constructive ambiguity

i am interested in taking kissinger's more sinister power play into a positive, generative direction in composition. rather than sapping optimism, i wonder how constructive ambiguity might push students to "write offshore" (cynthia haynes) and contemplate hopeful futures. how do we construct a future that allows for impredictability, cultivates that even? is there a way to …

quantifying sensing

tonight, my daughter and i took in the lovely flavors of a new [to us] local thai joint. it was the kind of meal in which everything that sounded good was requested from the tiny kitchen, a few bites were taken from each dish, and everything else was packaged for days of delicious leftovers. my favorite …

Composing ‘Histories of the Present’

a quick pin, excerpted from Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism (p. 63-69): Here, figures move transversally across spaces, quickly and lingeringly, reflectively and in the flesh, projecting and sensing atmospheres and impacts to which they have to catch up and respond. Sometimes they unlearn, sometimes they repeat, sometimes they surprise themselves, often they just lean numbly or …

touching [writing, writing] feeling

Handout/notes from yesterday's WIDE-EMU '16 presentation with my brilliant colleague, Thomas Passwater. touching [writing, writing] feeling The sense of physical touch itself, at least so far, has been remarkably unsusceptible to being amplified by technology (Sedgwick 15). The experience named “writing” is this violent exhaustion of the discourse in which “all sense” is altered, not into another …

queers in their natural habitat

in presenting to a classroom filled with artists today, a preface: this is not fine art, it is fun art. there is a marked line between arts | crafts. a line that i crossed when i pulled out the party beads, caution tape, dyed feathers, pipe cleaners, hot glue gun. according to my research partner, …

address unknown.

what happens when relational movement halts? when the movement toward is not accepted? does the affective pulse just dissipate or does it return to prick the sender? is this energy somehow compounded in the affected? or does it become redistributed/taken up by others? does it feed tolle's painbody?  how does a halting alter the course of …

performing empathies [the empathics]

I'm always thinking about what are the potentials for the body. What can we be? Who could we be? Who could we become? -Saya Woolfalk wanting to put The Empathics into conversation with Blackman's work in body studies and Manning's relational movement concepts, as well as explore this project from a cultural/comparative and/or visual rhetorics perspectives ... …

Massumi, Brian. The Autonomy of Affect, I

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002. 23-28. Print. To remember: the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect (24) content[:] its indexing to conventional meanings in an inter-subjective context ... determinate qualities (24) effect[:] the strength or duration of image ... its intensity …

Manning, Erin. Touch as Technique

Manning, Erin. "Taking the Next Step: Touch as Technique." Senses & Society 4.2 (2009): 211-26. Web. To remember: We move to touch and touch to move. Touch operates as a technique of the moving body, inciting it to direct its movement. The direction is relational, it is towards.Touching towards means igniting a relation that does …

Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling Introduction

Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003. Print. To remember: Famously, these are a cluster of sentences about which "it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing [a thing] ... or to state that I am …