Jon McKenzie - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Videos by Jon McKenzie
A speculative film on the revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r, a gay sci-fi researcher launched in Jon ... more A speculative film on the revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r, a gay sci-fi researcher launched in Jon McKenzie's 2001 text, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. While there this figure, taken from Marcio Souza's 1989 novel Lost World II: The End of the Third World, plays a critical ethno-archeologist, here the transmediated Kx4l3ndj3r performs as a time-traveling disastronaut, wandering the Earth guided and waylaid by three revelations. The first concerns RM, a thought-action figure of Austrian artist Ralo Mayer and his performative research project, How to Do Things with Worlds. The second concerns Perform or Else, whose author attempts a genealogy of the Challenger disaster, including figures found in NASA shuttle 51-L, Arthur Conan Doyle, Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, Marcio Souza, and scientist William Rutherford. The third concerns Nietzsche's startling thought that life is a rare form of death—and the destinerrance of the universe.
2 views
Papers by Jon McKenzie
AM, Apr 30, 2023
Across the arts and sciences, the ontological turn challenges Descartes' founding of the modern w... more Across the arts and sciences, the ontological turn challenges Descartes' founding of the modern world on human subjectivity, shaking the very foundations of aesthetic experience and experience itself. Facing global eco-anxieties, COVID, militant nationalisms, and critiques of extractive knowledge production, some se ek the world's worlding, others its unworlding. Globally, the sharing of aesthetic practices at individual and collective scale increasingly unfolds via transversal networks, transient ideation, and algorithmic processing by any media necessary. Given the multiple cascading crises of world-making/breaking: Who or what makes and unmakes worlds today, what composition of players constitute contemporary cosmography? Which aesthetic practices, materials, and structures enable and/or disable contemporary subject formation, sociotechnic collaboration, and shared world making? To what ends -if any -might such world-making or-unmaking proceed, and for whom or what? What signposts or onto-historical markers might guide these ways of proceeding toward or beyond the all too human?
Introduction: Contesting Performance in an Age of Globalization
Performance research has gone global. By this we refer not so much to the cultural phenomena stud... more Performance research has gone global. By this we refer not so much to the cultural phenomena studied — which, it is clear, have long been located around the world — but to the locations of researchers themselves. These locations have steadily expanded over the past two decades, whether it be in terms of individual researchers working alone or in small groups on different continents. This expansion is mirrored by the emergence of performance research and study programs in different countries. While the United States continues to host many influential scholars and programs, the United Kingdom in particular has seen an increase in performance scholarship and in university courses of study that carry the term ‘performance’ in their names, and important research projects and academic departments have emerged in locales as diverse as Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, and South Africa. In addition, a number of transnational scholarly organizations have formed — some with a regional focus, notably the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and the Asian Performance Studies Research Group, and others with an international scope, such as Performance Studies international (PSi) and the performance-focused working groups of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR).
Sonja, Artemis, Greta, Bernard: Interview on S/CARE PACKAGES
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
An interview by John Tinnell with Jon McKenzie, Ana Vujanović and Daniel Ross concerning Bernard ... more An interview by John Tinnell with Jon McKenzie, Ana Vujanović and Daniel Ross concerning Bernard Stiegler and what had been a planned collaboration with Bernard, included in AM Journal of Art and Media Studies No. 30 (2023): Issue No. 30, April 2023 – Main Topic: Cosmographies of Worlding and Unworlding.
Becoming Maker: Creating Transmedia Knowledge
Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, 2019
StudioLab’s first mission is to democratize digitality. The call to adventure involves a differen... more StudioLab’s first mission is to democratize digitality. The call to adventure involves a different image of knowledge, a transmedia knowledge composed of thought-action figures that mix ideas and images, logic and stories, episteme and doxa. At a deeper level, transmedia knowledge incarnates digitality, an emerging onto-historical apparatus whose modes of subject formation, social organization, and technical infrastructure mix the apparatuses of Platonic literacy and Homeric orality. StudioLab seeks to democratize digitality just as nineteenth-century educators sought to democratize literacy. The call to action here: become maker of transmedia knowledge, use the CAT frame to explore the conceptual, aesthetic, and technical dimensions of thought-action figures by combining learning activities found in seminar, studio, and lab spaces.
