I am truly thrilled to introduce Object-Oriented Feminism here in New York with a conversation about OOF featuring a brilliant line up of interdisciplinary speakers: Irina Aristarkhova, Katherine Behar, Johanna Burton, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ashley Dawson, Piper Marshall, R Joshua Scannell, and Rebekah Sheldon. I'm especially thrilled that the James Gallery, where Emmy Mikelson and I curated And Another Thing in 2011, in some ways a proto-OOF exhibition, invited me to host the New York book event. Please join us at the CUNY Graduate Center on December 7.
This conversation with Irina Aristarkhova, Katherine Behar, Johanna Burton, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Ashley Dawson, Piper Marshall, R Joshua Scannell, and Rebekah Sheldon explores object-oriented feminism (OOF), a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourseslike speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialismthat take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Approaching all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, OOF foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, fomenting unseemly entanglements between things when objects come together in practices like art, science, activism, and everyday life; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims and instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong." The discussion centers on a new discipline-expanding volume, Object-Oriented Feminism (University of Minnesota Press), which seeks not to define object-oriented feminism, but rather to enact it by bringing together contributors from a variety of fields and practices including sociology, anthropology, art, science and technology studies, English, philosophy, and everyday life.
Object-Oriented Feminism Book Event
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
7:00-8:30pm
The James Gallery
Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, First Floor
New York, NY 10016
More info: http://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/object-oriented-feminism
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1775665069316802/
Object-Oriented Feminism is now available from University of Minnesota Press!
Special Sale: Get 30% off when you from the UMP website and use promo code MN80720. Once you reach the shopping cart, enter the code, click "update," and your discounted amount will appear. You can also order with the promo code by calling (800) 621-2736. Offer expires February 1, 2017.
A discipline-expanding book that explores the political and ethical potential of being an object
Taking on object-oriented ontologies and speculative realism, the authors of these essays are not shy in reestablishing feminist theory as a primary resource for thinking about objects, things and environments. The editor, Katherine Behar, offers a brilliant introduction to object-oriented feminism and the encounter it stages with current philosophical trends.
Patricia Ticineto Clough, author of Autoaffection and coeditor of Beyond BiopoliticsThe essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourseslike speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialismthat take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong."
Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an "object" in relation to others in this collection.
Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinić, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL.
More info & orders: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/object-oriented-feminism/
Use promo code MN80720 for 30% off!
The Pera Museum's full color bilingual monograph on my work is now available for international orders through Cornucopia. Along with images of the works in the Data's Entry | Veri Girisi exhibition the catalogue includes texts by Katherine Behar, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Fatma Colakoglu, Alexander R. Galloway, Tung Hui Hu, Daniel Rosenberg, and Ulya Soley.
The catalog brings together Katherine Behar's works from the exhibition. It features an essay by the artist, which focuses on contingency in data visualization and how it expands to art and digital culture, as well as an essay by Fatma Colakoglu and Ulya Soley about Behar's works in the exhibition and how they translate into contemporary culture. Daniel Rosenberg discusses the etymology of data in terms of measuring and draws parallels between the Pera Museum's Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection and Behar's work. Patricia Ticineto Clough coins the term "datalogical turn" to reflect her idea of the contemporary trajectory and talks about Behar's work in this context. Alexander R. Galloway discusses how the ideas of black box and black bloc came together in the late 20th century and reflects upon the possible outcomes. The catalog also features an interview by Tung-Hui Hu, in which he and Behar delve into her notion of "decelerationist aesthetics."
Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girisi Exhibition Catalogue
International orders: http://www.cornucopia.net/store/books/datas-entry-catalogue/
Turkish orders: http://www.peramuseum.org/Publication/Katherine-Behar-/197/7
I'm terribly honored to be giving a plenary talk at the Tuning Speculation IV conference in Toronto.
The truly phenomenal call for papers at the link below has me very excited for this event. And a heads up for Toronto friends, we'll have a small book event so come get your copy of OOF! More info coming soon.
Update: Here is a video of my keynote talk:
Tuning Speculation IV: De-Tuning Speculation
18-20 November 2016, Toronto (Canada)
Organized by The Occulture
More info: http://www.theocculture.net/tspeciv/
I'm very happy to participate by offering a reading from Object-Oriented Feminism as part of this event organized by Ellie Krakow and hosted in her stunning solo exhibition at NURTUREart.
