DUTCH ART INSTITUTE: ROAMING ASSEMBLY #13

The Navigation Principle

Convened by Doreen Mende with Ayesha Hameed, Tom Holert, Rory Rowan and Vera
Tollmann

April 23, 2017, 1.30PM to 6.30PM

Harun Farocki, Parallel 2, 2014, 8.38min, screenshot

'Where does the world end?' asks the female voice in Harun Farocki's Parallel 2 (2014) while
the subjective-shot perspective directs the viewer on the continuous flight across a digitized
blue matter with geometric islands popping up and disappearing again. This sequence is a
horizon for proposing to enter the Navigation Principle through a double dimension of what
we might call, following Astrida Neimanis, as hydrologics. One dimension addresses the
datalogical condition of digitized matter. It takes us towards an investigation of a
computer-generated image that operates through digital liquidity and algorithmic cultures. A
second, parallel dimension takes us towards the ancient art of navigation that is revisited as
a mode of inhabiting the contemporary political condition. It opens the prospect of what it
means to think with and from water. This is a feminist concern that rethinks received
understandings of planetarity and globalization. How can we think the entanglement of this
kind of double hydrologics? What practices of articulation and interanimation can be
invented for the present and future? How can we politicize that new image-regime which
fosters the industrialization of thought (Farocki) through action, operation and
embodiment? What happens to the production of knowledge in the navigational landscape of
double hydrologics? How and in what ways does navigation offer a method, a practice, a
politics, an aesthetics, an epistemology and an ontology? The Roaming Assembly session
takes place in conversation with the Harun Farocki Institut and the CCC Research
Programme at HEAD Genve.