Student Moderator: Hatice Naz Sarman
Faculty Respondent: Paul Ryan
(B.A., New School University)
Mr. Ryan has had articles published in numerous journals including Leonardo, Afterimage, Millenium, Terra Nova, and Semiotica. He is also author of Cybernetics of the Sacred and Video Mind, Earth Mind. Mr. Ryan presented his design for an environmental television channel at the United Nations. NASA has published his Earthscore Notational System. And, his video art has been shown in Japan, Turkey, France, Germany, Spain, and throughout the U.S., including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and as part of the American Century Show presented by the Whitney Museum of America Art. His education includes study with Thomas Berry, Walter Ong, Horst Janson, Conor Cruise O'Brien, George Steiner, Marshall McLuhan, and Gregory Bateson.

PANEL:

Alexei Angelides
On Facts and Myths
(Click here to download paper)

Abstract: This essay attempts to show, provided some background assumptions about the nature of language and quantification, that the distinction drawn in many circles, between facts and myths, or facts and fictions, is itself testable against the attitudes that are taken up when the line between the two concepts blurs. Early analytic philosophy attempted to provide strict criteria with which to judge whether sentences were verifiable and therefore meaningful. In the process, an unusually large class of sentences was ruled out as meaningless. Statements that included concepts of value (e.g. the word "good") were expressly ruled out as statements that had a non-factual character. As such, they were deemed "unscientific." While this project has largely come to near-death, it lives on in variant forms. One such form is the division, still obvious in the humanities today, between the hard sciences and the social sciences. The purpose of this essay is to question said division, and suggest that a proper understanding of the practice of science, the concepts it uses, etc., leads one to a notion of information that cannot readily distinguish between what is a fact and what is a fiction. It is suggested that, devoid of demarcating criteria, information cannot be seen as simple "stated facts."

Jeremy Benjamin
Inhabiting Distribution/Consumption
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Abstract: Conceptualist Art's emergence marked a significant rupture in the direction and focus of modernist artistic practice through its leveling of a final, forceful blow to the Greenbergian teleology to which so much of modernist practice was a response. Clement Greenberg's thought revolved around two claims buoying its insistence upon the utopian character of autonomous art: namely, the two-fold idea of separate spheres, which insisted that not only must art cleanse itself of all ideological contamination, that is, of all (social, political, narrative, and representational) content, but also, that in art's turn to formal interrogation, each art must focus upon only those essential formal qualities specific to the medium of that particular art. Conceptual Art's understanding and use of the mediated "embedded-ness" in which art operates can thus be seen as the end of Greenberg's viability, and perhaps the end of what is called modernism. This paper examines the ways in which Conceptual and Post-Conceptual practice engaged and revealed a specific intermingling of elements relating through institutional, technological, and communicative structures which they mediate, determine, and define the significance of these elements. Through its aesthetic investigations, this general movement reconsidered the distribution and consumption sphere as areas of non-totalized domination, and suggested alternative ways of inhabiting these structures thus reconfiguring the public sphere.

Andy LaValle
Language and Death
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Abstract: This paper serves to clarify the connection between language (in the abstract and concrete) and death. This is done from several perspectives in order to understand and map the development of language as understood from a structural point of view to the Freudian "death-impulse" and how aspects of language and speech reflect fears/desires reinforced by media and popular images. If we believe that desire is somehow lost in the act or event of signification, how is it recovered in everyday speech and action? What happens when that speech and action are directed toward death itself? An example of this is seen in the popularity of the HBO original series Six Feet Under, about the trials and tribulations of a family-run funeral home, or the phenomenon of the Hollywood Cemetery. This paper explores the limits of what constitutes "madness" and its relationship to language and speech.