As part of our public program series, NURTUREart presents Taking Up Space, a reading about objects and feminism. Guest readerswho are working in visual art, performance, poetry, translation, history, and cultural anthropologyinclude Katherine Behar, Aimee Meredith Cox, Katrina Dodson reading from Hilary Kaplan's translation of Angélica Freitas, Megan Heuer, Glendalys Medina, and Barb Smith.
Taking Up Space: An afternoon of readings
Nov 13, 2016, 3-5pm
NURTUREart
56 Bogart Street
Brooklyn NY
Admission is free and open to the public.
More info: http://nurtureart.org/objects-feminism-an-afternoon-of-readings/
OOF returns to SLSA for its sixth year to celebrate the launch of Object-Oriented Feminism with UMP! Object-Oriented Feminism (OOF)a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and new materialism that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primaryhas been created collaboratively at SLSA since 2010. In conjunction with this year's conference, we are celebrating the launch of Object-Oriented Feminism, an edited collection featuring many SLSA members.
Book Panel: Object-Oriented Feminismwith Katherine Behar and contributors
Society for Literature, Science and the Arts
November 36
Atlanta, GA
Launch Party: November 4, 2016, 8pmmidnight
Details TBA
More info: http://litsciarts.org/slsa16/
About the book: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/object-oriented-feminism/
One week only! Molly Mac has curated another supersmart show at The Alice in Seattle. I'm thrilled that she has included my video, Autoresponder.exe.
Fwd:<no-reply>@TheALice is an immersive exhibition of video, sound, screen capture performances and video games. Artworks in this exhibition explore the socialized isolations of social media platforms, virtual worlds and digital image manipulation software. Artists grapple with themes of nostalgia, corporate malaise, negative feedback, virtual labor and pixelated embodiment.
Fwd:<no-reply>@TheAlice
Wednesday, October 58, 2016
27 pm
6007 12th Ave S
Seattle, Washington 98108
Closing Reception October 8, from 68pm
More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/1775275762737074/
http://www.thealicegallery.com/current-exhibition.html
I'm looking forward to visiting Helsinki in late September and October.
I'll begin by participating in a seminar in the Pixelache Festival, on the theme of "Interfaces for Empathy."
The following week, I'll be workshopping a new project tentatively titled "Privacy Settings" with students in the new MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance (MAECP) program, headed by the wonderful Kira O'Reilly, at the University of the Arts, Helsinki. I will also give a public lecture about my work.
Interfaces for Empathy Seminar: Empathy, Technology, and the Emergence of Collective Intelligence
Friday, September 23, 2016
18:3020:30
Lapinlahti Hospital Auditorium
Lapinlahdentie 1, Helsinki
Details TBA
More info: http://festival.pixelache.ac/festivals/festival-2016/about
http://festival.pixelache.ac/events/conversation-empathy-technology-and-the-emergence-of-collective-intelligence
Artist Lecture: "Optimized, not Optimistic"
University of the Arts, Helsinki
Monday, September 26, 2016
18:0020:00
Theatre Academy, Auditorio 3
More info: http://www.uniarts.fi/en/events/fri-23092016-1115/katherine-behar-%E2%80%9Coptimized-not-optimistic%E2%80%9D-open-lecture-ma-ecology-and
Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1773199049632845/
Fans of OOF need wait no more! At long last, Object-Oriented Feminism will be out this fall from University of Minnesota Press and is now available for preorder from Amazon.
A discipline-expanding book that explores the political and ethical potential of being an object
Taking on object-oriented ontologies and speculative realism, the authors of these essays are not shy in reestablishing feminist theory as a primary resource for thinking about objects, things and environments. The editor, Katherine Behar, offers a brilliant introduction to object-oriented feminism and the encounter it stages with current philosophical trends.
Patricia Ticineto Clough, author of Autoaffection and coeditor of Beyond BiopoliticsThe essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourseslike speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialismthat take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong."
Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an "object" in relation to others in this collection.
Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinić, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL.
More info: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/object-oriented-feminism/
My first solo museum show, Data's Entry, will open this September at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. I'm showing new works alongside past projects, and am extra excited and humbled by the brilliant writers who are contributing to the catalog: Daniel Rosenberg, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Alexander R. Galloway, and Tung-Hui Hu, in addition to the wonderful curators, Fatma Colakoglu and Ulya Soley.
