In September 2021, The New Centre for Research & Practice will enter its eighth year of operations, offering online graduate-level seminars in art & curation, philosophy, architecture & design, and transdisciplinary humanities. With growing support from hundreds of members, and staffed with internationally-renowned instructors, The New Centre is a leading institution for virtual learning and para-academic pedagogy.
We are excited to announce that the scholarship applications for our fall/winter 2021 season are open from today until September 6 at midnight EDT. To apply, please complete this form. The application should include a writing sample and a cover letter (in PDF) outlining your interests, and reasons why you need financial help. Currently, half of The New Centre’s full scholarship recipients are from the Global South and half are women. In addition, all applicants from the Global South receive an automatic 50 percent tuition reduction.
Our fall/winter 2021 season features new seminars by Franziska Agnier, Ray Brassier, J.-P. Caron, Simon DeDeo, Colin Drumm, Ed Keller & Carla Leitão, Mattin, Michael Marder, Jason Mohaghegh, Reza Negarestani, Daniel Sacilotto, Mohammad Salemy & Romulo Moraes, and Laura Tripaldi. Starting this year, we are also extending our Fall/Winter seasons to February, balancing out the length of our seasons and making it easier for Certificate Students to plan their academic year. For more information about our Fall/Winter offerings, please visit our seminars page.
Our Membership drive will continue until October: 75 USD for two years (instead of 300), and 50 USD for a year (instead of 150). Our Members have full access to 600+ hours of content from our archive and can audit upcoming seminars as they happen. They also receive a Google account with unlimited cloud storage, pay reduced rates for consultations, and can promote their events via our mailing list and social media. Our YouTube-only membership is also available for 4.99 USD directly from our channel.
In the last six months, we have also branched out and developed new ways to engage our community at the forefront of social media platforms. Our Discord channel now provides closer communication and interaction between our members, researchers and instructors. The New Centre’s Clubhouse features audio encounters aiming at expanding the scope of our educational practices. In the last season, we partnered with the 13th Gwangju Biennale—Minds Rising Spirits Tuning to open a dialogue between its directors Defne Ayas and Natasha Ginwala and selected artists from the Biennale. We also hosted a Farsi/English bilingual conversation with our programmer Reza Negarestani on his sui generis book Cyclonopedia.
In addition, our public program, Sheltering Places, continues to serve as a way for our researchers to engage with one another and with artists, curators, and academics from around the world. Guests for the program’s fourth season included Post Brothers, Una Chung, Elena Gapova, Grigory Ioffe, Anna Longo, Cecile Malaspina, Ceci Moss, Sasha Razor, Carl Sachs, and Victor Wang.
This Fall, our publishing platform TripleAmpersand (&&&) will release a first-time English translation of François Laruelle’s Phenomenon and Difference with a preface by Katerina Kolozova, and a new book by Anil Bawa-Cavia on computational mathematics, titled Logiciel. Meanwhile, our online &&& Journal continues to act as a laboratory for theoretical and political speculations on philosophy, art, technology, social thought, and everything in between.
In the past six months, The New Centre collaborated with other institutions to produce new learning experiences. We hosted a series of workshops with the Digital Earth Fellowship 2021, aiming to develop an experimental graphic novel. We are currently working with the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion and Richmond Art Gallery to launch the second iteration of the Incredible Machines Conference 2014, a hybrid online and in-person event held in Vancouver, Canada which was the precursor for The New Centre’s activities.
To expand our Institutional Membership we are now offering this service for a flat annual fee of 500 USD. If you are interested in becoming an institutional member or collaborating with us, please click here or email us directly.
Finally, we would like to welcome Zainub Verjee to our Board of Directors. Verjee has over four decades built a formidable reputation as a Canadian cultural administrator and public intellectual, winning prizes such as Canada’s National Film Board Fellowship and the Governor General’s Award.
