An Indeterminate Other: Being, Virtuality, and Materiality
1 March - 31 May 2020
Biography
Dr Lesick is the past Chair of the School of Craft + Emerging Media at Alberta University of the Arts, where he teaches in Media Arts, and directs the Creative Environment for Emerging Electronic Culture. He’s also held an adjunct professorship at the Digital Futures Initiative in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and has been visiting faculty at the Banff Centre and the University of California at Irvine. In 2012, Lesick was awarded the inaugural People’s Choice Award for the Most Inspiration Digital Leader at the Digital Alberta Awards.
Summary
The project combines philosophical and theoretical analyses with praxis-based artistic exploration negotiating questions of Being, meaning, and mattering. In an era of
quantum physics, mediated virtuality, artificial intelligence, and of biological, biochemical, and bioepistemological poeisus (creation) what are the implications of these shifting notions of materiality and processes of “mattering” on how we consider this fundamental notion of Being? Thinking through the likes of Georg Fredrick Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Stephen Shaviro, Catherine Malabou, Karen Barad, and others, I am asking in what ways do these phenomena expose and problematise naturalised determinate categories and draw us instead toward mattering as an expression of relational determinacy derived from the void of indeterminism.
The totality of possible existence is played out in Being, in the void, in an unembodied state of indeterminacy. This is transposed to the phenomenal world according to the complement of material conditions which both limit and manifest material sets of possibility. A window into the indeterminate and virtual of Being may be human cognition and memory. The mind captures material experience through memory and folds it against itself, shuffling, juxtaposing, and rearticulating entities (whether these be objects, concepts, or other boundary forming agencies). In doing so we are able to hypothesise and speculate possible cause-and-effect relationships into the future, while constantly re-evaluating and reconfiguring the past.
In the contemporary era no longer are the parameters of possibility merely determined in cognitive virtuality, but this virtuality has been disarticulated from the individual and fed back to them as synthetic memory or knowledge. Through television, film, and an increasing complement of interactive media we are inscribed with histories and experiences which we have never tangibly experienced. Media gives us access to virtualised realities which intersect, conflict, and overwrite embodied experience.
Dr Lesick is being hosted by Dr Angela Piccini, Film and Television.
The following lectures are planned, dates, times and venues will be confirmed in due course.
Public Seminar - Breaking Aesthetics
“Aesthetics” is one of the most prominent, and arguably overused terms in art. The word has become interchangeable with variety of concepts such as taste, beauty, style, fashion—the word is a floating signifier that has been quickly stripped of its meaning. This seminar will explore challenges issued by 8 theoreticians and philosophers in Process Philosophy, Speculative Realism, New Materialism, and Post- Humanism and develop the concept as a fundamental form of mattering that demands meaning.
Graduate student seminar - What are the limits of no-thing?
Emmanuel Levinas contended that even nothingness is a thing. How are we to understand such a foundational concept when it is equally so impossible to apprehend. This seminar explores the limits of “nothing” in philosophy, art, and every experience.
Departmental lecture - Preliminary Conjectures on Indeterminacy and the Dissolution of Time, Space, and Matter as Substance.
Using the concept of indeterminacy as a diffraction point this lecture tugs at the thread of being, time, and space as requisite “containers” of subjective phenomenology, exploring instead whether “human” might not be the only phenomenological condition that we experience. Drawing on my work in media arts and materiality, the trajectory of thinking will be drawn between Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Karen Barad and others to render indeterminacy as a productive philosophical heuristic.
