Media and Modernity: “Ars::longa”

Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Paul Chan
“Ars::longa”
[Response: Devin Fore]
Tuesday, February 27, 2024 @5pm ET
N107 (School of Architecture)

It is traditionally understood that the first part of “Ars longa, vita brevis” means it takes a long time to master an art or technology. Another interpretation is that art lasts, perhaps longer than life. I suggest a new third reading: that art extends life itself. To support this reading, I consider the work of Chris Marker, Arakawa & Gins, and experiences from my own private research and development in the domain of artificial intelligence called Natural Language Processing. Hellenistic mathematicians Archimedes and Eratosthenes, who fused poetry with calculation to capture what is “unbounded” or “infinite” are invoked. Naturally, Faust appears.

Paul Chan is an artist based in New York. He founded the press Badlands Unlimited (2010-2018). “Breathers”, a survey exhibition of his recent practice organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, will travel to the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in March 2024. Chan was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2022.

Devin Fore is Professor of German at Princeton University. He is editor of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test (Yale University Press, 2017) and History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (Zone Books, 2014); he is also author of Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (The MIT Press, 2012) and Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming this fall).

Image Caption: Paul Chan, Left Handed Stomachion, 2023 (detail)

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