ALICE Laboratory at EPFL Lausanne, Workshop

27 May 2024

“Models and Diagrams as Semantic Carriers” workshop and seminar on May 27, 2024 for ALICE Laboratory at EPFL, Lausanne, CH

Models and Diagrams as Semantic Carriers
On Vehicles of Embedding Otherwise

In this session we’ll depart from Gilles Châtelet’s assertion that a diagram does not “simply illustrate” nor translate already “available content,” and how the implied virtuality of this assertion enables conditions of sensibility for the hitherto unthought. As many scholars from a variety of fields recognize, we are at an ‘end of the world as we know it,’ so the problem of knowing from without familiar frameworks giving semantic structure to thought, is revealed not just as an epistemological (abstract) problem, but an existential (concrete) one. Considering the legacy of situated knowledge claims, the question emerges of how to relocalize practices of knowing in end-of-world conditions that mingle empirical givens with nongiven conceptual destinations? Practices that take place somewhere, somewhen, by some agent, yet embedded in an elsewhere space of reasons and sensitivity? Throughout this session we’ll be reflecting on the genre of knowledge claims made in the name of art in post-critical terms: knowledge making for non-given worlds. Here, art will be considered as a model making activity (understood broadly), namely one that can embed interpretants in prosthetic otherworlds that summon a re-attunement of sensitivities those unfamiliar worlds necessitate.

Suggested Reading (not necessary):
Gilles Chatelet, “Introduction,” in Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, trans. R. Shore & M. Zagha, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 1-15.