Calendar

Upcoming Events
September 11: Advertisements.

Friends and faculty-members read from their recent favorites:

Alex Hampshire: Blaise Cendrars
Brandon Joyce: Meister Eckhart

September 20: UMBAU

New Ideas in Architecture + Making in Pursuit of the Radical. How do we enage the world.
Architectural dreaming via Virginia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Rwanda, Liberia, and Austria. www.umbauschoolofarchitecture.org

Time to be Announced.

September 21: Earth Crown. Secret Abuse. M Ax Noi Mach

Inside the headbanger's crypt (formally The Scarea), the Institute welcomes Earth Crown and Secret Abuse for an evening of scummy noise music.

Also appearing: M Ax Noi Mach and Dick Neff

9pm
Donations welcomed.

Past Events
September 02: How I Spent My Summer Vacation
9pm.

Please join us at the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study at 9pm on Tuesday, September 2nd, for a program of slideshows of travel photographs. Adam Leeds will show photos from his recent travels to Russia, Dan Wyche from his recent travels to Thailand, and Ben Remsen from his not-at-all recent trip around the European continent. Ben's will focus exclusively on European graffiti -- of artistic, political, and/or vandalistic varieties. If Adam's or Dan's will have focuses, that has not been made known to the present blurbist.

The slideshows will serve as prompts for an open-ended discussion (before, during, and especially after) of what we're doing when we look at other people's travel photos. What are we doing aesthetically? Culturally? Personally (i.e. as friends)? Why are we intrigued? Why are we bored?

The slideshows will serve the secondary purpose of allowing those in attendance to actually learn what Adam and Dan did over their summer vacation, and what some cool graffiti that Ben saw in Europe looks like. All three slideshowers have been instructed to keep their presentations to around ten minutes, so don't worry about getting too bored.

The discussion and slideshows and more discussion will follow the screening of Shawn Kornhauser's and Nathaniel Holt's film "Finding Comfort" and will be followed in turn by a mass bike ride to Woody's to see Club Lyfestile. You can do everything you want all the time.

Free and open to the public.

Slideshows from around the world
August 30: TDAR FINAL EXAM: The Art/Test
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As part of its month-long “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session,” THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH invites you to attend its closing reception and watch/participate in "The Art/Test," the result of a month’s collaborative work with tenured faculty at the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study. Food, drink, and grades. Event begins at 7pm sharp; attendance is mandatory for fall pre-registration.

More info here.
August 26: Computer Science - Formal Language Theory [Part II]
So it's really part one, but we went over some lambda calculus stuff and with the homework last time, so this gets to be part two (and the final class on the topic). The next topic after this will be Programming Algorithms and Data Structures, which will probably be a several class topic, and will probably be one of the most interesting topics.
Language doesn't tell me anything about my LAN
August 21: TDAR Guest Lecture: "Comic Books or Graphic Novels?"
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As part of its month-long “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session,” THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH invites you to attend “Comic Books or Graphic Novels? The Politics of Nomenclature," a talk by Dr. N.C. Christopher Couch. Discussion and reception to follow. Event starts at 7pm sharp.

More info here.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us N.C. Christopher Couch is the author of numerous books and articles on Latin American art and on graphic novels and comic art, including The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit of the Father of the Graphic Novel (with Stephen Weiner), Will Eisner: A Retrospective (with Peter Myer), Faces of Eternity: Masks of the Pre-Columbian Americas, and The Festival Cycle of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus. He curated exhibitions at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library American Museum of Natural History, the Americas Society, the Oklahoma Air and Space Museum and the Smith College Museum of Art. He was senior editor at Kitchen Sink Press (Northampton), editor in chief at CPM Manga (New York, and has taught at Amherst, Columbia, Hampshire, Haverford, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and the School of Visual Arts. Publications he edited won or were nominated for 17 Eisner and Harvey Awards, and he has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Dumbarton Oaks of Harvard University, and the Newberry Library. Current publications include the edited volume Conversations with Harvey Kurtzman, and a book on Batman artist and editorial cartoonist Jerry Robinson.
August 14: TDAR Workshop: "Taking Tests, Making Tests"
As part of its month-long “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session,” THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH invites you to attend a discussion-workshop on “the test” as aesthetic object-experience w/special guest Dr. John Muse, Haverford College's Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow for 2007-09 in the Fine Arts. Event begins at 7pm sharp.

