On November 23rd at 16:30, Blaise Kirschner will be officially installed as a professor in Fine Arts with a focus on moving images at the Royal Institute of Art. They will deliver a lecture at the university’s premises on Skeppsholmen. Warmly welcome!
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Inaugural Lecture by Prof. Dr. Blaise Kirschner
In My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Kathy Acker writes: “To substitute space for time. What’s this mean? I’m not talking about death. Death isn’t my province…Myself or any occurrence is a city through which I can wander if I stop judging.”
Acker’s substitution of space for time deborders the self and renders its anatomical arrangement (as body) into an architectural and social one (as city). Narration gives way to navigation, as the speaking self no longer moves through time, but through the spatialisation of its specific individuation. If this formulation seems abstract, then a drawing by Unica Zürn illustrates it concretely. Entitled “Plan of the House of Illnesses” it depicts Zürn’s body and its institutionalisation as one formation: a two-dimensional floor plan of a hospital, with its chambers and halls formed of body parts and organs, that both constitute and house the speaking self (alongside doctors, guards and enemies). Against a biocentric conception of the body as an organic and anatomically bounded entity, the “Plan of the House of Illnesses” thus offers a mapping of its biocultural emergence and antagonisms, incorporating elements that precede, coincide with, and exceed individual lifespans.
Analogously to Acker’s proposed substitution of space for time and Zürn’s body-building, what would it mean to imagine the movement of moving image (primarily considered a time-based medium) not as a movement through time, but rather as a movement through space? What if a film is approached as a form of environment, rather than a form of narration? What can be learned from related, post-cinematic media, such as gaming and VR simulations, in which filmic montage is replaced by navigation through computationally constructed space, as Alexander Galloway and Harun Farocki have so extensively theorised? And what are the technical and conceptual limitations of computer simulations and avatars when confronted with Acker’s and Zürn’s ‘both/and’ figurations of self and environment in text and image?
Working with and through these propositions, Blaise Kirschner’s inaugural lecture will develop a post-cinematic poetics of the moving image that attends to the ways in which something like a body and something like an environment are formed, in order to disrupt the codes and violences that perpetuate themselves in and through such formations.