“Observation as a Way of Life: Time, Attention, Allegory” A Lecture by Lorraine Daston Director, Max Planck Institute for the history of Science, Berlin 12 November, 6:00pm Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts 1 Washington place More Information: nd35@nyu.edu Lorraine Daston has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. She is currently completing a book on “Moral and Natural Orders” and co-editing a volume on “Histories of Scientific Observation.” Professor Daston has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Brandeis, and Göttingen Universities, and at University of Chicago, where she is Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought. She has also held visiting positions in Paris and Vienna and gave the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at Oxford University (1999), the West Lectures at Stanford University (2005, and the Tanner Lectures at Harvard University (2002). Among her recent publications are Objectivity (co-authored Peter Galison) and Thinking with Animals (co-authored with Gregg Mitmann); she has also co-edited Things that Talk, The Moral Authority of Nature, and the early modern volume of The Cambridge History of Science. Two of her books, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, and Wonders of Nature (co- authored with Katharine Park), were awarded the History of Science Society’s Pfizer Prize.

As if the Digital Labor bash at the New School and Yale’s New Media Ecology wasn’t double booking enough, SVA has also put together a conference on November 14th. Jonathan Crary will be speaking. The title is Media Modes.

The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has launched a special feature on public sphere formation on the occasion of the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Wall on November 9, 2009, hosted on the essay forum “Transformations of the Public Sphere”, co-sponsored by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK). With essays by Andrew Arato, Mark Beissinger, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Konrad Jarausch, Michael Kennedy, Elzbieta Matynia, Steven Pfaff and forthcoming essays by Hauke Brunkhorst, Jack Goldstone, Julia Hell, and others. The forum is interactive. Readers are invited to submit comments.

The New School for Social Research, Fall 2009 Anthropology Public Lecture Series

Situationist Ethnographies

a lecture by

McKenzie Wark
Eugene Lang College

Wednesday, November 18 at 6:00pm
80 Fifth Avenue, Room 529

McKenzie Wark is a theorist of media and new media with interests in new media technology,  intellectual property, computer games, and new media art and culture. He is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004), Gamer Theory (2007), and other works.

Organized by The Department of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research

Wednesday November 4th, Matthew Hindman will speak at the Columbia Communications Colloquium, 12-2 p.m. (room 601B).

The title is:

“The Elephant and the Butterfly: The Curious Political Economy of Web Traffic.”

The event is free and open to the public.

Philosophers, yes, but philosophers who have a lot to say about media and communications.

Philosophy Department Workshop Series – Critchley,
Butler, Ranciere

10/23/2009 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

A conversation with Simon Critchley, Judith Butler and Jacques Rancière

An events hosted by Verso

Location: Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55
West 13th Street, 2nd floor
Admission: Free; no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-
come first-served

By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School
Wednesday, October 21, and Thursday, October 22, 2009
Open daily, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Parts & Labor Gallery at The New School
66 West 12th Street, New York City
Admission: Free
www.veralistcenter.org

As part of By Any Name: Institutional Memory at The New School, a weeklong exhibition and program series co-produced with Parts & Labor Gallery, the Vera List Center presents the following free events:

Open Discussion
John Zinsser, The New York Art World and The New School: History and Possibility
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 – 1:00 to 2:45 p.m.
Parsons The New School for Design
Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street

Since the 1930s, artist-instructors such as Berenice Abbott, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Lewis Mumford, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Ralph Pearson have brought a resolve of professionalism to The New School. Since then, The New School has hosted international art luminaries from Joseph Beuys to John Currin to Trisha Donnelly. Yet, the university now finds itself at a crossroads of purpose and identity. How should it go forward in art education? What is “academic” and what is “professional”? What has the university been doing right? What has the university been doing wrong? Artist-instructor John Zinsser hosts an open discussion with current and former New School students, asking questions essential to the ongoing mission of the arts at The New School.

Roundtable
The Librarians’ Circle
Wednesday, October 21, 2009 – 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.
The New School, Orozco Room
66 West 12th Street, 7th floor
Free, reservations required at vlc@newschool.edu, or 212.229.2436

Librarians and archivists of The New School, together with faculty, discuss how notions of institutional memory and identity are created through libraries and archives. Examining the way bodies of knowledge are structured and organized, the librarians also explore possibilities for the future of information science, and consider how the social production of knowledge contributes to identity – on both the level of the individual and in institution as such.

