How to do things with Academia

Description

Engaging in a dialogue with two previous symposiums, Humanities Unplugged (Berlin, 2010) and Collective Futures (London, 2011), the aim of this symposium is to extract a set of collaborative, academic practices, which can be utilized, enacted, and transformed by collective endeavors within and beyond academia. The symposium is particularly concerned with three perspectives: practices of knowledge production, collective performativity, and the boundaries of academia. These issues have already been scrutinized in the previous symposiums through workshops, presentations, games, and discussions, which sought to open up the personal to the collective, the theoretical to the practical, the rational to the affective, and the academic to what is not academia. In an attempt to think reflectively on these practices, the Copenhagen symposium will engage with the format of the manual. The manual usually operates as an instructional assistance for assemblage or usage and is supplied with most consumer products. Ideally, the manual offers an intelligible step-by-step account of ‘how to…’ enabling the user to acquire and utilize new knowledge for practical purposes. The Copenhagen symposium intends to take the manual beyond its confined scope and instead – learning from numerous artistic practices, e.g. Conceptual art and Fluxus or more recently the publication Do it edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist – to inhabit the format differently. Not by usurping the stagnant format that self-confidently claims to have the only correct solution to our problems, but rather to use the manual as a format, which enables a reflection on a practice: The manual as being preoccupied with how to do a specific thing and intended for the sharing of this knowledge. We wish to sound out the potential of the manual to make change by our own means in the context of academia today. In this spirit we propose to create a provisional collection of manuals on how we can redo academia.

Period	16 Jun 2011 → 18 Jun 2011
Event type	Seminar
Location	København, DenmarkShow on map