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Will Hallett screens selections from a video art practice he's been working on over the last few years while discussing some of the research that backgrounds it and the particular workflow that’s developed through/alongside it.

Starting with that workflow and following from there into the research background, he'll highlight the programming languages, software, and techniques he employs, some of the rationales and spaces of improvisation and randomness in each, and map out some practical themes such as network relations, glitch and compression, scrapism, détournement, and—as hopefully elucidated through the whole of the presentation: “transference” in the context of computer media.

Most importantly, there will be swaths of video content ranging from soothing to black metal and banditry to spice up your tuna sandwich and cracker jacks.

To explicate the above themes and his particular approach to the idea of transference in the computer media context, we’ll review the little known history of Institutional Psychotherapy—an institution-centered radicalization of psychoanalytic treatments of psychoses in 20th century asylums—as it was practiced in post-war France and through the apex of the 1968 student uprisings by practitioners such as Francois Tosquelles, Jean Oury, Felix Guattari, and Frantz Fanon.

Reviewing Guattari’s theory of transversality (an expansion of the psychoanalytic concept of transference from an emotional to an embodied relationality) and its enduring impacts on contemporary understandings of art and design in networked environments, Will tries to hypothesize his own practice as an intervention on the gradual sidelining of mental illness and the paradigm of the unconscious from the political imaginaries of contemporary media arts and design.

Given time, we’ll also review the exceptions and rules of this trend drawing on design examples from New-Territories, Strelka Institute, Aum Studio, and Pa.LaC.E and gesture towards Will's new curiosities and questions built out of the practice about the symmetries and asymmetries between the unconscious and intelligence as discrete paradigms of practice and thought.

Will Hallett (https://www.instagram.com/willh7344/) is an independent artist and researcher. He works on the history and contemporaries of arts-research with an emphasis on digital approaches to art, politics, and play. Will has previously taught computational design courses at Fordham University and at the Estonian Academy of Arts. He is an alumni of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and has written for Triple Ampersand Journal and the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society and runs a small flower farm and design studio in the Maine woods.

Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/6bb8b772-fa81-4486-859e-3372f2d9ae9a/%28Chicago_Studies_in_Practices_of_Meaning%29_Camille_Robcis_-_Disalienation__Politics_Philosophy_and_Radical_Psychiatry_in_Postwar_France-University_of_Chicago_Press_%282021%29.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAT73L2G45EIPT3X45%2F20220407%2Fus-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20220407T070400Z&X-Amz-Expires=86400&X-Amz-Signature=a28bbad211fe6c4ba1980d510487f50eb7645f22dc2125f90e1ec2fd02d1ebaa&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=filename%20%3D%22%28Chicago%2520Studies%2520in%2520Practices%2520of%2520Meaning%29%2520Camille%2520Robcis%2520-%2520Disalienation_%2520Politics%252C%2520Philosophy%252C%2520and%2520Radical%2520Psychiatry%2520in%2520Postwar%2520France-University%2520of%2520Chicago%2520Press%2520%282021%29.pdf%22&x-id=GetObject)

New-Territories, MythomaniaS (https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/c4b6ac15-33fa-44a5-9804-d84bc24328f0/MYTHOMANIAS.pdf?X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAT73L2G45EIPT3X45%2F20220407%2Fus-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20220407T070411Z&X-Amz-Expires=86400&X-Amz-Signature=b2675911280f8577dd422c0b0db14e1b2218a28d8b3e35565ce261a65962ae69&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&response-content-disposition=filename%20%3D%22MYTHOMANIAS.pdf%22&x-id=GetObject)

Andrew Goffey, Guattari and Transversality: Institutions, analysis and experimentation

Ed Keller, The Cosmopolitical Gesture

Tiziana Terranova, Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital, and the Automation of the Common (http://www.euronomade.info/?p=2268)

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