We are going to Helsinki for the Performance Philosophy network’s fifth biennial conference at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Here is our abstract:
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Speculative Epistemologies – Science and Magic. Triangulating zones of entanglement between knowledge, belief and embodied practice
A Key Group formed by Alice Lagaay, Anke Haarmann, Tom Bieling, Torben Körschkes, Petja Ivanova, Barbro Scholz and Frieder Bohaumilitsky
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A notorious legacy of coloniality is the assumption that knowledge is universal and that all societies and cultures are knowable from a singular ‘bird’s-eye’ point of view. This resulted in what some call a ‘tyranny of logic’; the boundary-defining framework of science that excludes any episteme that cannot be grasped by its methodological norm, defining thereby what can or cannot constitute the ‘knowable’ or ‘true’.
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Related to this are the challenges of post-colonial thought. In particular, the fact that any effort to think through and to overcome the violence of exclusion implied and continuously enacted by academic straitjacketedness, faces the problem of how to define and reframe what constitutes knowledge and truth as opposed to, say, belief, dogma, ideology – or mere speculation. Increasingly, ‘rebellious’ epistemes are emerging outside of academic frameworks, demanding, for instance, that more subjective, non-quantifiable experiences (as opposed to strictly empirically repeatable experiments) be equally valued as knowledge.
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Speculative Design offers a methodological toolbox to explore and potentially legitimize alternative models and modes through world-building based on socially not, or not yet, normalised ‘truths’. However, the problematic dichotomy remains: whilst a neutral and transparent universal truth is a fantasy, its disturbance through individual embodiments cannot be the sole alternative. A careful observation of the modes and assumptions, the premises and processes of different knowledge-generating practices within, and beyond, the confines of academia is required, i.e. actual inter- or transdisciplinary.
The team members of Spec Space, the Laboratory for Speculative Design Research at HAW Hamburg, will attempt to perform this interdisciplinarity on the stage of the academic conference, demonstrating different ways of knowing, approaching and triangulating the question of what is beyond the intellectual subjugation of academia and the problem of science as a tool for knowledge production. This will take place in a performative panel involving a pole dance training session between a designer/astrologer, a design-researcher and tarot/dream analysis expert, and a discussion between philosophers on the historical connection between logic/science & spirituality. Different matrixes of embodied and explicit knowledge will be dramaturgically brought together to challenge the audience to understand, decode, interpret the information, and analyse what different modes of knowing are ascribed and what value they receive in social realities. The results will be synthesized in a workshop with the audience after the keygroup presentation.
More info via Uniarts / Performance Philosophy Problems 2022:
https://www.uniarts.fi/en/documents/performance-philosophy-2022-key-group-presentations/?fbclid=IwAR24Q828o4edNGd6aVL51JgoCEdqk5b7XRmtpkIlaEmAi1e09DQXhxdZxVw#speculative-epistemologies-science-and-magic-triangulating-zones-of-entanglement-between-knowledge-belief-and-embodied-practice +
The team members of Spec Space, the Laboratory for Speculative Design Research at HAW Hamburg, will attempt to perform this interdisciplinarity on the stage of the academic conference, demonstrating different ways of knowing, approaching and triangulating the question of what is beyond the intellectual subjugation of academia and the problem of science as a tool for knowledge production. This will take place in a performative panel involving a pole dance training session between a designer/astrologer, a design-researcher and tarot/dream analysis expert, and a discussion between philosophers on the historical connection between logic/science & spirituality. Different matrixes of embodied and explicit knowledge will be dramaturgically brought together to challenge the audience to understand, decode, interpret the information, and analyse what different modes of knowing are ascribed and what value they receive in social realities. The results will be synthesized in a workshop with the audience after the keygroup presentation.
More info via Uniarts / Performance Philosophy Problems 2022:
https://www.uniarts.fi/en/documents/performance-philosophy-2022-key-group-presentations/?fbclid=IwAR24Q828o4edNGd6aVL51JgoCEdqk5b7XRmtpkIlaEmAi1e09DQXhxdZxVw#speculative-epistemologies-science-and-magic-triangulating-zones-of-entanglement-between-knowledge-belief-and-embodied-practice +