Program Announced: OSK/Stedelijk Museum/RKD visiting fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art | Dr. Zach Blas
Dates: Preliminary sessions: week of 27-29 May 2024; seminars: week of 2-5 June 2025; public lecture (mandatory for participants): 6 June 2025
Venue: Stedelijk Museum & University of Amsterdam
Open to: RMa students (OSK and other national schools) and PhDs. Auditors from the UvA or other Dutch universities are, however, also welcome.
Credits: 6 EC
Instruction language: English
Fellow: Dr. Zach Blas, Assistant Professor, Visual Studies (University of Toronto)
Instructor: Dr. Corina L. Apostol (UvA): c.l.apostol@uva.nl
Coordination: OSK (osk-fgw@uva.nl)
You can register via this link.
Deadline for signing up is December 1st. Please send in a short motivation and your CV to: osk-fgw@uva.nl.
We are pleased to announce the 2025 Stedelijk Museum/RKD visiting fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art, Dr Zach Blas, University of Toronto. A cooperative project between the Research School for Art History (OSK), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, The Hague, and the University of Amsterdam
Introduction
In a vibrant cultural city such as Amsterdam there seems to be no shortage of artists’ talks and public debates about modern and contemporary art. Visitor figures here are the envy of any city in the world, and modern and contemporary art history is also a highly popular course to study at the University of Amsterdam. What is often missing, however, is the rigorous academic accompaniment of exhibitions, as well as publicly visible and educationally viable evidence that what is shown is both based on (collection) research and should also engender new research: we wish to strengthen and highlight the important links between the collections and archives of the Stedelijk and the RKD, their exhibitions, research projects, mediation and education. Our programme is based on the high-end of researched curatorial/exhibition practice in the modern and contemporary field and complements the Stedelijk Museum’s and RKD’s collection research and exhibitions.
The exciting programmes of the partners gain additional academic status with a Fellow of the highest international standing. RMa students will come into contact with current exhibition and research projects and learn from best practices. One aim is to draw them towards academic research (to PhD level) into Dutch museum collections of modern and contemporary art, the research programmes of the partners, and/or curatorial projects.
The Fellow
The Fellow will be a leading scholar of modern and/or contemporary art (likely from abroad) coming to Amsterdam for the purpose of teaching in their area of expertise. The position changes annually in the spring semester. Those invited will teach a three-day seminar open to (research) Master’s students and give a public lecture at the Stedelijk. The seminars are conceived in such a way that the focus is narrow enough to convey both factual and theoretical knowledge in a short teaching period, and broad enough to awaken students’ interest in the field in general. They may focus on the oeuvre of an individual artist, on a particular problem (avant-garde/neo-avant-garde, decolonizing canons and institutions, curatorial strategies, art criticism), or even on a single work of art. A broad range of methodologies and art-historical traditions are represented over time, with scholars coming from a variety of countries and institutions.
The Fellow in 2025 will be Dr. Zach Blas (University of Toronto).
Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice draws out the philosophies and imaginaries residing in computational technologies and their industries. Working across moving image, computation, installation, theory, and performance, Blas has exhibited at venues including Vienna Secession, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, KANAL—Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, Twelfth Gwangju Biennale, ZKM Center for Art and Media, and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. His 2021 artist monograph Unknown Ideals was published by Sternberg Press and Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst. He is co-editor, with Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, of Informatics of Domination, forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2025. Blas holds a Ph.D. from The Graduate Program in Literature at Duke University and an M.F.A. in Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. He previously lectured in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.
Silicon Traces
This seminar contends with beliefs and fantasies influential to Silicon Valley’s visions of the future. In 1943, Ayn Rand published The Fountainhead, a novel whose protagonist architect Howard Roark, celebrated for his uncompromising vision, became a blueprint of heroic individualism and techno-utopian subjectivity for California tech entrepreneurs. In 2015, Way of the Future church was founded by former Google employee Anthony Levandowski as a religious organization oriented around worshiping a coming AI god that promises to remake humanity. Recent years have seen the rise of the nootropics industry, in which tech workers take smart drugs and microdose on LSD and psilocin mushrooms, to unlock creativity in the service of work, and as such, reengineer psychedelia as a mode of neoliberal productivity. Over the last 14 years, elite figures in the California tech industry have been preparing for the apocalypse by planning and building doomsday bunkers in Oceania, all on Indigenous land: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has nearly completed construction on a bunker compound on the island of Kauai in Hawaiʻi; Nearby, the island of Lānaʻi is owned by Larry Ellison, chief technology officer of the software company Oracle, who views the island itself as a bunker; and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is in development to build his own bunker property on the shores of Lake Wānaka in New Zealand. This seminar explores how fiction, drug culture, religion, and apocalypse profoundly shape Silicon Valley’s often eschatological futurist visions and undergird its modes of control and domination.