Reviews and resources
Women Performance a Journal of Feminist Theory, 1995
Throes. Conceived and performed by Doorika. The Vineyard Theater, New York City, October 14, 1994... more Throes. Conceived and performed by Doorika. The Vineyard Theater, New York City, October 14, 1994. Visiting Hours. An installation by Bob Flanagan in collaboration with Sherrie Rose. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City, September 23‐ ...
Becoming Cosmographer: Co-designing Worlds
Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, 2019
StudioLab’s third mission is to remix performative values. This call for adventure entails enteri... more StudioLab’s third mission is to remix performative values. This call for adventure entails entering the fourth space of thinking and acting, the community field where transmedia knowledge becomes civic discourse and expert knowledge finds new grounds in common knowledge and participatory research. Collaborating with community partners, critical design teams use transmedia knowledge to address local needs and desires and explore how values of cultural efficacy, technical effectiveness, and organizational efficiency shape partners’ experiences of the world. The call to action here: become cosmographer or co-designer of worlds; use the design-thinking frame to collaboratively harmonize human desirability, technical feasibility, and financial viability by orchestrating performances and actualizing imagined worlds.
Stratification and Diagrammatic Storytelling. An Encounter with 'Under the Dome
lo Squaderno, 2015
My long-term, applied performance research project is called StudioLab, for it mixes seminar, stu... more My long-term, applied performance research project is called StudioLab, for it mixes seminar, studio, and lab learning – experiments in theory, design, and media that produce essays, videos, lecture performances, and through DesignLab, a design consultancy with workshops, media studios, and smart media forms and practices.
Jane Challenger, Disastronaut
Perform or Else, 2002
Performativitäten, Gegen-Performativitäten und Meta-Performativitäten
Performing the Future, 2013
Challenging Forth: The Power of Performance
Perform or Else, 2002
Ouisconsin Eidos, Wisconsin Idea, and the Closure of Ideation
“Ouisconsin Eidos” names the becoming other of ideational thought, the digitalization of a logoce... more “Ouisconsin Eidos” names the becoming other of ideational thought, the digitalization of a logocentric thinking intimately allied with the history of phonetic writing, the book, the archive, the university, protocols of academic publishing—and Western colonialism. If ideation makes possible modern research and knowledge, its displacement may oscillate between violence and hope, ignorance and wisdom. Since ideation unfolds through phonetic writing, post-ideational thought-action entails engagement with emerging digital forms, habits, and infrastructures. The smart media genres formalized at UW-Madison’s DesignLab function as experiments mounted amidst times of intense battles over the forms and functions of knowledge and higher education. The logic of Ouisconsin Eidos encourages other site-specific engagements.
Philosophical Interruptions and Post-Ideational Genres: Thinking Beyond Literacy
In this energetic exchange, McKenzie questions traditional forms of literacy by challenging their... more In this energetic exchange, McKenzie questions traditional forms of literacy by challenging their dependency upon the thinking subject as the ground of thought. Depicting philosophy as the great interrupter, shifting the show from storytelling to arguments, he accuses literacy of organizing the world into logocentric zones of colonialism. Promoting a new way of thinking via digitality, McKenzie launches his intervention by creating non-linear, multimedia, and transdisciplinary modes of thought, reinscribing conceptual arguments outside phonetic writing in surprisingly new architectures of ideation.
Performuj albo… – w poszukiwaniu pełni / Rafał Maciąg
Didaskalia, 2012
Professor Rutherford and Gay Sci Fi
The Efficiency of Organizational Performance
Becoming Builder: Generating Collaborative Platforms
Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, 2019
StudioLab’s second mission is to democratize design. This call for adventure seeks a different mo... more StudioLab’s second mission is to democratize design. This call for adventure seeks a different mode of thinking and acting, shifting both critical and creative processes from the model of the lone original genius to that of recombinant collaborators. By connecting critical thinking to tactical media-making, the subversive energies of all-too-Romantic bachelor machines become reorganized into critical design teams, small desiring-machines or intimate bureaucracies modeled on activist cells, garage bands, and start-ups. The call to action here: become builder of shared experiences and collaborative platforms; use the UX frame to enable scalability and sustainability of transmedia knowledge production for different stakeholders by connecting with their experiential architectures.
