When the pandemic is over and as venues reopen, what will be the state of the performing arts? Will there be a return to the old normal or, instead, will some of the lessons and experiments that were undertaken under pandemic conditions begin to shape a new and expanded concept of performance, liveness, streaming as a medium, and the like? [Read more]
Tag: innovation
I get interviewed quite a bit as well as doing my fair share of interviewing. Beyond the realm of immediate practice, I have long harbored an interest in dialogue (dialectic) as a mode of philosophical inquiry and puzzled over its relative rarity within the contemporary academy. Perhaps it appears too “unprofessional,” too tainted by the literary and the ludic, the matter of fact and the improvisational, to be taken seriously as a form of scholarship.…
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What comes after mobility? Or, rather, what comes after mobility when the word is understood, much as it has been during most of the course of the 20th century, as automobility? According to a manifesto that I wrote in the late summer of 2016, the answer is MOVABILITY. Movability is a word I encountered in the course of research in the Piaggio archives in Pontedera. Apparently coined by an advertising agency in the 1960s, it…
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For several decades philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and education theorists have contested once prevalent accounts of human intelligence as a single, unified or monolithic thing, arguing instead for plural models that accommodate some degree of multiplicity in thinking/learning/knowing modes. The result has been controversy, particularly between advocates (like Howard Gardner) of expanded definitions of intelligence and those who propose instead more restrictive, measurable definitions that push various skill sets outside the bounds of “intelligence” proper.…
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It’s easy to poke fun at some of the tics and tropes that have come to define TED over the course of its 32 years of “spreading ideas that matter.” But the fact remains that TED has had an enormous impact and the TED stage is one of the world’s leading communications and innovation platforms, now fully global, interconnected with a multiplicity of television, radio, and web-based channels, and followed by audiences that number in the…
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A celebration of the Piaggio Group’s 130 years of history was held on March 23rd in Milan’s Teatro Vetra with an emphasis on its present and future plans. Speakers included Roberto Colaninno, president and CEO of the IMMSI holding company, to which the Piaggio Group belongs, and Stefano Belisari (“Elio” of the Italian band Elio e le Storie Tese). The centerpiece of the celebration was the limited edition volume FuturPiaggio (though the tantalizing presence of…
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On the fiftieth anniversary of R. Buckminster Fuller’s appointment as architect of U.S. Pavilion at Expo ’67 Montreal World’s Fair, I am releasing the bulk of a hitherto unpublished hourlong interview that was carried out with the late dancer-choreographer, Merce Cunningham, in his New York City dance studio, on November 22, 2004. The context for the filming of the interview was a research and exhibition project undertaken at the Stanford Humanities Lab in close collaboration…
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In the May 12, 2014 online edition of the New Republic, the co-authors of Digital_Humanities and I replied to Adam Kirsch’s recent piece: “Technology is Taking over English Departments: The False Promise of the Digital Humanities” under the heading Disputations. The aim of the response was not only to correct some factual inaccuracies, but to emphasize the fundamental ways in which technology lies within, not outside, the scope of humanistic inquiry (irrespective of whether the…
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