NB: The discussion-workshop will serve as the catalyst for a collaborative test-writing project among Temporary Department Fellows, PIFAS Faculty, and any other interested parties, culminating in the residency's closing event--the FINAL EXAM.

More info here.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us In 2006 John Muse received a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley. His dissertation, The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence: Roland Barthes, Avital Ronell, Roni Horn, co-chaired by Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman, analyzes Barthes' numerous writings on photography, an artwork by Horn entitled Another Water (the River Thames, for Example), and an essay by Ronell on the videotaped beating of Rodney King, "TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle." Muse shows how these works use photographs to promulgate a crisis of the evident.
FinleyMuse.com
August 13: Computer Science - Format Language Theory [rescheduled]
Come learn the wonders of Formal Language Theory - the area of research that Noam Chomsky was famous for, among others. We'll go over Languages and Finite Automata. 6PM
yoch bow math bow je shuv weee
August 07: TDAR Special Philosophical Research Group: "Each One Teach One"
As part of its month-long “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session,” THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH invites you attend a special Philosophical Research Group discussion focusing on Art Historian Florian Waldvogel’s seminal Manifesta 6 article "Each One Teach One" and its relation to PIFAS. Copies will be available at the meeting, but participants are encouraged to read the article before attending (not required). Event starts at 7pm sharp.

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Brandon Joyce & Dr. Richard Lee Davis, PIFAS Co-Founders.

More info here.

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August 02: Opening: TDAR Departmental Tea
Please attend the Departmental Tea/Opening for PIFAS’s Eric James Johnson Memorial Fellows for August 2008, THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH. Food and drink aplenty. Plus air-conditioning (really). Tea starts at 7pm sharp.

ABOUT TDAR The Temporary Department for Academic Research (TDAR) is a perpetually ad-hoc working group pursuing an investigation of academia, appropriating while at the same time acquiescing to the formalized parameters, institutional rituals, and conceptual boundaries of the classroom itself.

More info here.

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July 22: Mononchrom

www.monochrom.au

monochrom
LAW AND SECOND ORDER
(ZWEITE ORDNUNG MUSS SEIN)
A gala without M. Night Shyamalan

monochrom ist durchaus eine international agierende, in wien, graz und bamberg situierte kunstneigungsgruppe, seit 15 jahren umtriebig, mit diversen volontariaten in zahlreichen realitäten: internationale kunstszene, apfelsortenzucht, powerpointoperetten, feldgottesdienste, beweisführungen, schirmherrschaften, soziale praxis, game- und schämshows, theorie, internet, dübel und schnittchen. v.a. das sammeln, gruppieren, registrieren und befragen (befreien?) von alltagskulturellen vernarbungen ist monochrom passion und quasi-ontologischer auftrag. kulturarchäologische grabungssondagen in ideologie- und unterhaltungsstätten. staatlich geprüftes rhizom. die schönheit der impliziten kaputtheit der selbstverständlichkeit ist anlass für phänomenologische wollust und (benutzer-)freundliche mikropolitische übernahmen. oder so. bildet to-do-stapel!

Donations welcome.

July 11: PLANAR STRUCTURES I & II
PLANAR STRUCTURES I, 1:00 pm:

I'll walk you through simple paper construction techniques that will enable you to make some amazing, transforming models! Once you understand the basic principles it's entirely a process of discovery, so I'll be learning from you too.

PLANAR STRUCTURES II, 4:00 pm:

Shortly after Planar Structures I, we will be continuing with a deeper investigation of kinetic geometry.Shortly after Planar Structures I, we will be continuing with a deeper investigation of kinetic geometry. We will be seeing what's possible with double sided machine scored paper, and pushing our own folding designs further.

LAB FEE: $5