Professor Challenger and the Disintegration Machine
Wrestling with Plato’s Fight Club
Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, 2019
The crisis of the liberal arts requires wrestling with the founding distinction of Western knowle... more The crisis of the liberal arts requires wrestling with the founding distinction of Western knowledge, episteme and doxa, specialized knowledge and common opinion, and their associated media infrastructures. Epistemic knowledge depends on critical thinking and alphabetic writing, which the StudioLab pedagogy supplements with critical design and transmedia knowledge that mixes ideas and images, logic and story, episteme and doxa. Integrating seminar, studio, and lab learning, students become makers of media, builders of collaborative platforms, and co-designers of possible worlds. StudioLab seeks to strengthen campus and community relationships through transmedia knowledge and, at a systems level, help remix the performative values of cultural efficacy, technical effectiveness, and organizational efficiency that shape the contemporary world.
A speculative film on the revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r, a gay sci-fi researcher launched in Jon ... more A speculative film on the revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r, a gay sci-fi researcher launched in Jon McKenzie's 2001 text, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. While there this figure, taken from Marcio Souza's 1989 novel Lost World II: The End of the Third World, plays a critical ethno-archeologist, here the transmediated Kx4l3ndj3r performs as a time-traveling disastronaut, wandering the Earth guided and waylaid by three revelations. The first concerns RM, a thought-action figure of Austrian artist Ralo Mayer and his performative research project, How to Do Things with Worlds. The second concerns Perform or Else, whose author attempts a genealogy of the Challenger disaster, including figures found in NASA shuttle 51-L, Arthur Conan Doyle, Deleuze and Guattari, Heidegger, Marcio Souza, and scientist William Rutherford. The third concerns Nietzsche's startling thought that life is a rare form of death—and the destinerrance of the universe.
2 views
AM, Apr 30, 2023
Across the arts and sciences, the ontological turn challenges Descartes' founding of the modern w... more Across the arts and sciences, the ontological turn challenges Descartes' founding of the modern world on human subjectivity, shaking the very foundations of aesthetic experience and experience itself. Facing global eco-anxieties, COVID, militant nationalisms, and critiques of extractive knowledge production, some se ek the world's worlding, others its unworlding. Globally, the sharing of aesthetic practices at individual and collective scale increasingly unfolds via transversal networks, transient ideation, and algorithmic processing by any media necessary. Given the multiple cascading crises of world-making/breaking: Who or what makes and unmakes worlds today, what composition of players constitute contemporary cosmography? Which aesthetic practices, materials, and structures enable and/or disable contemporary subject formation, sociotechnic collaboration, and shared world making? To what ends -if any -might such world-making or-unmaking proceed, and for whom or what? What signposts or onto-historical markers might guide these ways of proceeding toward or beyond the all too human?
Introduction: Contesting Performance in an Age of Globalization
Performance research has gone global. By this we refer not so much to the cultural phenomena stud... more Performance research has gone global. By this we refer not so much to the cultural phenomena studied — which, it is clear, have long been located around the world — but to the locations of researchers themselves. These locations have steadily expanded over the past two decades, whether it be in terms of individual researchers working alone or in small groups on different continents. This expansion is mirrored by the emergence of performance research and study programs in different countries. While the United States continues to host many influential scholars and programs, the United Kingdom in particular has seen an increase in performance scholarship and in university courses of study that carry the term ‘performance’ in their names, and important research projects and academic departments have emerged in locales as diverse as Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, Slovenia, and South Africa. In addition, a number of transnational scholarly organizations have formed — some with a regional focus, notably the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and the Asian Performance Studies Research Group, and others with an international scope, such as Performance Studies international (PSi) and the performance-focused working groups of the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR).
