Community in Print
CASCO
(Publishing Class)
Class, 14 Sep 2013 – 17 Jun 2014
Community in Print focuses on serial publishing inspired by art-publishing enterprises that were for the most part in series form: from magazines prevalent in the 1970s like the American counterculture catalog, published by writer Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog or the collective General Idea’s FILE magazine, to more contemporary examples such as artist, critic, philosopher, and writer workgroup Chto Delat’s newspaper that takes the name of the collective, the bilingual magazine Pages, which looks into the Iranian context and initiated by Nasrin Tabatabai & Babak Afrassiabi or artist Can Atlay’s journal Ahali. What is significantly in common among them, are their self-institutional agency. Be the vehicle a journal, magazine, or periodical, they offer a space for ongoing, self-disciplinary practices of artistic research. This space, in turn, forms a community of readers and interferes in existing cultural spheres.
We call upon the participants in the DAI program to develop their own magazine or any form of serial publication—with the first edition launched over the course of the 10 months of sessions. This inherently evolves in tandem with establishing a form of long-term inquiry, which we find essential to singular artistic practices. The emphasis is also given to the operation of feedback into communities with whom the publications try to engage. The students are thereby encouraged to exchange with their readership, fostering a generous network of ideas and activities. In this manner, publishing is understood as a “tool” of self-education and self-constituency that can be used in the development of communities.
Heideggerian Things
Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology against the idea of explaining the world as independent from the human mind. Instead of relying on scientific theories, he introduced phenomenology as a method, which focuses on phenomena via the immediate experience of the knowing subject. Following Husserl, Heidegger sought to separate philosophy from scientific practice. Both philosophers were invested in the study of experience and of how things appear to us in the world. However, in 1927 with the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger radically distanced himself from his mentor Husserl. In this text, Heidegger examined the meaning of being and challenged the understanding of things as merely appearing in our consciousness. He argued that our being is nothing more than being-in-the-world, and as such, we do not analyze our experiences by bracketing the external world. Rather, we interpret our experience by looking at things in our specific context. Heidegger still follows Kantian tradition in the sense that he focuses on the experience of the world as limited to human beings–physical objects, hence, sit in the world without any access to the world.
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“Ready-to-hand” (Zuhanden) and “Present-at-hand” (Vorhanden) are two Heideggerian terms that explain the two-fold process when encountering a thing. “Ready-to-hand” refers to how things are given to us with a certain practical significance; the thingness withdraws in order to be useful. Explained by Heidegger’s famous hammer example, the hammer becomes transparent or invisible in the hammering. Present-at-hand refers to how things are merely perceived in our consciousness, without any reference to their usefulness. Present-at-hand is what allows the thing to be looked at as a discrete measurable object. The hammer is not fully a tool until it is broken, when we can fully visualize the tool-itself. Heidegger argues that Dasein, most of the time, encounters things first in their purposefulness (ready-to-hand), whilst ignoring their thing-being (present-at-hand). So, for instance, we don’t think of the hammer when we are hammering. We take things for granted and we “use” them before we “think” them. To encounter things as present-at-hand is to encounter them from the outside, preventing us to get into any depth of the thing unless the tool malfunctions.