Art and Politics in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2018 | Los Angeles

Otis College of Art and Design
May 21 – June 3, 2018

Faculty Bios


Nima Bassiri is an intellectual historian and historian of the human sciences, with a focus on the modern history of brain and behavioral medicine in Europe and beyond. He is currently Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, where he is also an affiliated faculty member in the Department of History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. Starting in August 2018, he will be Assistant Professor in the Program in Literature at Duke University. He is co-editor of Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject (Fordham University Press 2015) and is completing his first book, Pathologies of Personhood: Forensics, Madness, and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century, which examines the medico-legal and sociopolitical anxieties that surrounded the clinical elaboration of several major and quite unsettling neuropathologies during the nineteenth century in Europe and America.

Juli Carson is Professor at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Critical and Curatorial Studies Program and The University Art Galleries. She is author of Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007) and The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics (Buenos Aires: Letra Viva Press, 2011). Her essays on conceptual art and psychoanalysis have been published in Art Journal, Documents, October, Texte Zur Kunst and X-Tra, as well as in numerous international anthologies and monographs. Her forthcoming book, The Hermenuetic Impulse: Aesthetics of An Untethered Past, will be published by PoLyPen, a subsidiary of b_books Press.

Suparna Choudhury

Andrew Culp teaches Media History and Theory in the MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics and the School of Critical Studies at CalArts. His first book, Dark Deleuze (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), has been translated into numerous languages including Spanish, Japanese, and German. Current work includes a monograph on technologies of anonymous politics titled Persona Obscura (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). His essays on media, film, politics, and philosophy have appeared in Radical Philosophyparallaxangelaki, and boundary 2 online. He also serves on the Governing Board of the Cultural Studies Association.

Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, where he also directs the MA Aesthetics and Politics program. He is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel (2012) Narrative Care (2013), and Plastic Sovereignties (2016), and a co-editor of Gilbert Simondon (2012) and The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism (2013). He edits Parrhesia and the Critical Theory/Philosophy section of the Los Angeles Review of Books and is a member of the boundary 2collective. His new book, Finance Fictions, is forthcoming with Fordham University Press.

Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. A collection of her essays, What Is? (Cuneiform Press) was published in 2013 and Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press) appeared in 2014. Digital_Humanities, co-authored with Anne Burdick, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, (MIT Press) was published in 2012. In addition to her academic work, Drucker has produced artist‘s books and projects that were the subject of a retrospective, Druckworks: 40 years of books and projects, that began at Columbia College in Chicago in 2012. She is currently working on a database memoir, ALL the books I never wrote or wrote and never published. Recent creative projects include Diagrammatic Writing (Onomatopée, 2014), Stochastic Poetics (Granary, 2012), and Fabulas Feminae (Litmus Press, 2015). In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts by the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017.

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University where he is an assistant professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English. He also serves as the academic director of Future Tense, a partnership between ASU, New America and Slate Magazine, and a co-director of Emerge, an annual festival of art, ideas and the future. Ed’s research and teaching explore digital culture, creative collaboration, and the intersection of the humanities, arts and sciences. He is the author of What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, spring 2017) and co-editor several volumes including Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds (MIT Press, spring 2017). He completed his PhD in English and American Literature at Stanford University in 2011 and his bachelor’s degree at Princeton University in 2002. Before graduate school, Ed worked as a journalist at TimeSlate, and Popular Science.

Charles Gaines

N. Katherine Hayles, the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her books have won numerous awards, including the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998-99 for How We Became Posthuman:  Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship for Writing Machines  She teaches courses on experimental fiction, literary and cultural theory, finance capital and culture, science fiction, and contemporary American fiction.  Her latest book is Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious.

Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (on leave from the American University in Cairo). He is the author of 17 books, 15 already published and two in press. The most recently published are Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (Polity, 2016), Dante’s Broken Hammer: The Ethics, Aesthetics, and Metaphysics of Love (Repeater, 2016), and The Rise of Realism [with Manuel DeLanda] (Polity, 2017). He has published over 250 articles in 19 languages and has given over 300 lectures on six continents. In 2015, he was listed by ArtReview as the #75 most powerful influence in the international art world. He currently resides with his wife, Necla, in Dubuque, Iowa.

Eleanor Kaufman is professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.   She is the author of The Delirium of Praise:  Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001), Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being_(Johns Hopkins, 2012), and At Odds with Badiou:  Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press); and co-editor of Deleuze and Guattari:  New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture (Minnesota, 1998).

Mary Kelly is Judge Widney Professor in the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California. She is known for project-based work that addresses questions of sexuality, identity and memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations. Exhibitions include retrospectives at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (2010) Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, (2011), and Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, (2008), as well as representation in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, and Documenta 12. Major publications include Post-Partum Document, (1983), Imaging Desire, (1996), Rereading Post-Partum Document (1999), and Dialogue, (2011). She is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, (2015).