Pera Museum presents Katherine Behar: Data's Entry, the first museum survey exhibition of this New York-based artist who moves fluidly between sculpture, performance, video, and writing. Behar is drawn to the often confoundingand sometimes rebelliousways that people and technologies manage to coexist in digital labor. The works in Data's Entry show how working bodies can defy repetitive drudgery: user interfaces fail to fully script human action, machines run amok rather than faithfully automating human labor, and algorithms are crippled by their own exacting logic. Behar has become known for articulating an object-oriented feminist approach to her work. Instead of claiming special importance for human subjectivity, she seeks out solidarities between humans and nonhumans and finds in these connections unexpected traces of traditional gender, racial, and class dynamics.
In three new works inspired by the Suna and Inan Kıraç Foundation's Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection, the artist challenges the metaphor of cloud computing, which suggests that data is atmospheric and weightless. Behar asks, how has our understanding of data perversely evolved to become all measure and no weight? Her animations depict users of cloud computing swallowed in cloud-like growths. In another work, a dancer must negotiate an impossible interface of QWERTY keyboard keys representing data's material presence in the mind-numbing work of data entry. The exhibition also includes robotic vacuums doing the Roomba Rumba; the post-apocalyptic USB sculpture series, E-Waste; 3D-&&, in which a 3D printer grinds out Morse code messages for a herd of computer mouses; and a selection of the artist's parodic and poignant video works.
Katherine Behar: Data's Entry | Veri Girişi
Curated by Fatma Colakoglu and Ulya Soley
September 8, 2016October 16, 2016
Opening Reception: September 7, 2016, 68pm
Pera Museum
Meşrutiyet Caddesi No:65
34443 Tepebaşı - Beyoğlu - Istanbul
More info: http://www.peramuseum.org/Exhibition/Katherine-Behar/199
During the month of July, the art and media theory listserv -empyre- takes up the topic of "Feminist Data Visualization." I am an invited guest and will be featured during week 2.
Feminist Data Visualization / Moderated by Christina McPhee, with invited guests
Week 1: Catherine D'Ignazio, Lauren Klein, Erin Leland, and Lee Mackinnon
Week 2: Katherine Behar, Fiamma Montezemolo, and Annina Rüst
Week 3: Carolyn Castaño, Johanna Drucker, and Erin MacElroy
Week 4: Tif Robinette, Beatriz Cortez, and Aviva Rahmani
Archived discussion: http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2016-July/
More info: http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/index.php
I'm very pleased to share And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, now available from Punctum Books!
In And Another Thing: Nonanthropocentrism and Art, Katherine Behar and Emmy Mikelson explore how artists engage with nonanthropocentrism, one of the primary tenets shared by recent speculative realist and new materialist philosophies. Extending their investigations in And Another Thing, an exhibition which the authors curated in 2011, this volume documents both that exhibition and expands on two of its curatorial aims: prioritizing art historical contexts for contemporary philosophy (rather than the other way around), and apprehending artworks as historically specific objects of philosophy.
The book is organized in three sections. In the first section, Behar and Mikelson provide long-form essays that chart the evolution of nonanthropocentrism and art, spanning eighteenth-century architectural drawing, performance, minimalist sculpture, and contemporary postminimalism. These essays raise the stakes for art and speculative realism, showing how artists have figured and prefigured nonanthropocentric ideas strikingly similar to those expounded in various "new" realist, materialist, and speculativist philosophies. Literally occupying the center of the volume, in section two, the exhibition is represented by full-color plates of eleven works by Carl Andre, Laura Carton, Valie Export, Regina José Galindo, Tom Kotik, Mary Lucking, Bruce Nauman, Grit Ruhland, Anthony Titus, Ruslan Trusewych, and Zimoun. Artworks by these emerging and canonical figures lay bare the networks of alliances underlying the exhibition. The book concludes with three short meditations on the relation between nonanthropocentrism and art, and what that relation might portend for future thought. These essays, by Bill Brown, Patricia Ticineto Clough, and Robert Jackson, are speculative in the sense that they perceive potentials for theory arising from nonanthropocentrism's manifestations in art.
More info: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/and-another-thing/
I'm beyond thrilled to announce that my new book, Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity has been released by Punctum Books! I'm launching the book to coincide with the exhibition (listed below) at The Alice, and am very grateful to Eileen Joy and Molly Mac for making this happen!
I shall consider human actions and appetites just as if it were a question of lines, planes, and bodies.
~Spinoza, Ethics
In her first inquiry toward a decelerationist aesthetics, Katherine Behar explores this essay chapbook the rise of two "big deal" contemporary phenomena, big data and obesity. In both, scale rearticulates the human as a diffuse informational pattern, causing important shifts in political form as well as aesthetic form. Bigness redraws relationships between the singular and the collective. Understood as informational patterns, collectives can be radically inclusive, even incorporating nonhumans. As a result, the political subject is slowly becoming a new object. This social and informational body belongs to no single individual, but is shared in solidarity with something "bigger than you."
