(Please join us for some picture drawing games. Bring paper, pens, markers, food, and friends.)

Friends and faculty-members read from their recent favorites:

Alex Hampshire: Blaise Cendrars
Brandon Joyce: Meister Eckhart

9pm.

Please join us at the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study at 9pm on Tuesday, September 2nd, for a program of slideshows of travel photographs. Adam Leeds will show photos from his recent travels to Russia, Dan Wyche from his recent travels to Thailand, and Ben Remsen from his not-at-all recent trip around the European continent. Ben's will focus exclusively on European graffiti -- of artistic, political, and/or vandalistic varieties. If Adam's or Dan's will have focuses, that has not been made known to the present blurbist.

The slideshows will serve as prompts for an open-ended discussion (before, during, and especially after) of what we're doing when we look at other people's travel photos. What are we doing aesthetically? Culturally? Personally (i.e. as friends)? Why are we intrigued? Why are we bored?

The slideshows will serve the secondary purpose of allowing those in attendance to actually learn what Adam and Dan did over their summer vacation, and what some cool graffiti that Ben saw in Europe looks like. All three slideshowers have been instructed to keep their presentations to around ten minutes, so don't worry about getting too bored.

The discussion and slideshows and more discussion will follow the screening of Shawn Kornhauser's and Nathaniel Holt's film "Finding Comfort" and will be followed in turn by a mass bike ride to Woody's to see Club Lyfestile. You can do everything you want all the time.

Free and open to the public.

As part of its month-long “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session,” THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH invites you to attend its closing reception and watch/participate in "The Art/Test," the result of a month’s collaborative work with tenured faculty at the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study. Food, drink, and grades. Event begins at 7pm sharp; attendance is mandatory for fall pre-registration.

More info here.

So it's really part one, but we went over some lambda calculus stuff and with the homework last time, so this gets to be part two (and the final class on the topic). The next topic after this will be Programming Algorithms and Data Structures, which will probably be a several class topic, and will probably be one of the most interesting topics.

As part of its month-long “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session,” THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH invites you to attend “Comic Books or Graphic Novels? The Politics of Nomenclature," a talk by Dr. N.C. Christopher Couch. Discussion and reception to follow. Event starts at 7pm sharp.

More info here.

N.C. Christopher Couch is the author of numerous books and articles on Latin American art and on graphic novels and comic art, including The Will Eisner Companion: The Pioneering Spirit of the Father of the Graphic Novel (with Stephen Weiner), Will Eisner: A Retrospective (with Peter Myer), Faces of Eternity: Masks of the Pre-Columbian Americas, and The Festival Cycle of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus. He curated exhibitions at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library American Museum of Natural History, the Americas Society, the Oklahoma Air and Space Museum and the Smith College Museum of Art. He was senior editor at Kitchen Sink Press (Northampton), editor in chief at CPM Manga (New York, and has taught at Amherst, Columbia, Hampshire, Haverford, Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, and the School of Visual Arts. Publications he edited won or were nominated for 17 Eisner and Harvey Awards, and he has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Dumbarton Oaks of Harvard University, and the Newberry Library. Current publications include the edited volume Conversations with Harvey Kurtzman, and a book on Batman artist and editorial cartoonist Jerry Robinson.

As part of its month-long “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session,” THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH invites you to attend a discussion-workshop on “the test” as aesthetic object-experience w/special guest Dr. John Muse, Haverford College's Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow for 2007-09 in the Fine Arts. Event begins at 7pm sharp.

NB: The discussion-workshop will serve as the catalyst for a collaborative test-writing project among Temporary Department Fellows, PIFAS Faculty, and any other interested parties, culminating in the residency's closing event--the FINAL EXAM.

More info here.

In 2006 John Muse received a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley. His dissertation, The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence: Roland Barthes, Avital Ronell, Roni Horn, co-chaired by Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman, analyzes Barthes' numerous writings on photography, an artwork by Horn entitled Another Water (the River Thames, for Example), and an essay by Ronell on the videotaped beating of Rodney King, "TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle." Muse shows how these works use photographs to promulgate a crisis of the evident.
FinleyMuse.com

Come learn the wonders of Formal Language Theory - the area of research that Noam Chomsky was famous for, among others. We'll go over Languages and Finite Automata. 6PM

As part of its month-long “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session,” THE TEMPORARY DEPARTMENT FOR ACADEMIC RESEARCH invites you attend a special Philosophical Research Group discussion focusing on Art Historian Florian Waldvogel’s seminal Manifesta 6 article "Each One Teach One" and its relation to PIFAS. Copies will be available at the meeting, but participants are encouraged to read the article before attending (not required). Event starts at 7pm sharp.

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Brandon Joyce & Dr. Richard Lee Davis, PIFAS Co-Founders.

More info here.