The Napping Wizard Sessions

On April 02, 2021 I spoke with Farideh Sakhaeifar about her exhibition You are in the War Zone at Trotter and Sholer in New York’s Lower East Side and her residency at Koda Lab in Brooklyn. The presentations introduce several of her visual experiments from the last decade as a kind of survey. Her work explores various themes from the Middle East and her native Iran, and the differences and complexities of living in the United States since 2009. How does the media influence the way we see our position in the world? Having known Farideh since 2013, I take cues from the exhibition as opportunities to go off script into the past and future of her work and how she has handled the remarkable year that 2020 has been. Audio excerpts from Halabja, 1988, with sound design by Sadra Shahab and narration by Maryam Ghoreishiand vocal excerpt by Hussein Smko from the Hekler event The People’s Tribunal.You are in the War Zone was organized jointly by Trotter and Sholer: https://trotterandsholer.com/exhibition/you-are-in-the-war-zone/and Koda Lab: https://www.kodalab.org/with contributions and collaborations from Hekler: https://www.hekler.org/Details about Farideh and her work can also be found here: https://faridehsakhaeifar.com/I recommend you browse the website as we discuss the work and follow along with the images of the titles we introduce.

The following is a transcript from a lecture I delivered at A Night of Philosophy, a free event that hosted 62 international philosophers and 12 artists on April 24, 2015 from 7pm to 7am simultaneously at the French Embassy and The Ukrainian Institute on New York City’s Upper East Side. I was invited as an artist, and I chose the subject of the shape-shifting character Leshonkii, of Ukrainian, Russian and Slavic folklore, to adapt to the site of the Ukrainian Institute. As an artist, the logical shape to shift into was that of a philosopher. I delivered my lecture in a crowded auditorium on The Philosophy of the Comic and Tickling at 03:50 am. I have no audio or video documentation of the event, so this is a post-performance presentation. The laugh tracks and supplemental audio was included in the live performance.

In this lecture from The Night of Philosophy in 2019 at 05:00 am on October 06 at the New School for Social Research in New York City, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Nicolas de Warren, discusses our debt of plastic and nuclear waste. While many of us dream about augmented technology and the possibility of becoming cyborgs in the future, Dr. de Warren considers a different transformation of homo sapiens. With the prevalence, distribution and breakdown of plastics and nuclear waste into micro and nanoparticles, it is likely that we will consume so much as a species that future homo sapiens will indeed become part organic and part something else. Our waste habits produce an uncontrolled Kippleization – a term de Warren borrows from Philip K. Dick – that is guaranteed to transform the bodies of humans 100,000 years in the future. That is close to twice as long as homo sapiens have roamed the earth. The pyramids in Egypt are much younger than that, and yet the lazy gift we will saddle our descendants with will be far more cursed than the tombs of the pharaohs. In another Sci-Fi nod, this time to the Strugatsky brothers, de Warren compares us to disrespectful roadside picnickers - we have not taken from the forest everything that we brought in. Our campsite remains a mess.Nicolas de Warren is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. He has published extensively on phenomenological subjects such as Original Forgiveness, Husserl’s Awakening to Speech, Emmanuel Levinas and the Evil of Being, Sartre’s Phenomenology of Dreaming and Towards a Phenomenological Analysis of Virtual Fictions.