These online seminars will pursue many of the questions which we would pursue in the normal course of things; although things are anything but normal.

Shortly after the initial lockdown was announced in South Africa, the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO) at the CHR sent out the following small set of exercises, in order to prompt those scholars and colleagues interested in the Kinetic and in Movement something with which to think. Given what now seems the continuing lockdown, it strikes me that the website remains a space through which anyone interested in Kinesis, mobility, agency and objects can continue to think together. I encourage you to stay engaged in a dialogue with us, and there will be a regular set of provocations and prompts about being and moving.

Please Read The Attachment “Seminar One” first – this has some points of discussion for anyone interested in “Kinesis” and the question of movement in this moment when we are having to consider with all seriousness what movement is, and how we take freedom of movement as a basic right. We are in extraordinary circumstances and are called upon to curtail our movement, in the interest of containing a serious epidemic. The Laboratory of Kinetic Objects is a space which thinks about movement as a philosophical and a theoretical idea; and we have not as yet really imagined what it means in terms of our own condition as human beings. The dislocation of persons has marked our history as a species, and has taken catastrophic proportions in the past century. It is impossible to imagine what this current urgency about persons, flight, sanctuary and evasion means for the vast numbers of displaced and dispossessed. We are in a position of privilege if we can sit still and think in the next several weeks. Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of mind, has pointed out that we are very good at thinking about foreign places; or of unicorns, as if they are present with us. In our solitude and stillness, we are obligated to remember that the vast majority of persons have access to neither.

LoKO: Seminar One

Seminar One contains some considerations- visual explorations, really; while the second attachment is a scientific paper about the ways in which ‘intention’ has been mapped using algorithmic methods, logging and noting variations of movements of the hand based on the intentions of the person viewed.

Please take care of yourselves and those around you.