The Festival of Para-Academia (FOPA) is an experiment in collective equipment for an emerging cultural sphere.

A series of talks, panels, exhibitions + more will occur in Naarm between Nov 21 – 24.

FOPA is a gathering of entities responding creatively to the decay in the Australian university sector.

This event is for anyone who thinks ‘education’ ought to be done better.

MORNING SESSION 10am to 11:30am

Art Program

Heterarchy: a model for a non-institutional art org

Jan Bryant and Katie Stackhouse

Introduction / Poetic listening to place / The Unexperienced Experience (Writer Positioning)

MIDDAY SESSION | 12pm to 1pm

Independent School of Philosophy

Does only one thing make "life worth living"?

Martin Black

In contradiction to the experience of every one of us, the word "school" derives from the Ancient Greek word for "leisure," on the assumption that the study of philosophy is the one activity we would engage in during the hours in which we do not have to work. Our school seeks to cultivate the reading and discussion of classic and modern works of philosophy and philosophical literature. The second most urgent reason for this activity stems from the fact that we inhabit a world that is the product of the partially successful philosophical project known as the Enlightenment or modernity. To understand ourselves and that project’s partial failure requires reading the early moderns who set it in motion. The most urgent reason is that the contention of the classical philosophers that the best life requires some attempt to comprehend the whole of human existence remains unrefuted and possibly true. They argue that any human being may conclude from their own experience that there is reason to use our intellect, the most important part of us, whose “activity would seem to be what each person is, since it’s the authoritative and better [part]. It would be strange, therefore, if someone were to choose to live not their own life, but the life of someone else.” (Aristotle, Ethics 1177b34 ff.).

EARLY ARVO SESSION | 2pm to 3pm

Mongrel Matter

Philosophy of Final Words

Leon Kalumba, Daniel Stewart, Valery Vinogradovs

Bidding an honest, last farewell calls for great courage and, arguably, a singular sense of clarity; it's a heuristic message worthy of our attention, particularly if we consider authors and artists who created their own worldviews for us, facing death head-on during this ordeal, there’s nothing to lose and hide – on the folded edges dividing death and life, everything matters, and it is therefore surprising that no collective philosophical study of this critical lacuna has been undertaken to date (see Lewis 2016, Ward 2004; cf. Critchley 2008)

LATE ARVO SESSION | 4pm to 6pm

I 愛 AI

Essays, Fiction and Interviews

Sam Lieblich, Emile Frankel, Luara Karlson-Carp, Vincent Lé

‘I 愛 AI’ is a book of essays, fiction, interviews and visual interventions that reintroduce sex, desire and politics into utopian fantasies of artificial intelligence, via psychoanalysis. Contributors bring their artistic practice, their style of living, or psychoanalytic theory, to demonstrate what AI, the thing, and AI the fantasy, is all about. Is it all it’s cracked up to be? Is it just a mirage? And if there is such a thing, does it dream, does it love, is it afraid, can it want? Is there any emancipatory potential in there at all?

Put it this way, sci-fi doesn’t tell a rosy tale of our co-existence with AI, but the businessmen have been saying machine-intelligence will save the Earth since the first mechanical calculator started doing office work in 1863. We want to know, why are these imaginings so at odds? Surely phallic utopian conceptions of the singularity and all that surrounds it–mind uploads, brain implants, virtual therapists, virtual lovers, sexbots–can’t be sustained when it’s so clear that all the species of algorithmic harmony are really just more of the same, but faster.

There is no choice but to reckon with the persistence of algorithmic control, and all that the cybernetic turn has given and taken; but do we need to hornily fantasise that the algorithm is our friend, our enemy, our equal? How in that reckoning do we account for indigenous knowledge practices, counteract repressive data surveillance, disavow the destruction of the land by the abstract algorithms in the sky? Can we honour human subjectivity as embodied, sensory, cultural, and inimitable without indulging in a blind anthropocentrism?

EVENING SESSION | 7pm until late

7th Gallery

Lecture: Dario Vacirca; Panelists: Lucie Loy, Mel Deerson, George Aki, Jonathon Nguyen.

For decades, under various guises across the globe, the Artist Run - Initiative, Space, or Centre (ARI) - has played an integral role in supporting and championing artistic experimentation, critical discourse and community building. They are at once a springboard, a safe zone, a holding pattern, a cool kids hangout, a site, a platform, an energy, a not-for-profit alternative to the fucked matrix of speculative capital and commercial art. At their core, ARI’s are determined to be uncertain sites of hybridity and possibility that are articulated through practice and interpreted by use and reflection.

The ARI is also fast becoming an important site for pedagogy outside the confines of academia. Whilst many ARI’s have always been a beacon for undergrad students wanting to exhibit (not only for street cred but also to fatten out their CV’s), something has shifted in the ARI scene in the last thirty years that is seeing it play a more directly critical role in research with experimental approaches to pedagogy. This is of course parallel to the dynamics of the ‘educational turn’ seen across the contemporary arts - from biennales to major institutions - and is in correlation to the increase in ‘practice led research’ in higher education. Alt-art pedagogies are to education as transformative aesthetics and social practice is to politics, and investigative aesthetics is to journalism. ARI’s are a prime example of what para-academic Fintan Neylan describes as bringing theory back to the outside, where due to there being no disciplinary divisions set by institutional administrators, “there is only theory”. Theory is set free.

This presentation addresses the importance of contemporary Artist Run Spaces, and their connection to the broader para-academic movement in platforming and producing what Luis Camnitzer refers to as ‘critical public pedagogy’. In a short lecture, a para-academic inside-outsider presents a survey of the ARI as a site for critical experimentation, research and collective reckoning. Focussing on recent and future visions of Seventh Gallery, the lecture addresses non-hierarchical and non-disciplinary curation, presentation, and research as modes of critical dreaming. This is followed by a panel discussion with Seventh staff, board members and guest artists discussing transindividuation and defamiliarization as para-academic strategies toward a critical post-humanities. With divine intervention from Seventh’s provocateur in residence.

Contact the host of Festival of Para-Academia (Day 4)

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