Mark Tansey, The Innocent Eye Test, 1981
Recently, a significant conversion from media oriented to reflexive, investigatory and knowledge-oriented practice has been taking place in the field of ‘contemporary art’. ‘Knowledge Forms’ course participants will be inquiring about the nature of the relation between research, pedagogy, ‘knowledge’ and sharing in times of planetary computation and algorithmic determinations. We will test if the methodology and aesthetics of cognitive mapping, introduced by Frederic Jameson in the beginning of the 1990s, can still be applied to learning, reasoning and imagining today.
In our first session we will introduce terms such as: humanism, anti-humanism, posthumanism, universal eye, affectable eye, nature, unlearning, sensing, pedagogy, knowledge. We will discuss these notions until we reach consensus on their provisional meaning for our course. In the continuation we will discuss Jameson’s idea of cognitive mapping and analyze selected artistic, cinematic and aural examples. We will ask: How does the cognitive mapping change in the age of aggregate data and machine cognition? Who is the new subject of cognitive mapping?
In our following session we will continue to discuss the potential of cognitive mapping in the age of smart machines and situate it more broadly in the context of what Donna Haraway has dubbed the capitalocene, abandoning the depoliticized notion of the Anthropocene.
Finally, we will attempt to work towards the development of a ‘mapping’ project based on the ideas explored in the previous sessions and focusing on recognitions of links between different areas of the development and application of new forms of machinic cognition, vision and image production.
Whether our investigation will be turned into a knowledge form as an App, mind map, a single image, cinematic object, intervention, open archive, interactive digital map, a twitter account or if it would not take any visible/material form at all is to be decided together.