Sternberg Press / The Contemporary Condition Series

On the relationship between quantifiable and experiential knowledge as entanglement of multiple temporalities.

What parallels are there between a human pranayama practitioner and a migratory bird in heavily datafied environments? And what can they tell us about the need to reorient our thinking towards the planetary?

In Contemporaneity in Embodied Data Practices, two artistic field studies provide the starting point for a dialogical reflection on the entanglement of diverse temporalities in body-related, datafied, and experiential practices. Shifting through lived, historical, evolutionary, and technological rhythms, Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder unfold their respective more-than-human frames of reference, and arrive at specific forms of agency in the contemporary moment.

Published in partnership with the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at Aarhus University.

Interrogating the existing formal educational pathways for artistic and practice-based research.

Challenging Institutionalization explores the heterogeneous processes of PhD and postdoc supervision in the arts to formulate shared horizons.

The publication is structured around a series of lectures and conversations that took place at the 2023 Supervising Artistic and Practice-Based Research summer school at BAK (basis voor actuele kunst) in Utrecht. The school brought together students and PhD and postdoc supervisors to reflect on and challenge the existing formal educational pathways for artistic and practice-based research. Keynote propositions were provided by Barbara Bolt (Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne), Geoff Cox (London South Bank University), Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes (University of Amsterdam), Andrea Phillips (BxNU Institute), and Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design). Participants engaged in topics around pedagogical formats and generative kinship; queering methodologies, knowledge, and institutional preconditions; archipelagic thinking and decolonial frameworks; criticality and community within institutional preconditions; modes of critical self-reflection and positionality; the interface(s) of “writing” and “practice,” and the urgent interfaces of artistic research and art activism in a period of environmental collapse.

This publication consolidates the school’s collective mappings into a constructive toolkit for researchers, supervisors, and evaluators, which will provide concrete pathways for pedagogical approaches to the societal and planetary urgencies of our era.

Copublished with the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at Aarhus University.

Contributors
Barbara Bolt, Maibritt Borgen, Geoff Cox, Laura Guy, Maria Hlavajova, Maureen de Jager, Kalen Wing Ki Lee, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Glenn Loughran, Jacob Lund, Mari Mäkiranta, Andrea Phillips, Henk Slager, Alexandra Regan Toland, Iris van der Tuin, Mick Wilson

Can we speak of composition when we are in a state of unfathomable decomposition? Art being made today defies coherent categorization, and the world presents itself, day after day, as spinning into confused chaos, structural disintegration, and violent disorder. Revising his well-known histories of contemporary art, Terry Smith argues that we must respond to the compelling need for coeval composition at a time defined by the contemporaneity of divisive difference. This book traces how—despite many obstacles—visual artists across the globe are rising to this challenge.The second volume of the Contemporary Condition series continues the investigation into contemporaneity as a defining condition of our historical present. The series aims to question the formation of subjectivity and concept of temporality in the world now. It begins from the assumption that art, with its ability to investigate the present and make meaning from it, can lead to an understanding of wider developments within culture and society. Addressing a perceived gap in existing literature on the subject, the series focuses on three broad strands: the issue of temporality, the role of contemporary media and computational technologies, and how artistic practice makes epistemic claims.The Contemporary Condition series edited by Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, Volume 02
Copublished with Aarhus University and ARoS Art Museum