On December 10, 2018, we presented a new lecture performance as part of the Performing Knowledge symposium at Segal Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center.
TAFs #11: KOSMOGRAMS
When Plato threw out the poets in The Republic, he banished poetry, music, dance, and images from the emergent realm of ideational knowledge, upon which he established the Academy to initiate youths into eidos and logos, ideas and logic. Centuries later, we sit in this institution, silently listening and watching, virtually stuck in our seats.
What happens when thinkers walk, stagger, and dance?
Thought-action figures (TAFs) are to digitallity what ideas were to literacy: an emerging mode of thinking and acting. TAFs are in no way limited to human figures: animals, plants, machines, processes, materialities, ideal entities—all are becoming TAFfy, sticky networks formed by chance and necessity that gather and disperse events throughout the multiverse.
Overcoming logocentric inertia requires engaging with performative, transmedia forms of knowledge-power. We can use Benjamin’ and Ulmer’s kosmograms to generate TAFs from multiple spacetimes while also tracking their convergent and divergent trajectories. Such kosmographies compose disastronuatic flights of thought-action.
“I’ve told many colleagues about the incredible Thought Action Figure lecture performance and now I can share the experience with them. As I write this, I realize how energized the closing ‘lecture performance art,’ group dance, Q+A, and after party made me toward both my academics and voice in the final push of the semester and a table reading of a play I’ve been cast in, as I pressed on with my Thought Action Figure avatar projecting from me. Truly catalytic.”
Carolyn A. McDonough, CUNY GC