Sonja, Artemis, Greta, Bernard: Interview on S/CARE PACKAGES
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
An interview by John Tinnell with Jon McKenzie, Ana Vujanović and Daniel Ross concerning Bernard ... more An interview by John Tinnell with Jon McKenzie, Ana Vujanović and Daniel Ross concerning Bernard Stiegler and what had been a planned collaboration with Bernard, included in AM Journal of Art and Media Studies No. 30 (2023): Issue No. 30, April 2023 – Main Topic: Cosmographies of Worlding and Unworlding.
Becoming Maker: Creating Transmedia Knowledge
Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, 2019
StudioLab’s first mission is to democratize digitality. The call to adventure involves a differen... more StudioLab’s first mission is to democratize digitality. The call to adventure involves a different image of knowledge, a transmedia knowledge composed of thought-action figures that mix ideas and images, logic and stories, episteme and doxa. At a deeper level, transmedia knowledge incarnates digitality, an emerging onto-historical apparatus whose modes of subject formation, social organization, and technical infrastructure mix the apparatuses of Platonic literacy and Homeric orality. StudioLab seeks to democratize digitality just as nineteenth-century educators sought to democratize literacy. The call to action here: become maker of transmedia knowledge, use the CAT frame to explore the conceptual, aesthetic, and technical dimensions of thought-action figures by combining learning activities found in seminar, studio, and lab spaces.
Reviews and resources
Women Performance a Journal of Feminist Theory, 1995
Throes. Conceived and performed by Doorika. The Vineyard Theater, New York City, October 14, 1994... more Throes. Conceived and performed by Doorika. The Vineyard Theater, New York City, October 14, 1994. Visiting Hours. An installation by Bob Flanagan in collaboration with Sherrie Rose. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City, September 23‐ ...
Becoming Cosmographer: Co-designing Worlds
Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, 2019
StudioLab’s third mission is to remix performative values. This call for adventure entails enteri... more StudioLab’s third mission is to remix performative values. This call for adventure entails entering the fourth space of thinking and acting, the community field where transmedia knowledge becomes civic discourse and expert knowledge finds new grounds in common knowledge and participatory research. Collaborating with community partners, critical design teams use transmedia knowledge to address local needs and desires and explore how values of cultural efficacy, technical effectiveness, and organizational efficiency shape partners’ experiences of the world. The call to action here: become cosmographer or co-designer of worlds; use the design-thinking frame to collaboratively harmonize human desirability, technical feasibility, and financial viability by orchestrating performances and actualizing imagined worlds.
Stratification and Diagrammatic Storytelling. An Encounter with 'Under the Dome
lo Squaderno, 2015
My long-term, applied performance research project is called StudioLab, for it mixes seminar, stu... more My long-term, applied performance research project is called StudioLab, for it mixes seminar, studio, and lab learning – experiments in theory, design, and media that produce essays, videos, lecture performances, and through DesignLab, a design consultancy with workshops, media studios, and smart media forms and practices.
Jane Challenger, Disastronaut
Perform or Else, 2002
Performativitäten, Gegen-Performativitäten und Meta-Performativitäten
Performing the Future, 2013
Challenging Forth: The Power of Performance
Perform or Else, 2002
Ouisconsin Eidos, Wisconsin Idea, and the Closure of Ideation
“Ouisconsin Eidos” names the becoming other of ideational thought, the digitalization of a logoce... more “Ouisconsin Eidos” names the becoming other of ideational thought, the digitalization of a logocentric thinking intimately allied with the history of phonetic writing, the book, the archive, the university, protocols of academic publishing—and Western colonialism. If ideation makes possible modern research and knowledge, its displacement may oscillate between violence and hope, ignorance and wisdom. Since ideation unfolds through phonetic writing, post-ideational thought-action entails engagement with emerging digital forms, habits, and infrastructures. The smart media genres formalized at UW-Madison’s DesignLab function as experiments mounted amidst times of intense battles over the forms and functions of knowledge and higher education. The logic of Ouisconsin Eidos encourages other site-specific engagements.
