ISCP Talk
January 12, 2016

Timothy Morton: and you may find yourself living in an age of mass extinction

Timothy Morton will give the keynote lecture And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction in conjunction with ISCP’s exhibition Aqueous Earth. This will be Morton’s first public lecture in New York City since 2011.

Timothy Morton is the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and has collaborated with Björk, Haim Steinbach and Olafur Eliasson. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence(Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 150 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, design and food. He blogs regularly at http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com.

Lecture is free and open to the public; RSVP is necessary to rsvp@iscp-nyc.org.

To join the talk virtually, create a Livestream account and join us on Tuesday, January 12 at 6:30pm EST.

This program is supported, in part, by New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
December 15, 2015

Blued Trees for Aqueous Earth

Aviva Rahmani will perform the first three movements of Blued Trees, a five-part symphony that began with an overture in Peekskill, New York during the summer solstice in June 2015 and will conclude on Election Day in 2016. Newtown Creek is the second movement of the symphony, and is conceived in relation to the exhibition Aqueous Earth. Blued Trees at ISCP will be a musical installation with live performers and projections and will include a requiem for the lost habitat of Newtown Creek that has become a Superfund site.

Peekskill was chosen for the overture of Blues Trees because plans for expanded pipelines there would pass within 105 feet of the flawed Indian Point nuclear plant which is only 30 miles from New York City. The music for Peekskill was installed as a series of vertical symbols painted on trees with ultramarine blue and buttermilk, to grow moss and reflect the connection between trees and water. The designated pattern of the painted trees was aerially conceived as one-third-mile-long musical measures. One tree equaled one note. Blued Trees has or will be been installed in 20 sites internationally, and is copyrighted to initiate litigation against the pipeline companies.

This program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
December 8, 2015

Salon: Sophie Jung, Lilian Kreutzberger, and Maruša Sagadin

Sophie Jung’s work revolves around the awe of unstable semiotics. With her textual and textured sculptures, she addresses the earnest and often absurd desperation in which uncertain concepts are packed into words, objects or facial expressions, shifting their assumed meaning from work to sentence to song. For the Salon, she will perform a selection of sculptures and elaborate on her recent work Operation Earnest Voice commissioned by Ballroom Marfa.

Painter and sculptor Lilian Kreutzberger synthesizes research into the futility and challenges of modern utopias and the role that urban space plays within them. Her wall-reliefs deal with process, abstraction and painting. Their scale and materiality either reveal or add ambiguity to how the work is read—as a map, motherboard or hieroglyph.

Maruša Sagadin’s practice centers on the relationship between language, architecture, gender and sculpture, drawing inspiration from pop and subculture sources. For the Salon, she will speak about new work that collages images from magazines, LP records and YouTube.