No Telos is a collaborative artistic research project for exploring the critical role of uncertainty, disorientation, not knowing and open-ended activity within creative practice and during uncertain times. This artists’ book comprises a series of ‘scores’ drawing on exercises and practices first developed and tested in Venice (2017), where the city is approached as a working ground or live laboratory for artistic research and aesthetic investigation, for poetic inscription and playful experimentation. Contributing artists: Andrew Brown | Emma Cocker | Steve Dutton | Katja Hock | Tracy Mackenna| Danica Maier | Andy Pepper | Elle Reynolds | Derek Sprawson.
No Telos considers different tactics for resisting the increasingly outcome-motivated or achievement-oriented tendencies of contemporary culture, by shifting emphasis from a mode of telos or goal-driven productivity towards experimental forms of process-led exploration, subversive playfulness and wilful irresolution. No Telos was conceived as a counter-measure to the ubiquitous demands to do more and more — faster and faster — that arguably underpin the current culture of immediacy and urgency, with its privileging of multitasking, perpetual readiness and ‘just-in-time’ production. No Telos was adopted as a (mis)guiding principle through which to collectively test and develop shared ways of doing and becoming — for producing generative states of uncertainty; for exploring the disruptive potential within incompletion and the unresolved; for cultivating receptivity to the unfamiliar and unexpected, to the possibility of the unknown.
Book Launch
Sunday 16 June, 18:00 - 20:00
Research Pavilion
Sala del Camino
Giudecca
Venice