Diana of the Dunes / Artemis of Ephesus
“That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.”
Rebecca Solnit said that in a lovely book, and with the trip to the dunes last Sunday, Nick Wiley showed us how it’s actually done. Not by going off-trail into untrammeled wilderness, but by conjuring up a mental and physical labyrinth of pine cones, mother goddesses, succession theories and enticing tales of a University of Chicago “human computer” who defied the gender norms of their day. A pathbreaking trip for people whose attention loves to wander.
For this session Nathalie Zajac will present her work deconstructing the new normals of AI through shareable subversive strategies. It’s all about “deflecting the technological gaze.” She suggested reading the intro of Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, plus a few chapters if they sing to you.
AI is an amazing tool: a superpower. Yet if it is treated as the single font of knowledge and the ultimate guide to behavior, it could soon “flood the zone” of collective consciousness, intricately determining the content and patterning of all psycho-social worlds – much as social media has already done, but even more intensely. Natalie’s deflection practices are a way to start thinking about artistic and political strategies for the dawning age of hypernormalization.
Norm-core, normopath, normie: it’s the last thing you want to be. But wait a minute. Isn’t a norm the most precious of all things? If I say “blue” and it means something to you, isn’t that the positive effect of a linguistic norm? Aren’t norms the basis of all reliable measure, all social communication, not to mention all ethics? “What is a norm?” asks Francois Ewald in a disconcerting essay. “A principle of comparison, of comparability, a common measure, which is instituted in the pure reference of a group to itself, when the group has no relationship other than to itself, without external reference and without verticality.” How to get lost in that kind of world?
You can check out Ewald’s short text, A Power without an Exterior, if philosophy is your thing. One way or another, on Sunday we’ll discuss the social fabric of communication, its affective warp and electronic weft, and the arts of getting lost as “a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.”
ZOOM LINK HERE – STARTS AT 11AM
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