Abstract
In this paper, I introduce the work of the International Congress for Infrathin Studies (ICIS), focusing especially on the Infrathin Seminar. The ICIS is a group that I helped found in 2020. We–a multi-disciplinary, geographically-dispersed community of artists, academics, and activists–use Surrealist-derived methods to perform an answer to Mark Fisher’s notion expressed in his Capitalist Realism book: late capitalism has built into it mechanisms that disable our ability to think and imagine beyond capitalism’s edges. The Infrathin Seminar, an ongoing series comprised of intimately scaled, game-formatted, online conversation experiments to instigate exploratory, creative exchanges among participants on topics of supreme urgency. This seminar offers participants aleatoric engagements that work to revive our collective imagination, which we feel is vitally necessary for all emancipatory work. This paper talks specifically about the methods utilized in the Infrathin Seminar, focusing especially on our use of image prompts. This paper presents some of the foundational concepts driving the Infrathin Seminar, elucidates the ways that the Infrathin Seminar connects with the history(ies) and methods central to Surrealism, and explains some of the outcomes of this seminar project.
Presenters
Brent Everett DickinsonLecturer, Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Creative and Cultural Technologies
KEYWORDS
Surrealist Practice, Image-Prompts, Organizing Creative Post-Capitalist Communities
