The Lures of Speculation
THE LURES OF SPECULATION
An Artistic-Theoretical Parcours about the Choreographies of the Speculative
»The man with an ordinary sense of reality,« according to Robert Musil, »is like a fish that nibbles at the hook but is unaware of the line, while the man with that sense of reality which can also be called a sense of possibility trawls a line through the water and has no idea whether there’s any bait on it.«
Not by accident, Robert Musil but also philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead compares the act of speculating with throwing out a fishing line: anyone who speculates fixes their eye on a target and, bravely or timidly, totally focused or aimed into the open, triggers a series of estimates or physical measures that actualise themselves in the throwing out of the line. In the process he exchanges the illusion of targeting and factuality associated with the speculative for a specific, voluminous stretched and space-structuring practice: for a playful ignorance that at the same time is a poetic production of perspectives and possible reality.
SCORES N°8: Lures of Speculation looks at the choreographies of the speculative; at the baits that, once thrown out, aim at the assumed desire of the target to be lured in and constantly update and organise our performative and discursive movements. As part of the artistic-theoretical parcours, artists and theoreticians are invited who, in their performances, lectures, lecture performances and dialogues, in workshops and training, work on their very own practices and devices of speculation. In complex choreographies and shimmering feedback logic, they open up the close mutual relationship of attraction and determination, success and failure, of estimation and anticipation, and in the process tell us something about the projections, interests and bodies that are at stake in the act of speculation.
Speculation with … four dialogues with lures:
Having a conversation means accepting a diversion from one’s own thoughts. In a dialogue sense becomes shared. The dialogós is a play through words in which the participants have to get involved with one another in an anticipatory way so that the flow does not peter out. Feeling out for possible answers, affirming or rejecting them in advance, a speculative gesture is part of every conversation.
Four live conversations follow hard on the heels of four terms that seem to be central to current aesthetic and political debates: materiality, history, improbability and intangibility. The lures interfere during the dialogue: a parasitical position on the issue, a digression, a performative counterargument. Attractions that cross the arguments and lure them onto other tracks. NIKOLAUS GANSTERER accompanies all the dialogues as a draughtsman and „materializer“ by documenting the course of the hypothesis-building in diagrams.
– Speculating with the intangible:
VINCIANE DESPRET (philosopher, University of Liège) and BERND KR ÄFTNER (artist, University of Applied Arts, Vienna) talk about the question of how one can address the dead and other presences that are not materially present. How one can we make them matter? Their baits are the Viennese dead (and probably a performer).
Please CLICK HERE to watch the presentation of Bernd Kräftner on video at the Mediathek of TQW.
– Speculating with history :
KATRIN SOLHDJU (cultural-studies scholar, Centre for Literary Research, Berlin) and KARIN HARRASSER (cultural-studies scholar, Linz University of Art) ask what kind of agents and forms of knowledge historiography produces and what the anteroom of the last things before the last looks like. JANEZ JANSA (artist, MASKA, Ljubljana) will divert their thoughts.
– Speculating with materiality:
MICHAEL HALEWOOD (philosopher, University of Essex) and TOMISLAV MEDAK (philosopher and performer, BADco. Zagreb) investigate what the material of the social is. What role has the material played in political theory and social theory since Marx? AINO KORVENSYRJÄ (artist, Helsinki/Cologne) will pour oil on the flames.
– Speculating with improbability:
PAULA CASPAO (artist Paris, researcher University of Lisbon) and BOJANA CVEJIC (artist, TkH / Walking Theory Belgrade) are going to foreground questions about what kind of affective object improbability is. They will also talk about performative gestures that are required to make place for insecurity and nonsense and the political nature of such gestures. ANNA MENDELSSOHN (performer, Vienna) will insure their imponderabilia and eventualities.
Concept: Karin Harrasser, Sandra Noeth, Alexander Martos
Translecture with live speculative drawing: Nikolaus Gansterer
Performance: 26 – 29 March 2014 at TQW Tanzquartier Vienna, Austria / Halle G and Studios.
Scores N°8: Lures of Speculation is part of TIMeSCAPES. Images and Performances of Time in Late Capitalism, a project of the following organisations: Science Communications Research (Vienna), BADco. / Filmprotufilm (Zagreb), MASKA (Ljubljana) and TkH / Walking Theory (Belgrad). With the support of the cultural programme of the European Union, Bundeskanzleramt Kunst and Science Communications Research.