The Manifold

Exposed Arts Projects is a think-and-do tank that celebrates the power of arts-based research to produce an informed multidimensional perspective on the contemporary human condition. It is set to nurture an innovative, mindful and just society that is driven to explore the creative alternatives to the status quo.In line with the THINK part of our mission, each year our research project departs from an ethically complex question and brings together a diverse group of researchers to maintain an inclusive, interdisciplinary mode of knowledge production. The DO part reflects the specific way we choose to make our research public: through organising various kinds of educational activities that are relevant to people of different age and background. We facilitate two kinds of engagement: volunteering that enables the members of the public to work together with our team of researchers to acquire practical skills and knowledge; and events participation — such as reading groups, workshops, seminars, Q&As and games.

Exposed Arts Projects

In this open discussion, an artist convenes with a mathematician, a poet, and the public to consider the implications of the ‘manifold’

This is the 6th and final event in a two-day programming series of short, interdisciplinary research talks and participatory workshops at Exposed Arts Projects, entitled 'ONE FOLD, TWO FOLD, TEN FOLD, MANIFOLD.'In an open-forum discussion facilitated by the project’s leaders and partners with the public, we will all convene to discuss our concerns and questions around the implications of the 'manifold', starting with our responses to Kant’s philosophical use of a ‘manifold of sense.’ Free and open to all!About the speakers:Gina DeCagna is a MFA candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her public-facing interventionist installations have shown in solo and group exhibitions in London, New York, Philadelphia, and forthcoming Venice. She has been a Venice Fellow under the British Council (2019), Arts Engagement Fellow of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania (2017–2018), and a Steering Committee Member of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium (PASC) (2017–2018). She earned her BA in English, Creative Writing and Fine Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was founder and editor of Symbiosis (2012–2016), a project and publication of collaborating contemporary artists and writers. Dr Mehdi Yazdi is an Iranian mathematician specialised in topology and geometry; his research interests include surfaces and three-dimensional manifolds, foliations, and knot theory. He is a Glasstone Research Fellow in Science at the University of Oxford's Mathematical Institute and a Junior Research Fellow at St Peter's College. He received his PhD in mathematics from Princeton University in 2017 and has given talks widely, including at University of Cambridge, Yale University, University of California at Berkley, and Columbia University, among other institutions. He draws inspiration from geometric forms found in nature and in historical and contemporary models of art and architecture.Dr Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa-New Zealand. She joined the English faculty at Kenyon College in 2019 after receiving her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches American and Anglophone poetry with a specific focus on the literatures of the Pacific region. Her wide ranging scholarly interests include environmental humanities, sound studies, and the digital humanities. Her current book project investigates the systems and representations of waste and waste management in contemporary poetry and film. She is the author of a year of misreading of the wildcats (New York: The Operating System, 2019), earsay (n.p.:Trollthread, 2016) and five chapbooks, including ocean plastic (New York: BlazeVOX, 2019), blue doors (New York: Belladonna* Press, 2018), and Gallipoli Diaries (n.p.: Gauss PDF, 2017). In addition to her creative work, her scholarship and reviews have been published in journals such as Jacket2 and the Journal of Modern Literature. She is a reviews editor for Jacket2 and a consulting editor for the Kenyon Review.About the programming series:'ONE FOLD, TWO FOLD, TEN FOLD, MANIFOLD' is a series of interdisciplinary research talks and participatory workshops instigated by American artist Gina DeCagna.To paraphrase the late-nineteenth-century British writer John Huntley Skrine, one way to define a ‘manifold’ is as a chosen abstraction that gathers into focus qualities of human duty, experience, and hope. However, the term has varied meanings across context and research discipline. An artist convenes with a mathematician, a poet, and the public to consider varied meanings of the ‘manifold’ and to understand how our internal values and external objectivities intertwine. Through her interventionist installations of discarded cardboard, American artist Gina DeCagna employs a material and symbolic sensibility of ‘manifolds’ in building improvised organic architectures that resemble geographical strata, tree rings, and plant foliage from discarded cardboard to speculate on the forms and structures of globalised society. While in Baroque times, fabric folds were depicted to speak to a spiritual understanding of the soul, DeCagna seeks to represent the folding collapse of late capitalism, mixing indeterminacy with strength. She brings into her orbit the topologist Dr Mehdi Yazdi, who finds similar visual inspiration to propel his mathematical intuition around questions of manifolds and foliations — research questions that ultimately could lead us to mathematically understand more structures and systems that underpin the world, including, potentially, that of the Internet and even DNA. Poet and scholar Dr Orchid Tierney brings the metaphorical world of language into researching the representations of waste and its management, most recently completing a poetic work on ocean plastic. Finally, we will critically convene these different disciplinary approaches through philosophy, starting with Kant’s ‘manifold of sense’, that of bringing particularities together through a synthetic process of understanding.To learn more, visit www.exposedartsprojects.com.

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The Manifold

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The Manifold

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