Join Cornel West, Graham Burnett, Saskia Bos, Jill Magid, Carl DiSalvo, McKenzie Wark, Mendi+Keith, Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau, Anjum Asharia, and Marisa Jahn for a book launch rife with pleasurable and productive friction.
Wednesday, October 10th, 2012, 7pm
The Great Hall at The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003
Opening Remarks
Saskia Bos, Curator, Art Historian, and Critical Theorist; Dean of The School of Art at The Cooper Union
Marisa Jahn, Artist, Activist, Editor of Pro+Agonist, and Executive Director of REV-
Agonistic Activities
Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau, Founders, Agonistic Architecture/Fake Industries; Adjunct Professors (Columbia University, The Cooper Union)
Artists/poets Mendi+Keith
Carl DiSalvo, author of Adversarial Design (MIT Press, 2012)
McKenzie Wark, new media theorist and Professor, The New School
Jill Magid
Marisa Jahn and Anjum Asharia (REV-)
Keynote Conversation
Cornel West, scholar, author, and activist
D. Graham Burnett, author and Professor of Philosophy of Science, Princeton University
Book signing
About
The mission of the School of Art of The Cooper Union is to educate artists in the broadest sense, both as creative practitioners engaged with a wide range of disciplines in the visual arts and as enlightened citizens of the world who are prepared to question and transform society. Central to the school’s philosophy is the advancement of the artist’s role in relation to the prevailing forms and institutions of cultural production.
Since 2000, REV- has engineered imaginative approaches to advancing cultural equity. We do so through constituency-led campaigns for social justice, youth media arts, research & development, and activities that trammel the boundaries between the printed word and public sphere. We are artists, advocates, media makers, low-wage workers, immigrants, and youth working to spark the public imagination and accelerate social change. www.rev-it.org
About the book:
Pro+agonist: The Art of Opposition
Editor: Marisa Jahn
Co-presented by: Walker Art Center, Northern Lights.mn, and REV-
Contributors: Princeton scholars D. Graham Burnett + Cornel West; design theorist Carl DiSalvo; theorist of postmodernity Jean-Francois Lyotard; Chantal Mouffe, author of The Return of the Political and co-author with Ernesto Laclau of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics; entrepreneur John Seely Brown; Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer finalist and author of The Intuitionist and Sag Harbor; artist/writer Anjum Asharia; new media artist Warren Sack; artist/activist Steve Shada; artist/theorist Mark Shepard; Doris Sommer, author of Bilingual Aesthetics; and McKenzie Wark, author of Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.
Pro+agonist: The Art of Opposition is a book and set of playing cards that explore the productive possibilities of ‘agonism,’ or a relationship built on mutual incitement and struggle. Designed in black and blue—the colors of a good bruise—Pro+agonist brings together writings by interdisciplinary artists, scientists, CEO’s, crackpots, war strategists, psychotherapists, and philosophers who raise questions about the importance of political dissent, the function of discord in discourse, the rules of escalating conflict, the roles of parasites within systems, the ins and outs of concord and congress, and more. The book’s introduction, written as a disagreement between a cast of fictional characters, is (arguably) more stimulating than if it were written from a single, unified perspective. Readers will emerge with a greater appreciation for duking it out and taking it to the streets.
p.s. – There’s a half-inch hole running through the center of both the book and the playing cards so that you can peek through, frame the Other, and keep them with you as you read along.
