CT+CR Collective

The Critical Theory + Creative Research Collective carries out projects, performances, roundtables, and various collaborations during the course of the year.  Thus far, the group has done projects for the Social Dream Lab at the Kimball Gallery, the de Young Museum in San Francisco (the performance piece “Manifesto on the Right to Dream” and the readings “And Now They Want Your Dreams, Too,” filmed by Holly Andres); a series of performances entitled “Come if You Dare” for Anna Craycroft's C'mon Language project at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)/TBA:13; a natural installation project in the high desert of Oregon with the Korean artist Atta Kim; and a video conference with members of the Center for Integrated Media on the future of education (“Future Tense:  Education in a Third Space”), among others.

CT+CR COLLECTIVE PROJECTS, 2013-present

CT+CR Collective ’20-’21, “In Those Days: A Report on the Weather,” Caldera Arts Center

CT+CR Collective ’18, “The Sea as Seen from the Shore by Flashlight (After Michelet),” Airstream Poetry Festival 2018

CT+CR Collective ’16, “4785” (Casting Our Glances across These Shores towards Fukushima-Daiichi on the 5 th Anniversary of the Pacific Disaster), Gearhart Beach. Video

CT+CR Collective ’16, Roundtable discussion on the Fukushima Project with Martha Rosler

CT+CR Collective ’15, Collaboration with Atta Kim, The Drawing Nature Series. Two installations at Caldera, photographic documentation, seminar series

CT+CR Collective ’14, “Visible Futures,” discussion in response to the Futures Project, Centre for the Living Arts. Arts-based research project on visual manifestations of the future and the critique of sci-fi aesthetics

CT+CR Collective ‘13, “Come If You Dare,” presented as part of Anna Craycroft’s “C’mon Language,” PICA and TBA:13. http://pica.org/event/cmon-language-ct-cr-collective/

Additional CT+CR Events, TBA:13:

Anne-Marie Oliver and Barry Sanders, Curators, with Val Hardy and Brooke Wendt, Assistant Curators, “Infinity Device,” Pop-up video/animation, PDX, May 24, 2013. Explorations of the Vanishing Edge

Anne-Marie Oliver, Barry Sanders, Thomas Zummer, and with Friends Like You, “Regarding Jacotot’s Claim That One Ignoramus Can Teach Another What He Himself Does Not Know,” presented as part of Anna Craycroft’s C’mon Language Project, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) and the TBA:13 Festival. http://pica.org/event/cmon-language-anne-marie-oliver-barry-sanders-thomas-zummer-and-with-friends-like-you/

CT+CR Collective ’13 for Natalie Zimmerman and Michael Wilson’s Social Dream Lab, de Young Museum, San Francisco; February 6-March 3, 2013: “And Now They Want Your Dreams, Too (Dead Straight),” a series of projects including the following:

DEAD STRAIGHT
Performance
February 10, 2013

Beginning with Bachelard’s notion of “dreams of will,” members of the CT+CR Collective read from the dream works of the dead, some with resurrectional intent. Taking the form of a live mimic model or exquisite corpse and executed according to strict time-based rules and restraints, first and foremost being the rule that the author must be dead, this performance explores recitation, in and of itself, as a form of social dreaming, involving interpolations of past, present, and future as well as complex aggregates of individual, dyadic, and collective will

Filmed by Holly Andres and jD White. Postproduction by Miles Johnson and Evangelina Owens
https://vimeo.com/70895834

WAKING, SLEEPING, AND OTHER ARTIFACTS
Roundtable
February 15, 2013

Electronic technologies produce new images that precede perception in ways that Bachelard, thinker of dreams, could neither have predicted nor imagined. Dreams, wishes, aspirations, nightmares, blessings, and curses circulate the net with lightning speed and equal ease, scrambling delicate ratios of waking and sleeping, memory and forgetting, knowing and unknowing, ownership and appropriation, will and determinism, knowledge and desire, the ingenuous and the disingenuous, the lived and the unlived. Indeed, what if that’s the point? In this roundtable, members of the Collective explore the fundamental ambivalence of social dreaming, particularly in light of current conceptions of the Commons and Hive Mind

Readings: Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,”; On Individuality and Social Forms; Michel Foucault, selection from “Dream, Imagination, and Existence: An Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s ‘Dream and Existence’”; Dream & Existence; Friedrich Kittler, “Computers,” Optical Media; and Henri Lefebvre, “Clearing the Ground,” Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday

Filmed by Amy O’Brien and Cassie Cone. Postproduction by Amy O’Brien

MANIFEST CONTENT
Blog
February 20-March 6, 2013

Drawing in more interlocutors, including Wolf, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Lacan, St. Augustine, Kittler, Klein, Kristeva, Simmel, Bataille, Bachelard, Bergson, Bloch, and Binswanger, members of the Collective issue further calls and responses in the form of a blog. The questions remain: What is social dreaming? What does sociality look like and feel like today? How can we transform the merely collective into the social?

MANIFESTO ON THE RIGHT TO DREAM
Closing Ceremony
March 2, 2013

Members of the CT+CR Collective deliver a manifesto on the right to dream