I kind of want to do one – but really I want to find a project that I
would do anyway and just find a way to get it backed by a uni. I want
it to be theoretical in motivation but to involve field
work/experiment/projects. I want to be really clever about it so that
I do not get swallowed up/destroyed/left to die in academic
instutionalisation.
From what I understand, it's a snakepit. It seems like an experiment where you put a bunch of highly intelligent people together and have them all fight it out for one carrot on a stick held jsut out of reach and watch them use their Machiavellian brilliance to fuck each other over in the scramble to get it. I think maybe you have to be really bloody minded to navigate all the politics and either way you get crushed by or get subsumed into the bureaucracy. It also seems like if you're absolutely brilliant, you get a pretty rum deal, so that's also an option.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, I feel like that where so much of the interesting material and ideas in the world gets filtered through and synthesized and analyzed. I always feel like certain strains of academia, especially in fields like anthropology, social science, science, critical theory are so much more experimental and progressive and radical than anything I see artists do, mainly because academia seems to have become so specific and specialized they're really mapping secret histories.
ReplyDeleteI tend to agreeee - or more accurately, this is what I am afraid of.
ReplyDeleteThis is why I want to do it with specific goals in mind - those being really just to fund practices that I want to do anyway, even if its just during a PHd.
So rather than a gateway to academia, it is more for incubation.
Ok. What about the Berkman centre? Is there any work someone there does that would be about art / culture / internet that i could extend onto something else?
ReplyDelete[ http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/05/Culturomics ]
ReplyDelete