I had a dream last night where i was failing a class , i thought i understood what they were talking about and i just plain didnt . the prefessor wrote 'see me' and gave me a grade of 41. 
recently the press person for the theater i worked at laughed at me because i could not tell her how many people were in my cast.   it was either 11 or 12.  but  i will speak to the children  about what i have learned.  my gpa in college was 3.2.  .

RICHARD MAXWELL is an artist and the artistic director of New York City Players since its inception in 1999. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship and The Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, as well as two Obie awards, a Creative Capital grant, a Spalding Gray Award and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. Mr. Maxwell’s work has been commissioned by ICA London, Barbican Centre, Festival D’Automne, Kunsten Festival, Vienna Festival, and presented in the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial. Mr. Maxwell’s book Theater for Beginners (2015) is his reflection on what it means to perform. His video works have been exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, Greene Naftali Gallery, and White Columns, and his Port Authority paintings were shown at Six Summit Gallery in 2021. Mr. Maxwell studied acting at Illinois State University and co-founded the Cook County Theater Department in Chicago. He has resided in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City for the last 30 years.

[TBA]

In contemporary art, ‘contingency’ is often marketed as risk, as the cheap thrill that something might go wrong. But when risk becomes an inbuilt virtue, it also becomes a format legible to patrons, institutions, and markets, ready to be priced, insured, and turned into a premium. This talk treats contingency less romantically, as pushback from materials, infrastructures, publics, and histories that force practice to disclose its dependencies. It also rejects the fantasy that contingency dissolves necessity, because what changes is not that anything can happen, but which constraints are allowed to govern what happens.

Alongside contingency and complexity, the term ‘complicity’ is used in a material sense to name entanglement. It refers to the way an action propagates beyond its author and returns with effects routed through funding, platforms, markets, and logistics. That problem is shared, without being identical, by experimental political organizing, where local initiatives get captured or dissipate because there are no durable interfaces for commitments, costs, and repair. Drawing on Alexander Bogdanov’s tektology and the Proletkult experiment, organization is approached as an experimental medium, with an emphasis on designing composition rules, transfers, and feedback across heterogeneous sites. The aim is to keep contingency from becoming stagecraft and complicity from becoming a stamp of sophistication, and to turn both into methods of coordination that hold a trace, absorb shock, and accumulate learning without flattening differences.      

REZA NEGARESTANI is a philosopher and writer whose work spans contemporary philosophy and rationalist accounts of intelligence, with a growing focus on theories of organization. His writing has also been taken up in contemporary art and cultural contexts. He is the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008). His most recent major philosophical work, Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic/Sequence/MIT Press, 2018), develops a rationalist account of mindedness across German Idealism, complexity theory, and theoretical computer science.

Nina Rappaport will discuss the concept of the Hybrid Urban Factory in which light industries are mixed in buildings with other community, arts, cultural, and social uses based on ideas of social condensers and participation. She will show international examples along with clips from her Worker’s Lunch Box films.

NINA RAPPAPORT is an urbanist, a professor in history/theory at Kean University School of Public Architecture. She directs Vertical Urban Factory, a think tank and consultancy, which focuses on the intersection of production spaces, architecture, and the role of the factory worker. She is author of Vertical Urban Factory (Actar 2015, paperback 2020) and curator of the eponymous traveling exhibition (2011–24); author of Hybrid Factory/Hybrid City and the symposium Hybrid Urban Factory at Yale School of Architecture in November 2023. She co-edited Design for Urban Manufacturing (Routledge 2020). She created a series of films of factory workers called A Worker’s Lunch Box, which has been displayed in Philadelphia and New York and with Vertical Urban Factory.           
She is Publications Director at the Yale School of Architecture where she edited the magazine Constructs for 24 years and continues to manage the book series and exhibition catalogs. She has written significant essays on urban production. She has taught at numerous New York City area universities and lectures internationally. She co- founded Docomomo US and New York/Tri-State, in 1996, and is on the steering committee of the Western Queens Community Land Trust.

Talk & reading copies, Will Holder          
On measure, reporting, accounting, transcription, “machine data […]  throwing light on the role of emotion,” love [what the world needs now, is…], “non-dominating authority”, and “other [musical and material] factors” of conversation, sequencing and song.

“The essence of my music is that the syllables go by as fast as they do in the American English language and the pitch stresses, which make one syllable more important than the other syllable, are all within a range of half an octave. It's like you squeeze it in one direction and expand it in another direction. I've always been interested in tempo because it's a big, big factor in vocal music. The other factors, like melody, have been used up for the time being.” Robert Ashley, 2003

*Alice Notley, “Diamond”, Culture of One, Penguin, 2011

Brussels-based typographer WILL HOLDER edited and published F.R.DAVID, from 2007–24, a journal concerned with the organisation of reading & writing in the arts (co-published with de Appel, Amsterdam 2007–16, and KW, Berlin 2017–24). In 2017, Holder was inaugural fellow of “A Year With…”, at KW, Berlin: a year-long programme placing publishing, writing and documentation in parallel with the institution’s exhibition programme. Holder furnished and ran a private residency with 13 guests, publicly discussing and producing publications, on site at KW. This period laid the foundations for uh books, and Will’s work with Alice Notley will be the last book it will publish. The singular “uh” suggests an adaptive whole of a plural “books”. The disparity between logotype (a) and its phonetic “uh” (say out loud: “a sandwich, a wallet […] a giraffe”) is suggestive of the publisher’s work with artists, musicians, dancers, readers & audience using conversation as model and means for writing; by way of speech, performance and transcription.

Holder has received a Paul Hamlyn Award in support of his practise, and has had most recent solo displays of his work at British Art Show, (various venues) UK; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; Institut Funder Bakker, Denmark; Oscillations Festival, Brussels; Kunstverein, München; and Alma Sarif, Brussels. Amongst many others, Will has made books with Cady Noland, Ricardo Basbaum, Robert Ashley, Michael Stevenson, The Otolith Group, Falke Pisano, Lucy Skaer; and he has published the work of poets Lyn Hejinian, Alice Notley, and H.D..