ACTS

AESTHETICS & CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT SEMINAR

ACT I: Venues for Thought Experiments in Aesthetics and Media

The UC Davis Humanities Institute has funded Venues for Thought Experiments in Aesthetics and Media, a research cluster co-directed by Associate Professor of Anthropology and AIL director Tarek Elhaik and Katharine Wallerstein, DHI Associate Director and chair of the Humanities Administration Network of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI). The cluster takes as its subject matter intersecting concepts of “venue,” “aesthetics,” and “media,” growing from conversations that have been taking place over the last 18 months between its core members. Experiencing, interrogating, and conceptualizing the material, virtual, and philosophical spaces in which scholars, artists, and others come together for shared creative and critical thought, along with the aesthetic, affective, and political tasks venues assume and perform, is at the heart of our project. Moreover, the cluster seeks to locate what we call “venue work” or “venue curation” within a larger media ecology – an ecology of organisms, souls, environments, ideas, concepts, and images. Our work is therefore inspired and animated by a search for an oikos where “cogitative souls” (Elhaik, 2022) can carry out their image and concept work, and where they can encounter and study, without mastering them, the “reveries” (Bachelard, 1960) that traverse and animate them. This oikos, one venue and many, is a time-space of immanence, of inquiry and experimentation, and, not least, of imaginative forms of conviviality.

The activities of this cluster, fruitful in and of themselves, will doubly serve as incubator and groundwork for a more durable project currently under development. This durational project concerns the creation of a traveling summer seminar called the Aesthetics and Contemporary Thought Seminar, or ACTS: ACT I, ACT II, ACT III, and so on. The seminar will offer human science and humanities scholars, artists, curators, scientists, graduate students, and other colleagues the opportunity to, first, investigate the very concept of venue; second, to linger, year after year, in conversations about the transmedia registers of contemporary aesthetics and the thought-experiments that they enable; and, third, to reflect on and produce conceptual reconfigurations from within this itinerant venue. The acronym ACTS furthermore evokes the stage, a dedicated platform on which various narratives unfold, surprise, and challenge the imagination.

Throughout the 2022-2023 year leading up to the seminar, a series of podcasts featuring the voices of seminar participants will be broadcast from AIL and the DHI, and the year may also be punctuated with any variety of gatherings, presentations, and experimental media activities at Davis or among our partners and affiliates.

The cluster members are:

The cluster’s schedule of activities is as follows: