meaning, from coherence and universality to unique events, procedures (algorithms) and incoherence, characterizes A+G’s project as a whole.

ON PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE AND EFFICACY in the Work of Arakawa and Gins

Alan Prohm PhD – artist, scholar and educator

Alan will focus on the unique proposition A+G make in the history of art, architecture and philosophy: procedural architecture. He will question the efficacy they posit with this proposition in theory and practice, examining landing site theory (biotopology) and the architectural body as bases for an architecture for overcoming dying.

HOW-TO KNOW-HOW: The Taskings and Askings of Arakawa and Gins towards the Realisation of Living

Jondi Keane PhD – artist and independent scholar

Jondi will focus on processes and procedures of “cleaving” and on how this key notion— of joining and separating segments of awareness—informs activity within and across the modes of perception and action involved in responding to the body-wide prompts of A+G’s work.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

The authors have each known and worked with Arakawa and Gins for decades and are currently co-authoring a book with the title, Another Way of Knowing.

Don Byrd is a poet and a nervous observer of an overcrowded Earth, where the evolution of complex intelligence has been displaced by generalizations for forty millennia or more. He is Professor Emeritus of the State University of New York in Albany where he taught literature for 42 years, publishing poetry, essays and books including The Great Dimestore Centennial (1986), a book-length poem, and The Poetics of the Common Knowledge (1994).  ​​

Alan Prohm is an artist, scholar and educator living in Berlin. His researches in the spatiality of knowing and meaning led him to the work of A+G, which he has taught in art & design contexts since 2004.  With The BodyBuilding Project (2007/2014), the Reading Room exhibition (2008) and his ongoing built poem, The Tubular Loom since 2011, he has explored procedurality in practice. A speaker at the previous A+G conferences (2005, 2008, 2010) and at the funeral for Madeline Gins in 2014, he organized the 4-Day event The Proceeding Procedure and published 2 issues of Procedures journal. ​​

Jondi Keane is an artist and independent scholar. Since 1981, he has exhibited, performed, published and taught in the USA, UK, Europe and Australia. His doctorate, Arakawa and Gins: The Practice of Embodied Cognition (2006) led to co-organising the Reading Room exhibition at AG2 (2008), the AG3 conference (2010), the Unruly Techniques symposium (2014) and the Second International Body of Knowledge: Art and Embodied Cognition Conference (2019). He is co-author of Creative Measures of the Anthropocene (2020) with Kaya Barry.

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BOOK PROJECT with Jondi Keane and Don Byrd

More on the book project coming soon

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SOME SAMPLES FROM THE FILES

A few soundbites, a bit of an interview and a slideshow:

Landing Sites
Biotopology
more…

Recording of Madeline Gins, with Arakawa at AG1 Paris Nanterre 2005

CONVERSATION w/ MADELINE GINS AND ARAKAWA

In conversation with Arakawa and Gins – on an Architecture for Tentativeness – with Alan Prohm NY Nov 2006

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SLIDESHOW: Visit to the Reversible Destiny Office 124 W. Houston St NYC – photos Alan Prohm 2006