Sanford Kwinter is a Canadian architectural theorist, writer, and editor. He is a professor of architecture at The European Graduate School / EGS, at The School of Architecture at Pratt Institute, New York, and at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he heads the Institute for Theory and History of Architecture. Kwinter co-founded the independent publishing company Zone Books with designer Bruce Mau, and theorist Jonathan Crary. The publishing house also produced the journal of the same name––ZONE. He has contributed numerous essays and articles to a vast number of periodicals including: Art in America, L’autre Journal, Harvard Design Magazine, Yale Journal of Architecture, and PRAXIS, among others. As diverse as Kwinter’s books are, Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001) is considered “a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts.” Whereas his second book, Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture(Actar, 2008), is “an extended meditation on infrastructure, war, computation, mechanical and material intelligence, and other multivariate facets of modernity,” which was followed by Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium(Actar, 2010). Together with Rem Koolhaas and the Harvard Project on the City, Stefano Boeri, Nadia Tazi and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, they published the book project Mutations (Actar, 2000), “an atlas of new urban spaces.” Among the numerous fellowships Sanford Kwinter has received are those from the Canada Arts Council and the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. He was also the recipient of the 2013 Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Candice Lin received her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004 and her double BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University in 2001. Her work engages notions of gender, race and sexuality, drawing from postcolonialism, citizen science, anthropology, feminist and queer theory. Lin has been awarded several residencies, grants and fellowships including the Headlands Center for the Arts (2016), the CCF Emerging Artist Fellowship (2015), Fine Arts Work Center residency (2012), the Frankfurter Kunstverein Deutsche Börse Residency (2011), Instituto Sacatar Artist Residency (2011), and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009).  Lin’s work has been recently exhibited at the Modern Museet (Stockholm), New Museum (NY), and was part of “Upon a Shifting Plate”, Sharjah Biennial, SB13 Tamawuj (Beirut).  She has had recent solo exhibitions at Bétonsalon (Paris), Gasworks (London) and Commonwealth & Council (LA). She lives and works in LA.

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher. He has contributed extensively to philosophy journals and has lectured at universities internationally. He is the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008), Torture Concrete: Jean-Luc Moulène and the Protocol of Abstraction (2014) and the forthcoming Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic / Sequence Press) on the intersection between philosophy of mind, German Idealism and theoretical computer science.

Warren Neidich is a conceptual artist, writer, and theorist. He is currently Professor of Art at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, founding director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and the American editor of Archive Books, Berlin. Selected Awards and Fellowships include: The Fulbright Specialist Program, Fine Arts Category, University of Cairo, 2013; The Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale, Berlin, 2010; AHRB/ACE Arts and Science Research Fellowship. Bristol, UK 2004. Recently published books include The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 3, Archive Books2017 Neuromacht, Merve VerlagBerlin, 2017 and The Colour of Politics, Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, Berlin, 2017-2018. His work represented by the Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland.

Alva Noë (www.alvanoe.com) is a writer and philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT 2004), Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (FSG 2009), Varieties of Presence (Harvard 2012), and, most recently, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (FSG, 2015). He is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Center for New Media and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. Noë is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has recently been named a 2018 recipient of the Judd/Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies. He has been a regular contributor to National Public Radio’s science and culture blog 13.7 Cosmos and Culture since 2010.

Renee Petropoulos has created projects and exhibited internationally. Most recently embarking on the project “Among Nations (Mostly)” with a performance “Analogue” (2012) at the MAK, Venice to Venice (2012) as part of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. and “Women in Surrealism” for LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). “Black Star”, begun in 2006, is a performance in continuum in Berlin.  Her most recent installment of “Prototype for the History of Painting: Eingrouping Social Historical” was installed in MARTE San Salvador, El Salvador.  Her recent film, “Two or Three Things I Know About Gas Station Mini Marts” screened at Screening, in Philadelphia.   The outdoor public sculpture project “Bouquet”(Flower Tower) Between Egypt, India, Iraq, the United States, Brazil, Ethiopia, and Mexico”, situated in Santa Monica, California at a street and pedestrian intersection was completed in spring, 2014. An exhibit of related subject, “Bouquet(Flower Girl) Between Libya, the United States and Scotland”, was installed at LAMOA in Eagle Rock in May 2014.  Petropoulos’ monument drawings were also included in “Forms of the Formless” at Beijing Moca, curated by Marlena Donahue. From the United States to Mexico/ From Mexico to the Untied States, was presented at Commonwealth and Council, which included a choreographed performance. She is exhibited Monument 1 – conjugation, with the Proxy Gallery in Paris in 2016.  In 2016, a cd of sound work, Between Libya, the United States and Scotland, created with composer Greg Lenczycki, will be released.  Two new works are scheduled for 2016, one with the Isaura String Quartet and a reading of sculpture, “Cheek by Jowl”, at Hauser Wirth Schimmel. Her project with former student, Amanda Katz was released this summer in 7 x 7 (http://7×7.la/semicolon/).  She recently returned from Naples Italy where she has been working on a collaborative project, with Neapolitan scholar, Dr. Denise Spampinato.  In 2018, she will be producing a project in conjunction with the MUAC in Oaxaca, Mexico as well as being a guest artist at the Palm Springs Museum.