To study, this class proposes a method of the trace. Tracing is at once an evocation of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989), in which analyses of avant-garde art movements and punk music led Marcus to social and political revelations, but also tracing in computer science. Here, to trace is to capture data in order to show how various components of a software program are operating, executing, and performing. Information gathered from tracing can then be used to diagnose problems as well as to debug. With the goal of tracing through “software programs” that constitute the power structures and futurisms of Silicon Valley, this seminar offers four interrelated case studies to trace: the objectivist fiction of Ayn Rand, the nootropics industry and psychedelia, AI religiosity, and prepping for the end of the world. We pursue tracing to study, map, and historicize forces that comprise Silicon Valley power and futurisms. Yet, we also pursue tracing to articulate ways in which to resist Silicon Valley’s colonization of the future, that is, to envision otherwise; we will do so through an engagement with concepts including xeno-telos / unknown ideal, the contra-internet, acid communism, AI heresy, and the decolonial proclamation that “another end of the world is possible.”
Learning Objectives
After completing this course, students will be able to:
- identify and discuss key concepts, theories, and debates across a range of disciplines that are relevant to critical studies of the California tech industry and the futures it engineers
- analyze artistic practices that critically challenge Silicon Valley futurisms
- discuss theories and concepts that posit futures antagonistic to Big Tech
- perform comparative analyses with journalistic sources and academic scholarship
- apply materials studied to an original research project
Preliminary Session 1: Silicon Valley’s Power Structures
- Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute, 1 September 1995
- Fred Turner, “Google at Burning Man,” New Media & Society 11, 1&2 (2009)
- Erin McElroy, “Introduction” and “Coda: Unbecoming Silicon Valley,” Silicon Valley Imperialism: Techno Fantasies & Frictions in Postsocialist Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024), 1-36; 209-216
- Zach Blas, “Unknown Ideals,” Unknown Ideals (London: Sternberg Press, 2021), 14-45
Preliminary Session 2: Ayn Rand and the Influence of Objectivist Fiction
- Lisa Duggen, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019)
- Jonathan Fredland, “The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley,” The Guardian, 10 April 2017
Preliminary Session 3: Contra-Internet
- Zach Blas, “Contra-Internet,” e-flux journal #74, 2016
- Zach Blas, Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 (film, 2018)
- Suggested:
- Marc Siegel, “Punk Pasts, Dildo Futures,” Unknown Ideals (London: Sternberg Press, 2021), 66-87
Session 4 (with Dr. Blas): Smart Drugs and Psychedelia
- Olivia Solon, “Under pressure, Silicon Valley workers turn to LSD microdosing,” Wired, 24 August 2016
- Kirsten Grind and Katherine Bindley, “Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley,” The Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2023
- Joshua Neves, “The Internet of People and Things,” in Technopharmacology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 89-119
- Mark Fisher, “Acid Communism (unfinished introduction),” K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher from 2004-2016 (London: Repeater, 2018)
- Zach Blas, The Doors (artwork, 2019)
- Suggested:
- Pamela M. Lee, “When the Lizard King Met the Lizard Brain: The Doors,” Unknown Ideals (London: Sternberg Press, 2021), 192-219
Session 5 (with Dr. Blas): AI Religiosity, AI Heresy
- Michelle Le, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence,” Wired, November 15, 2017
- “What is this all about?” Way of the Future (2018)
- Beth Singler, “The AI Creation Meme: A Case Study of the New Visibility of Religion in Artificial Intelligence Discourse,” religions 11, 253 (2020)
- “On AI Gods and AI Heretics: Zach Blas interviews Beth Singler,” Ass of God: Collected Heretical Writings of Salb Hacz (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Frans König, Köln), 20-29
- Zach Blas, CULTUS (artwork, 2023)
- Suggested:
- Amy Hale, “Zach Blas’s CULTUS: Conjuring the Dark Gods of Silicon Valley’s Technocracy,” CULTUS, arebyte exhibition booklet (2023), 8-11
Session 6 (with Dr. Blas): Prepping for the Apocalypse, Living in End(s) of Worlds
- Douglas Rushkoff, “The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse,” The Guardian, 4 September 2022
- Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand,” The Guardian, 15 February 2018
- Evan Calder Williams, “Introduction,” Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010)
- “Preparing for the end of the world as we know it,” Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (2020)
Seminar dates: 2-5 June 2024 (the public lecture – mandatory for participants – will take place on 6 June at the Stedelijk)
Contact: Dr. Corina L. Apostol (UvA): c.l.apostol@uva.nl
Deadline for registering and letter of motivation: 2 December 2024.
You can find a full overview of the OSK Education Programma for the academic year 2024-2025 here.