OUR STUDIES SHOW
OUR STUDIES SHOW is collective research in Philosophy of Mind, set up to practice intentional doing-thinking through haptic social mapping and arrays of modal operations.
The SPCUNY Faculty Fellowship supported a sequence of thinktank-style scenarios, set up to engage in inquiries and develop scores. Through this series of in-person gatherings, we (those assembled) dig deeply into metaphysical and conceptual problems, such as “the nature of cognition,” and what can be meant by “neurodivergence,” and “epistemic agency.” Together, participants undertake dramaturgical processes of debating, deliberating, deciding, and sketching out “logical spaces” (such as decision-trees) for shared inquiry.
OUR STUDIES SHOW stages processes of collectively articulating the epistemological problems that matter to us, in conjunction with embodied and dramaturgically-reflexive practices for thinking together and inhabiting shared “Mundus imaginalis” mental theatre and states of consciousness. Considering our inhabitation of our own body-minds as legitimate empirical study (e.g. “instances of human thinking”) and our intuitions and ideas as important philosophical and thetic contributions, we practice thinking together in ways that resist AI and neurocolonization, center affect, social equity, compassionate communication, care, aesthetics, cognitive difference, and “interesting” relations. By staging practices of doing-thinking together, OUR STUDIES SHOW demands radical new forms of both artistic performance (“theatre”) and philosophy, intervening in and re-making the means through which truths are determined by power.
Through the Fall 2024 sessions, collective bodies composed inquiries:
1) how is “human thinking” related to “nature”?
2) how does what actual embodied persons believe about this question “matter”?
3) How shall we evaluate “beliefs” on grounds other than whether or not they are “true” or “scientific”? (doxastics vs. epistemics)
Through the Spring 2025 sessions, we developed experiments and other “theoretical dramaturgies” (scores for researching, thinking, and theorizing together). A booklet of these scores, diagrams, and experiment-forms is forthcoming.
Session Dates
Fall 2024:
SESSION 1: Monday, November 18, 6-9pm, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, NY
SESSION 2: Monday, December 2, 2pm-5pm, CUNY Graduate Center, NYC
SESSION 3: Monday, December 9, 6-9pm, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn, NY
SESSIONS 4-6 took place in January 2025 in Kumasi, Ghana, space and community supported by perfocraZE (PIAR residency), travel supported by the Rose C. Lamont Fellowship. Participants in some of these sessions were paid (like participants in an experimental study) while all others were free/non-monetary.
Spring 2025:
Sunday, March 9, 2pm-5pm, IN PERSON (Brooklyn NY, register for address, max 15 participants)
Sunday, April 6, 2pm-5pm,
ONLINE FREE/NON-MONETARY.
Photo by Regan de Loggans
René Cepeda
Poster by Abygai Peña
Photo courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of the artist
Image courtesy of Annabelle Heckler