In decelerationist aesthetics, the aesthetic properties, proclivities, and performances of objects come to defy the accelerationist imperative to be nimbly individuated. Decelerationist aesthetics rejects atomistic, liberal, humanist subjects; this unit of self is too consonant with capitalist relations and functions. Instead, decelerationist aesthetics favors transhuman sociality embodied in particulate, mattered objects; the aesthetic form of such objects resists capitalist speed and immediacy by taking back and taking up space and time. In just this way, big data calls into question the conventions by which humans are defined as discrete entities, and individual scales of agency are made to form central binding pillars of social existence through which bodies are drawn into relations of power and pathos.
More info: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/bigger-than-you-big-data-and-obesity/
My video project Modeling Big Data will be presented in I Wasn't Just Saying What You Wanted To Hear... at The Alice in Seattle. Molly Mac beautifully curated this immersive video and sound exhibition, which stages a conversation between five single-channel video artworks by five different artists: Katherine Behar, Constance DeJong, Ellie Krakow, Jaeeun Lee and Elise Rasmussen.
I will also launch Bigger than You: Big Data and Obesity, my new book published by Punctum Books on the occasion of this exhibition.
I Wasn't Just Saying What You Wanted To Hear...
Curated by Molly Mac
March 5, 2016 - April 9, 2016
The Alice
6007 12th Avenue South
Seattle, Washington 98108
More info: http://www.thealicegallery.com/coming-soon.html; https://www.facebook.com/events/1263241133692781/
I'm excited to bring my dancing roombas to Princeton University's Butler College as part of Emergent Ecologies, organized by Eben Kirksey with Grace Glovier, Cody Kohn, Kayli Marshall, Greg Umali, and Alexandra Palocz. A special performance of High Hopes (Deux) will take place during the exhibition opening.
Emergent ecologies are being fastened into place with new rivets and cyborg articulations.
Featuring art by Maria Whiteman, Ellie Irons, Anne Percoco, Katherine Behar, Adam Zaretsky, Laura McLauchlan, Susan Hoenig, Praba Pilar, Anuj Vaidya, Krisanne Baker, Sophia Chao, Christy Rupp, J. D. Doria, Deanna Pindell, Steve Barrett, Vaughn Bell, Sharon Kallis, Peter Bauer, Peter Richards, Michael Klingler, Jeff Hoelle, and Karin Bolender.
OPENING RECEPTION: Monday, February 29th, 6-7:30pm This reception in the Studio '34 Cafe at Butler College follows a special event in the same space: "Hope in an Era of Extinction," featuring a talk by Cary Wolfe (Rice) starting at 4:30, and a panel discussion with other distinguished visitors.
CLOSING RECEPTION: Wednesday, March 30th, 6-7:30pm The closing event in Studio '34 Cafe will involve performative art interventions by Anna Dumitriu (London), Alex May (London), and Kathy High (RPI) in association with a two-day Symposium: "Gut Reactions: Rethinking Human Nature with the Microbiome."
Emergent Ecologies Art Exhibit
Curated by Eben Kirksey
February 29, 2016 - March 31, 2016
Princeton University, Butler College, Studio '34 Cafe
Come see Disorientalism's Maiden Voyage at Radiator Gallery! Our project inspired by the Land O'Lakes Indian will be included in Food Nostalgia, curated by Amanda McDonald Crowley.
Food nostalgia looks at food in contemporary America through a lens of fast food iconography and industrial food production. Participating artists variously draw on popular cultural references, brand recognition, bodies, memory, nostalgia, and playfulness. They ask us to think about our relationship to our colonial pasts, feminist thinking, cultural diversity, and marketing culture. The corporatisation of our food systems is deeply entrenched in our psyche; historical and contemporary trade routes of our food affect our cultural landscape. As a framework to explore how we cook, eat, and consume, food nostalgia will be a platform to share ideas, and food.
Food Nostalgia
Curated by Amanda McDonald Crowley
February 5, 2016 - March 13, 2016
Gallery hours: Friday and Sunday 1-6 PM, or by appointment
Opening Reception: Friday February 5, 2016, 6 - 9pm
Radiator Gallery
10-61 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, New York, 11106
tel: 347.677.3418
email: info [at] radiatorarts [dot] com
More info: http://www.radiatorarts.com/food-nostalgia/