Student as Producer on Tour – Manhattan

Student as Producer has been on tour in New York, 11 – 14th October, 2011. Mike Neary and Joss Winn spoke at several universities in Manhattan, including Baruch College – City University of New York (CUNY), the Adelphi University and the New School. Mike and Joss gave their talk at Baruch College ( CUNY) alongside Jim Groom, from Mary Washington University. Jim’s work shares similar objectives with Student as Producer. You can see photographs from the presentation here, as well as listen to an audio recording. The talk was well received. There is a great deal of interest among the academics and students who attended the presentations on Student as Producer.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (1940).

Student as Producer is based on a number of intellectual projects, including critical social theory. Walter Benjamin (1892 -1940) was a central figure among a group of critical social theorists writing in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. His article, Author as Producer (1934), is a key text for the development of Student as Producer

Author: Mike Neary