Desire for Transmission: On Movements of Materials and Knowledges

This second volume of the Basel Dialogues critical book series traces the voices and ideas that are shaping the contemporary academy of art and design and the most pressing issues of the day.

Desire for Transmission. On Movements of Materials and Knowledge is the second volume of Basel Dialogues, the new critical book series from the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. Composed of striking conversations from recent public symposia, intimate meetings, international festivals, and academic seminars, the dialogues feature the school’s professors, students, and their celebrated guests—from the fields of visual art, design, filmmaking, media theory, science, coding, and poetics—all grappling with transdisciplinary practices pursued amidst a multivalent world. Their rich conversations cover technologies of transmission amid conditions of surveillance and resistance; trance techniques and cybernetics of the moving image; the languages of realism and fantasy that infuse both fashion and publishing; the immaterial histories of material knowledges; and contemporary image production’s role in justice. Taken together, the diversity of voices collected here speak to issues of theory and practice, art and science, poetics and politics, denying their opposition, while revealing the deep desire for social and artistic transformation that so often propels pedagogy forward.

In dialogue: Abhay Adhikari, Bakri Bakhit, Asia Bazdyrieva, Aleena Chia, Nadim Choufi, Diane Dever, Shuruq Harb, Ute Holl, Pauline Julier, Dorotheé King, Quinn Latimer, Zach Lieberman, Jacqueline Loekito, Vanessa Opoku, Ìfẹ́olúwa Ọ̀ṣúnkọ́yà, Claudia Perren, Filipa Ramos, Michael Renner, Bérénice Serra, Tai Shani, Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe, and Matthieu Vitse