The metalepsis workshop develops Gérard Genette’s concepts of diegesis and mimesis using the Lacanian–Freudian concept of cathexis (“investment”). From Žižek and others comes the idea that investment has key components in the spatial-temporal field. The continua it mandates, however, breaks down. The “inventory” driven by fetish and symptom gives way to the sinthome and the collapse of the fantasy structure of the fetish.
The workshop uses visual examples from painting (Antonello, Velázquez, Magritte, Picasso) and film (The Gleaners and I, Notorious, Young and Innocent, Dead of Night) to parse this break in cathexis and play out the role of the (death) drive and its operational logic of gaps and delays. The workshop aims to establish a shorthand notation based on the frame, and an activation device based on the ancient zairja, astrological “computers” intended to clarify by combinatorial and stochastic confusion of original conceptions — i.e. the acousmatic. In Lacan, the idea of the extimate pinpoints the role of Truth, in both the first and fourth positions in the four mathemes of discourse. This is the place of the inside frame, the gap between reversed predication, the return of materialism to the automaton.
Recent workshops include (1) an interview organized and produced by Mark Aerial Waller for the Technē Consortium, AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, Department of Fine Art, Kingston School of Art, Knights Park, UK; (2) lectures, seminar, and discussion with Pedro Bello Ravara, Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences November 26–29, 2019; and (3) lectures and workshop on Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo, with Prof. Chuck McBride and Sadra Tehrani, at South Dakota State University, November 2 – 5, 2018. Other workshop sites have included: Yale University, Carleton University, WAAC (Virginia Tech.), University at Buffalo, Temple University, the University of the Arts, and University of Pennsylvania.
A series of “Rear Window Workshops” was held in the summers at Penn State University, supported by Penn State Outreach.
Workshops now center on combining local/individual construction/photography/video work in combination with zoom seminars, culminating in zoom performances.