Philosophical Interruptions and Post-Ideational Genres: Thinking Beyond Literacy
In this energetic exchange, McKenzie questions traditional forms of literacy by challenging their... more In this energetic exchange, McKenzie questions traditional forms of literacy by challenging their dependency upon the thinking subject as the ground of thought. Depicting philosophy as the great interrupter, shifting the show from storytelling to arguments, he accuses literacy of organizing the world into logocentric zones of colonialism. Promoting a new way of thinking via digitality, McKenzie launches his intervention by creating non-linear, multimedia, and transdisciplinary modes of thought, reinscribing conceptual arguments outside phonetic writing in surprisingly new architectures of ideation.
Performuj albo… – w poszukiwaniu pełni / Rafał Maciąg
Didaskalia, 2012
Professor Rutherford and Gay Sci Fi
The Efficiency of Organizational Performance
Becoming Builder: Generating Collaborative Platforms
Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, 2019
StudioLab’s second mission is to democratize design. This call for adventure seeks a different mo... more StudioLab’s second mission is to democratize design. This call for adventure seeks a different mode of thinking and acting, shifting both critical and creative processes from the model of the lone original genius to that of recombinant collaborators. By connecting critical thinking to tactical media-making, the subversive energies of all-too-Romantic bachelor machines become reorganized into critical design teams, small desiring-machines or intimate bureaucracies modeled on activist cells, garage bands, and start-ups. The call to action here: become builder of shared experiences and collaborative platforms; use the UX frame to enable scalability and sustainability of transmedia knowledge production for different stakeholders by connecting with their experiential architectures.
Professor Challenger and the Disintegration Machine
Wrestling with Plato’s Fight Club
Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement, 2019
The crisis of the liberal arts requires wrestling with the founding distinction of Western knowle... more The crisis of the liberal arts requires wrestling with the founding distinction of Western knowledge, episteme and doxa, specialized knowledge and common opinion, and their associated media infrastructures. Epistemic knowledge depends on critical thinking and alphabetic writing, which the StudioLab pedagogy supplements with critical design and transmedia knowledge that mixes ideas and images, logic and story, episteme and doxa. Integrating seminar, studio, and lab learning, students become makers of media, builders of collaborative platforms, and co-designers of possible worlds. StudioLab seeks to strengthen campus and community relationships through transmedia knowledge and, at a systems level, help remix the performative values of cultural efficacy, technical effectiveness, and organizational efficiency that shape the contemporary world.
Die Performance von Demokratie
Die Aufführung, 2012
Sonja, Artemis, Greta, Bernard: Interview on S/CARE PACKAGES (2023)
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 2023
An interview by John Tinnell with Jon McKenzie, Ana Vujanović and Daniel Ross concerning Bernard ... more An interview by John Tinnell with Jon McKenzie, Ana Vujanović and Daniel Ross concerning Bernard Stiegler and what had been a planned collaboration with Bernard, included in AM Journal of Art and Media Studies No. 30 (2023): Issue No. 30, April 2023 – Main Topic: Cosmographies of Worlding and Unworlding.
LifeLines Traumaturgy: Wherewhen Nothing Takes Place but the Place Jon McKenzie, Bryan Reynolds, ... more LifeLines Traumaturgy: Wherewhen Nothing Takes Place but the Place
Jon McKenzie, Bryan Reynolds, Leeny Sack, Saviana Stanescu
Performing Grounds Forum, Theater & Architecture Working Group, , Prague Quadrennial, June 15, 2023
Flash talk abstract: The multimedia performance LifeLines explores creation in the age of Cultural Intelligence Agencies. Director Bryan Reynolds, noted New York playwright Saviana Stanescu, performance artist Leeny Sack, and transmedia dramaturg Jon McKenzie set their untimely acts of assembly in caves, catacombs, and subway stations in order to stage the abyssal, mise en scene, structure of contemporary life, what Sloterdijk terms our "vita performativa." A series of midwives -Madame Blavatsky, analyst Sigmund Freud, Herodotus, an icy Scythian Amazon, Jaroslav the Wise, Jane Challenger-slyly guide the audience-assemblage through different birth scenes offering up pluriversal interpretations and stylistic interventions across dramatic, philosophical, autobiographic, and choreographic genres.
