Announcement: As for Protocols Seminar Series

Vera List Center for Art and Politics announce its Spring 2021 As for Protocols Online Seminar Series:

February 8–May 21, 2021

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School is pleased to announce its Spring 2021 As for Protocols Seminar Series. The continuation of a two-year curriculum curated around the 2020–22 focus theme As for Protocols, each seminar brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners across disciplines and locales to examine a particular figuration of protocols and how art and artists work with or counter them. Exploring issues of autonomy and surveillance, gendered labor and political education, and social and scientific experiments, the Spring 2021 seminars offer a discursive and multi-modal framing of these topics. Considered together, the seminars underpin a larger commitment of the focus theme—the pursuit of a decolonized set of everyday protocols that aim to ensure a more livable and viable future.

Accessibility

As part of our commitment to DEI, all programs and events of the Vera List Center are free for all to attend, physically or virtually. Public programs are video recorded and shared on our website and Vimeo page or The New School Youtube page and thus accessible worldwide. Occasionally, they are live-streamed. Our online events feature closed captions, ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation, and, sometimes, verbal descriptions.

• Seminar 4: Reimagining Protocols: Reclaiming, Challenging, and Queering Surveillance

Monday, February 8, 2021, 6–8pm EST, Online
Surveillance has become widely accepted as a prevalent feature in both our public and private worlds. How has the field of aesthetics dealt with what scholar Simone Brown terms “troubling surveillance” in reference to the spillover of military drones into civilian lives? What artistic practices and political frameworks have they created to challenge, resist, and queer modes of surveillance? Convened with Fabiola Hanna, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media at The New School, this panel features American Artist, Media Studies scholar Shaka McGlotten, performer Margaret Laurena Kemp, and artist Abram Stern (aphid).

• Seminar 5: Protocols of Revolutionary Feminisms to Re/make the World

Monday, March 8, 2021, 6–8pm EST, Online
Viewing International Women’s Day through the lens of the multi-scalar and trans-historical practices of revolutionary feminisms—political education, forms of organizing, gender representation—we consider what protocols are needed for a reconfiguration of the world focused on gendered labor, solidarity, and internationalism. Convened with New School faculty Ujju Aggarwal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Experiential Learning, Schools of Public Engagement, and Laura Y. Liu, Associate Professor of Global Studies and Geography, Eugene Lang College.

• Seminar 6: Lab Work: Art of the Experiment

Monday, April 5, 2021, 5–7pm EDT, Online
Whether as a research protocol or a demonstrative pedagogical form, the uses of the “scientific experiment” as a technique and site of Empire have been queered and decolonized across history and practice. Convened with Jeannine Tang, Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, The New School, and featuring artists fields harrington, Mary Maggic, and Claire Pentecost, this panel considers the possibilities of both amateur and professional traditions of scientific experiments and how they figure into aesthetic practices of various scales and scopes.

• Symposium: To Hold Things Together With BAK Utrecht

May 20–21, 2021, 11am–2pm EDT, Online
This first year of the seminar series concludes with To Hold Things Together, a two-day symposium on protocols of encounter and solidarity in the hyper-local and hyper-dispersed present. Organized with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, the symposium engages real and speculative community and institutional models, and proposes theoretical and practical elements of coalitional exchange. Presentations blend daily seminars led by the collective freethought with roundtable conversations, performances, and artistic interventions.

• Kite: Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). A Dialogue About Making Art in a Good Way

Friday, May 21, 2021, 4–5:30pm EDT, Online
As part of the symposium, Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite leads a conversation on Indigenous notions of ethics, protocols, AI, and how Lakȟóta ontology can inform art and world-making in a “Good Way.”

Other spring programs:

• Panel discussion
  Climate Relations: Indigeneity in Activism, Art, and Digital Media
  A Feminist Art Project’s Affiliated Society Session during the 2021 College Art Association Conference
  Thursday, February 11, 2021, 3–4:30pm EST, Online
  With 2020-2022 VLC Borderlands Fellow Maria Hupfield
• Panel discussion
  Communication After Refusal: The Turn to Love and Polyvocality
  Monday, February 22, 2021, 7–9pm EST, Online
  With 2020-2022 VLC Fellow Rasheedah Phillips
• Study group
  Necessary Work
  April 11, 15, 25 & 29, 2021, 7–9pm EDT, Online
  With 2020-2022 VLC Fellow Adelita Husni Bey
• Convening
  NO WORK, NO SHOP. Socio Environmental Imagination and Pedagogies of Action
  April 22–23, 2021, Online
  With 2020-2022 Boris Lurie Fellow Etcétera

Click here for more information, full program listings, and registration.

Image: Kite and Devin Ronneberg, Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock), 2019. Photo courtesy Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.