Presentation of the publications Restricting Flight for Surreptitious Assembly by Domen Ograjenšek and The Art of Encoding by Maks Valenčič

17 April 2024 at 7 PM
Cukrarna (lecture room), Poljanski nasip 40, Ljubljana

Programme moderators
Uroš Prah and Martin Hergouth

Restricting Flight for Surreptitious Assembly by Domen Ograjenšek is a surprising philosophical novella that draws on the life and work of Jožef Peter Alkantara Mislej, a mostly forgotten figure of Slovenian philosophic tradition. The work turns to the scenes of a quiet disintegration of his strangely ambitious system, as well as to the materiality of thought, which might stem out of that very disintegration. It intertwines and untwines the strands of diagrammatism, mysticism and the image destined to be reduced to a mark, taking us into the midst of conspiratorial meetings in 18^th-century Vienna and its contemporary outskirts to direct us towards a vectorial ascent into the unknown.

In his lecture, Maks Valenčič will deal with artistic gesture, that is, analyse the artistic predisposition in the anthropological sense. What is an artistic gesture and what are its implications in the sociological and political sense? How does it determine the horizon of artistic endeavour and what are the consequences of this fact? The starting point of the lecture will be Joscha Bach’s claim that “artists are people who fall in love with the loss function”, which is to say that the specificity of artists lies in them being interested in all possible ways of encoding. As it will turn out during the lecture, artists are characterised precisely by that fact, that is, a specific relation to encoding patterns, which also includes a speculative potential and relates the artistic gesture to various speculative discourses, for the alternative ability of reco(r)ding patterns leads to the ability of a generative world building.