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CURRENT PROJECTS
1. Anywhere/Anyplace Academy MEDIA <CALENDAR> |
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| We throw everything away. Plates, cups, cell phones, bottles, bags, clothing; items which could easily be reused, recycled, or repurposed. Arguably, as a result, we are conditioned to consider our own thoughts, ideas, and concerns - even our relationships - just as disposable. We drop concepts for other newer prettier ones before the original has a chance to take hold and flourish, becoming something new and separate from our initial intentions, and stronger for it. Surplus goods and surplus knowledge can be viewed not only as cultural poles in a disposable society, but as a metaphorical springboard for the possibilities inherent within all of us. What are we going to do with our “trash?” What life can it lead after its proposed role has been fulfilled? In an increasingly invisible society we are each a consumer, creator, and clearing house for knowledge, just as much as we are the receivers, producers, and disposers of material goods. In this knowledge based, often startlingly ephemeral, consumer culture the realization and management of our ideas and concerns manifests as political will. All too often this strength goes dangerously under-utilized. Collectively we all benefit from a cyclical economy of knowledge, economically, as well as socially and politically. When we are told that the material goods we consume are limited to a single, one-time-only use, limited to a single purpose or function and none else, we are bound and beholden to others, forced to consume in excess rather than create and hybridize from the world around us. Similarly, when acculturated to believe that for one reason or another our thoughts and concerns are somehow limited, or lesser than, those of others, when our ideas are regimented towards set ends and means, we are intrinsically put at a disadvantage intellectually and socially, and in turn, politically. The repurposing of ideas, the expanding and agitation of them, much like the repurposing of more tangible physical materials, is infectious and generative. Like the many-headed Hydra, a good idea set free, fractured from its origins, spawns another, and another still. No matter how one might like to kill it, codify it, capitalize upon it, it cannot die, it cannot be stopped. Surplus Seminar acts as a convergence for ideas generated within Red76’s initiative Flying University. It is a means of gathering people together to imagine, agitate and activate the ideas that reside all around us and within us. Surplus Seminar activates a series of projects which, often, take the form of ad-hoc schools interested in the investigation of surplus knowledge as a mirror image of surplus material: ideas which all too often find themselves going under-utilized, to the detriment of the whole. In fields, bars, hotel rooms, restaurants both legal and illegal, the projects that come together for Surplus Seminar aim to generated discussion on many topics, while providing a unified platform to consider the means, activation, and implications of sites of learning that are democratic and horizontal in nature. In our unstable and ephemeral economy ideas alone increasingly serve as the major bedrock for monetary growth and future zones of social and political convergence and capital. Very easily, and extremely aggressively, these zones can become marginalized, compartmentalized to continue an economic system built upon the creation of top-down hierarchical structures. The collective activation and inventive re-use of ideas, therefore, becomes politically necessary as almost never before. Open thought, the sharing of skills and knowledge, and the generative growth which develops from those activities, encourages a horizontal system of benefit, while simultaneously providing a space available to us all for inclusive learning and expansive new possibilities for what tomorrow can be. Surplus Seminar, with A/AA at its core, acts as a laboratory, experimenting with what that future can look like through the shared, generative utilization of ideas. |
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