Escapologies

Sept 25 2012, 21:00 - 24:00
Camp, Opernring 5-7, 8010 Graz

Hosted by Stephen Wright (CAN)
With: Federico Geller / Abriendo caminos (AR), Éric Létourneau / lecollege (CAN), Scott Rigby / Basekamp (USA), Charles Esche / Van Abbe Museum (NL), Dmitri Vilensky / Chto Delat (RUS), Florian Schneider / kein.org (D), Greg Sholette / Dark Matter Archives (USA)

Part of http://www.truthisconcrete.org/

Increasingly, practitioners from all fields of human activity are seeking exit strategies - instead of seeking more thorough integration. Voter abstention in elections; the flight from political parties and their organs of representation; the quest for anonymity and multitudinity; leaving academic disciplines in pursuit of more extradisciplinary modes of knowledge exchange; repurposing skills in parallel proto-institutional structures, often better equipped than their official variants. Even in the mainstream artworld, an increasing number of artists are simply dropping out deliberately evading its all-encompassing attention economy and politically enfeebling prescriptions of visibility.

Withdrawal from ideological and institutional capture has a history, but the current forms of offensive retreat suggest that it is more about eluding ontological capture - escaping assignment to a given ontology as art. Above and beyond the question of “why” one might seek to escape, and “from what” exactly and “where to”, is the question of “how”.

Escapologies brings together a polymorphous bloc of escapees (and of those who having contemplated escape have decided on a self-conscious pursuit of inclusion) to examine an array of escapological strategies which they have implemented, observed or contested.

We can’t promise this will be live online (or can we?), but If you’re in the area this symposium–and surrounding events that week–would be worth the trip!

See you then–or soon!