With John Aubry, Director, Raymond Fogelman Library; Joseph Heathcott, Chair of Urban Studies, Eugene Lang College; Shannon Mattern, Professor, Media Studies and Film; Ed Scarcelle, University Librarian; and Wendy Scheir, Director, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Archives for Parsons The New School for Design.

Art Walk
Art in the Institution/Art as the Institution: The New School Art Collection and its Institutional Life
Thursday, October 22, 2009 – 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.
Vera List Courtyard, 66 West 12th Street, ground floor

The Vera List atrium and courtyard adjacent to the landmark Alvin Johnson Building harbor evidence of the history, memory, patronage and institutional identity of The New School – through an eclectic collection of significant art works. They range from Chaim Gross’ Acrobats Family of Five from 1951 and Gonzalo Fonseca’s ceramic tile mural from 1959/1961 to Martin Puryear’s seating arrangements (1997) and the 2008 addition to Dave Muller’s meditation on New School graphic identity.

Silvia Rocciolo, Curator of The New School Art Collection, and John Wanzel, Curatorial Assistant and MFA in Fine Arts candidate, consider the role of The New School Art Collection as a living archive and how it reinforces institutional narrative and identity.

These events are presented on occasion of the Vera List Center’s 2009/2010 program theme “Speculating on Change,” and are made possible, in part, by a generous grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Image: Dave Muller’s “Interpolations and Extrapolations (detail),” installed in the Vera List atrium at 66 West 12th Street.

Media, Culture, and Communication

Neil Postman Graduate Conference

Friday, October 30, 2009

Helen Mills Theater, 137 West 26th Street, New York

RSVP
Attendance at this conference is free and open as seating allows.
Please forward to faculty and students who may be interested in attending.

9:00                 Doors open | Coffee served

9:15                 Welcome

Marita Sturken, Chair

Rod Benson, Director of Graduate Studies

9:30                 Panel I – Vision, Sound and/as Commodity

Jamie Berthe, “Deconstructing Tarzan or Reconstructing Racial Hierarchies?”

Melissa De Witte, “Memory and the Spectacle: Phantom and fantasy in a new economy of the image”

Jennifer Heuson, “Soundscapes of the Black Hills: An acoustemology of the American West”

Faculty moderator: Martin Scherzinger

11:00               Panel II – Politics of Memory

Lisa Gitelman, “Daniel Ellsberg and the lost idea of the photocopy”

Hatim El-Hibri, “Sectarianism, Maps and Beirut: From the French Mandate through the end of the civil war (1920-1991)”

Christine Weible, “How the creation of museums and memorials at the site of the ex-ESMA is impacting collective memory of the Dirty War in Argentina”

Scott Selberg, “Cognitive Fever: Remembering Alzheimer’s at the National Library of Medicine”

Faculty moderator: Nicholas Mirzoeff

12:45               Lunch served

1:30                 Keynote
Brian Larkin, Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University

“The Mobility of Images and the Ethnography of Value:  Cinema in Nigeria”

2:45                 Break

3:00                 Panel III – Media Activism

Victor Pickard, “Crises and Opportunities in the Ongoing Struggle for Public Service Media”

Evan Brody, “(De)scribing Disease: Capitalist HIV imagery and cultural memory”

Dwaipayan Banerjee, “Media Activism in its Local Place: Lessons from Bhopal”

Marco Deseriis, “The Faker as Producer: Politics of fabrication and the three orders of the fake”

Faculty moderator: Allen Feldman

4:45                 Reception | Drinks served

Joseph Turow (University of Pennsylvania) will speak on

“Digital Media and the Transformation of Consumer Culture”

Communications Colloquium

Room 601A, Journalism 12:00 – 2:00pm, Columbia University

The seminar is free and open to the public.

Victor Pickard (NYU)

Can Public Policy Save the News? The Uncertain History and Future of Journalism

Communications Colloquium

Room 601C, Journalism 12:00 – 2:00pm, October 15