MC: Gavin Keeney: Transmedia and/as Lived Law (GCSC)

This master class will examine the complex status of the moral rights of authors in the age of cognitive capitalism, from an existential versus legalistic point of view. Discussion will, therefore, focus on research and research outputs in the Arts and Humanities as a form of “lived law”. Experimental transmedia works will be screened as case studies, with a discussion of key texts and concepts from Keeney’s Works for Works (forthcoming), a two-volume work which will conclude his postdoctoral research project entitled “Lived Law”.

The case study material will be taken from the 2017 “Out of India” project, which took place at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India. The project comprises collectively produced, experimental performance-based research in the Arts and Humanities that crosses several disciplines but, through its visual-discursive apparatuses, focuses on the rights of authors and a defence of a free and open knowledge commons. Thus the “Lived Law” project and the “Out of India” project are currently undergoing a merger, where law is investigated through art and art is investigated through law.

The principal concern of the merger of the two projects is that the research aspects into law become a form of embedded agency in the visual works, whereas the visual works generate new research activities through the “testing” of the diverse media across various exhibition, publication, and editioning platforms given to contemporary academic and cultural production. These editioning strategies are an essential component in any attempt by authors today to escape from the appropriation or expropriation of their moral rights as authors.

The value of the masterclass for PhD students is that it illustrates a creative or artistic form of scholarship that underwrites theses conducted “sur travaux”, favoring qualitative and subjective content versus scientific and quantitative content.

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Hosted by Research Area 3: Performativity and Cultural Transformation

More info: gerlov.van-engelenhoven@gcsc.uni-giessen.de

// Dr. Gavin Keeney (New York) is an independent artist-scholar. He completed a research doctorate in Architecture, “sur travaux”, at Deakin University, Australia, in 2014, on the subject of “Visual Agency in Art and Architecture”. He has taught and lectured in universities in the US, England, Slovenia, Australia, and India. A 2016-2017 Teaching Fellowship in the Faculty of Architecture at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India, plus a 2017 co-funded research residency at the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, Italy, and a 2017 Visiting Research Fellowship at Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London, London, England, have served to launch his current study of transmedia as a form of “lived law”.

Publications

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 1, Radical Scholarship (Punctum Books, 2015)

Knowledge, Spirit, Law: Book 2, The Anti-capitalist Sublime (Punctum Books, 2017)

may both be downloaded free of charge at the following URL:

https://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=search&uiLanguage=en&template=&query=gavin+keeney