02/01 @ 8:00pm - Theoretical: “Re-Imagining the City as Revolutionary Utopia” With Tom McDonough and Alexander Galloway

Theoretical:  Re-Imagining the City as a Revolutionary Utopia

Theoretical is a new critical discourse series at ISSUE Project Room curated in collaboration with Brandon W. Joseph (Columbia University), David Grubbs (Brooklyn College), and Seth Kim-Cohen (Yale University). Through monthly talks, panels, and classes, this series seeks to actively engage artists, writers, and audiences in examining and discussing key issues in contemporary aesthetic theory, media, urban space and politics.
On February 1st, we invite you to join ISSUE Project Room for Theoretical: Re-Imagining the City as Revolutionary Utopia, a discussion between Tom McDonough and Alexander Galloway about Situationist Urbanism.

The Situationist International (SI), led by Guy Debord and central to the Paris uprising in May 1968, published many incendiary texts on politics and art in the journal Internationale Situationniste. One central theme to their work was rethinking the city: from a site for routine consumption and work to a utopia that breaks down barriers between function and play.
Book Launch event for The Situationists and the City: A Reader, edited and translated by Tom McDonough (Verso Books)
Free and open to the public

Tom McDonough is an associate professor in Art History at Binghamton University, specializing in post-War European art, cinema, and theory, as well as an editor of the journal Grey Room.  He is author of The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (MIT, 2007), and editor of both Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (MIT, 2002) and The Situationists and the City: A Reader (Verso, 2009).

Alexander R. Galloway, associate professor at New York University, is an author and programmer. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel projects. The New York Times recently described his work as “conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.” Galloway is the author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (with Eugene Thacker; Minnesota, 2007).