MAP: Cissie Fu, Cycling Chronicities
Cycling Chronicities: Presence and Luminance in Telematic Performance and Protest
Dr. Cissie Fu (Leiden University)
Wednesday, April 20, Lipsius Building Leiden (Room 030), 17:00-18:30,
In this talk philosopher and political theorist Cissie Fu invites us to test the limits of presence and luminance in telematic art through recent expansions of protest repertoire in Hong Kong, Spain, and South Korea. Premised on the dynamic interaction among artists, audiences, telecommunication devices, and new media content, telematic art throws into sharp relief those temporal confusions and spatial disruptions native to our digital environment.
Drawing on the work of Roy Ascott and Julian Maynard Smith, Fu explores how telematic performance reflexively dims realities, distorts senses, and dislocates perception by challenging clear-cut distinctions between real/virtual, embodied/projected, and live/digitalised. Resonating with poetry à la Paul Celan, such performances manifest a congenital and constitutive darkness. Reflecting Giorgio Agamben’s contemporary, they realize being on time for appointments that we cannot but miss. Returning Raymond Geuss’s call for productive obscurity in philosophical practice, they create the kind of ambiguity and indeterminacy that translates effectively from artistic expression to political engagement, towards a resuscitation of Hannah Arendt’s love for the world with 21st-century technology.
Dr. Cissie Fu is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Leiden University and Co-Founder of the Political Arts Initiative. She is currently writing a book on the politics of silence.
Contact:
This series is organized by Pepita Hesselberth, Yasco Horsman and Tingting Hui.To subscribe to our mailing list, contact Tingting Hui
Credits:
The talks are open to all students, BA, MA and RMA. There is no need to register, unless you are an RMA student and want to apply for earning 1 or 2 ECs. RMA students can earn 1 or 2 ECTS by: a) committing to attending all talks of one or both semesters, b) critically engaging in the discussion (e.g. by asking a question or giving a comment); c) writing a brief critical response to each presentation, the series/semester as a whole, or one specific topic (to be discussed) of no more than 1200 words. RMA students can apply by sending a brief motivation and a bio to the organizers.