Events

Building on the conversations started in previous sessions, each seminar is foregrounded by an artistic experience and accompanied by readings.

Seminar 1: Protocols as Language and Communication
September 14, 2020
6-8 pm EDT
Online

Convened by Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research, the first of these seminars considers relationships between linguistic, technical, aesthetic, social, and ethical protocols with Taeyoon Choi, Jesse Chun, Meredith D. Clark, and Chancey Fleet.

Seminar 2: Protocols for Community and Equitable Networks [as applied to education]
October 19, 2020
6-8 pm EDT
Online

Convened by Robert Sember and Jennifer Kabat with artist Shani Peters of  The Black School; Tsige Tafesse of the collective BUFU (By Us For Us); and artist Caitlin Cherry, founder and co-director of Dark Study this seminar explores the protocols for education outside the neoliberal university to prioritize care, fugitivity and shared learning.

Seminar 3: Protocols and Biopolitics
November 16, 2020
6-8 pm EST
Online

Convened by Josh Scannell, Assistant Professor of Digital Media Theory at The New School’s School of Media Studies with Anthony Ryan Hatch, Ronak K. Kapadia, Jasbir Puar, and artists Stephanie Misa and James Clar this seminar explores the relationships between the body, race, and technology, especially as they play out during a pandemic, with its own set of protocols, and when so much is laid to waste and so much else is up for grabs.

Seminar 4: Reimagining Protocols: Reclaiming, Challenging, and Queering Surveillance
February 8, 2021
6-8 pm, EST
Online

How have theorists and artists challenged these imposed protocols, engaging in what scholar Simone Browne has called “troubling surveillance,” to address the spillover of military surveillance into our civilian lives? Convened with Fabiola Hanna, with artists and scholars American Artist, Margaret Laurena Kemp, Shaka McGlotten, and Abram Stern (aphid).

Seminar 5: Protocols of Revolutionary Feminisms to Re/make the World
March 8, 2021
6-8 pm, EST
Online

For International Women’s Day, the fifth seminar, convened with Ujju Aggarwal and Laura Y. Liu, explores the theme of revolutionary feminisms, and the multi-scalar and trans-historical practices they embody, especially in the context of social reproduction, gendered labor, care and kinship, solidarity, and internationalism.

Seminar 6: Lab Work: Art of the Experiment
April 5, 2021
5-7 pm, EDT
Online

This seminar seeks to use and remake “the scientific experiment” in consideration of critical histories and theories of technoscience and with acknowledgement of “the experiment” as always also a site of Empire, but whose uses are sometimes democratized, queered, and decolonized by various practices. Convened with Jeannine Tang, with artists fields harrington, Mary Maggic, and Claire Pentecost.

The seminar series concludes for this academic year with a symposium in May with a forward-looking charge: how do we decolonize the protocols of our daily lives to ensure more equitable conditions for all.

SYMPOSIUM
To Hold Things Together
May 20–21, 2021
11 am–2 pm, EDT
Online

To Hold Things Together is a two-day symposium on protocols of encounter and solidarity in today’s hyper-local and hyper-dispersed existence. As a collaboration between the Vera List Center and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, in Utrecht, it also enacts modes of social and institutional nodality, and concludes the first year of the VLC’s program cycle As for Protocols.

CONVERSATION
Kite: Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). A Dialogue About Making Art in a Good Way
May 21, 2021
4–5:30 pm, EDT
Online

Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite hosts a conversation with artistic and research collaborators on her year-long VLC project Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road) focused on how Lakȟóta ontology can inform art and world-making in a “Good Way.”