Florencia Portocarrero is a researcher, writer, and curator. She obtained her BA in Clinical Psychology at the “Catholic University of Peru”, where she also received her MA in Psychoanalytical Theory. During the 2012/2013 Portocarrero participated in de “De Appel Curatorial Programme” in Amsterdam and in 2015 she completed an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at “Goldsmiths University” in London, where she graduated with honors. Portocarrero regularly collaborates with contemporary art magazines, such as Artishock and Terremoto; and has contributed with her writings on art and culture in numerous publications. In Lima, she works as a Public Program Curator at “Proyecto AMIL”, and is a Co-Founder of “Bisagra”, one of the few independent art spaces in the city.  She has recently been awarded “Curating Connections 2017/2018” residency program organized by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and KFW Stiftung.

Kenneth Reinhard is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English at UCLA.  He is the author, with Slavoj Zizek and Eric Santner of The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (University of Chicago Press, 2006; translated into Spanish and Korean; second edition 2013), and with Julia Reinhard Lupton, of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (Cornell UP, 1993; new revised edition 2009), as well as articles on French and German philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and religion.  He also writes performance reviews for Opera Quarterly.  He is the general editor and co-translator of The Seminars of Alain Badiou (20 volumes, forthcoming on Columbia University Press).  He is the Director of the UCLA graduate certificate program in Experimental Critical Theory.

Jason E. Smith is currently Chair of the Graduate Art MFA program at Art Center College of Design. His writing and research are largely concerned with contemporary art and aesthetics, modern continental philosophy (Spinoza, Hegel, 20th century), and post-1968 political thought (primarily French and Italian). He has published in ArtforumCritical InquiryParrhesiaRadical PhilosophySouth Atlantic Quarterly and Theory&Event, among other places. With Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip Armstrong, he has published Politique et au-delà (Galilée, 2010). He recently edited and contributed to a special issue of Grey Room devoted to the films of Guy Debord. He was a Cornell Society for the Humanities Fellow in 2013-14. Presently, he is working on two book manuscripts, The Once and Future Party (Verso, 2018) and Automation, Then and Now (Reaktion, 2019).

Jennifer Teets is a contemporary art curator, writer, researcher and performer born in Houston, Texas, 1978, living and working from Paris. She is known for her research on cheese, mud, and terra-sigillata – their transitioning towards materiality and entity and their ability to become something else when put in an exhibition or an essay. Since 2014, she co-hosts The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO), a live event series that has held iterations in Vilnius, Lisbon, Prague and Paris; and she carries out an inquiry (ethnographic, materialist) on geophagy and clays with forgotten origins titled “Elusive Earths” with Lorenzo Cirrincione. Teets was educated at the University of Texas at Austin (Latin American Studies/Urban Studies) and Sciences Po, Paris (SPEAP under the direction of Bruno Latour). From 2003-2007, she spearheaded the contemporary art program at the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City, the former home/studio of Mexican Muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros where she initiated her practice in the early 2000s. There, she curated over 20 site-specific, one-person exhibitions and performances by emerging and established Mexican and international artists. She was Resident Curator at Platform Garanti CAC in Istanbul in the fall/winter of 2007-2008 under the auspices of the Jumex Collection and the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC) from Mexico City. Later she was a resident at Kadist Art Foundation in 2009, setting up the groundwork for her long sejour in Paris. She has written extensively on art and curating in international art magazines and other publications and frequently lectures on curating and artistic research. She has guest lectured at Städelschule, Vilnius Academy of the Arts, Goldsmiths, CCA San Francisco amongst others. She is a faculty member of the Saas Fee Summer Institute of Art held in Berlin, an autonomous course at the intersection of theory and art held in the German capital each year.

John C. Welchman is Professor of art history in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, San Diego. His books on art include Modernism Relocated: Towards a Cultural Studies of Visual Modernity (Allen & Unwin, 1995), Invisible Colours: A Visual History of Titles (Yale UP, 1997), Art After Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (Routledge, 2001) and Guillaume Bijl(JRP|Ringier, 2016). Past Realization: Essays on Contemporary European Art (Sternberg, 2016) is the first volume of his collected writings. Welchman is co-author of the Dada and Surrealist Word Image (MIT Press, 1987), Mike Kelley (Phaidon, 1999), and Kwang-Young Chung (Rizzoli, 2014); and editor of Rethinking Borders (Minnesota UP, 1996), Institutional Critique and After(JRP|Ringier, 2006), The Aesthetics of Risk (JRP|Ringier, 2008) and Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art (JRP|Ringier, 2010) as well as the collected writings of Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism (MIT, 2003); Minor Histories (MIT, 2004); Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat, 1988-2004 (JRP|Ringier, 2005). He has written for Artforum (where he had a column in the late 1980s and early 90s), Screen, the New York TimesInternational Herald Tribune, the Economist among other newspapers and journals; and contributed essays to catalogues and associated publications at Documenta (Kassel), the Louvre (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Centre Pompidou (Paris), MoMA|PS1 (NY), Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool, Reina Sophia (Madrid), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), The New Museum (NY), Albertina, Vienna, Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), LA County Museum of Art, Sydney Biennial, Venice Biennale, Vienna Museum of Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Ludwig Museum (Budapest), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Edinburgh Festival, and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.