ODD THEORY

ODD THEORY has been since the beginning an attempt to understand as well as to reconfigure, with the delicate means afforded by a small-scale initiative, the Romanian imaginary. It functioned as a learning and sharing tool, and in the current configuration succeeded in its initial bet of bringing together a community of curious and courageous people. The small following overlapped ODD’s general following, but also managed to stand out as a work group of hybrid practitioners, one that is slowly developing common tools and initiatives.

In working with a collective imaginary, regardless of the scale of that collective, one has to face the challenge of the poor political imagination characterizing the contemporary world. Romania is, in that respect, eternally blocked in binaries which do not serve its citizens. The misery of catching up conflates with extremely narrow local politics, producing a public sphere in which important issues marking the world are never properly discussed. In that respect, ODD THEORY makes a point in choosing speakers who can deliver presentations and workshops on subjects that remain poorly known and understood on the local scene, topics which overlap and create a series of mind-opening mirrorings.

ODD THEORY is curated by Cristina Bogdan.

ODD THEORY #15

Reality Overload

Geert Lovink, Georgiana Cojocaru

15/03/2019 19:00

Mântuleasa 4, Bucharest, Romania

We acknowledge the fact that refusing to be part of the art world, due to being hurt and swindled by it, is not going to work out well if we muffle ourselves with irony to keep warm and use the tortured hypotheticals of theory to lick our wounds.

ODD THEORY #14

Coiled Verbal Spring

Rab-Rab Press

07/11/2018 18:00

Tranzit / Gazelei 44, Bucharest, Romania

The new publication by Rab-Rab Press, Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language, brings together the first English language translation of the Russian Formalist and Futurist writings on Lenin’s revolutionary language.

ODD THEORY #12

Version History

Caleb Waldorf

26/10/2018 00:00 - 27/10/2018 00:00

Salonul de Proiecte / Palatul Universul, Ion Brezoianu 23-25, Bucharest, Romania

In his lecture at ODD, Caleb Waldorf, co-founder and creative director of Triple Canopy, will trace the past, present, and future of Triple Canopy’s approach to post-digital publishing as well as how the magazine is situated within a broader field of publication topologies.

ODD THEORY #11

Privilege Escalation

Aymeric Mansoux

10/10/2018 20:00 - 11/10/2018 20:00

Tranzit / Gazelei 44, Bucharest, Romania

In this talk Aymeric Mansoux will discuss the ongoing techno-legal transformation of society into a collection of systems in which the questions of agency have been reduced to issues of permissions, platforms, and usership within arrangements relying on principles of, or drawing inspiration from both computational and legal systems.

ODD THEORY #10

Machine Imagination and Alien Metaphysics

Luciana Parisi

06/10/2018 18:00

Tranzit / Gazelei 44, Bucharest, Romania

If the image of the future has already been colonized by the inevitability of a planetary automation or by the Singularity, is it at all possible to re-introduce alieness in metaphysics beyond a master pattern that knows it all?

ODD THEORY #9

A Room For Everyone

Georgia Nicolau, Binna Choi

20/09/2018 17:00 - 22/09/2018 21:00

Tranzit / Gazelei 44, Bucharest, Romania

Georgia Nicolau & Binna Choi come together for a workshop and a conversation aiming to investigate, from both a theoretical and practical perspective, the meaning and practices of network based artistic production, the hacker logic in building collaborative platforms and constructions of art.

ODD THEORY #8

The Fascist Creep in the Tech Industry

Ana Teixeira Pinto

15/09/2018 18:00

Tranzit / Gazelei 44, Bucharest, Romania

How to describe the new configuration of fascist ideology taking shape under the aegis of, and working in tandem with, neoliberal governance? How to describe the nexus between ideology and fascist curious aesthetics?

ODD THEORY #7

Post-truth

Ovidiu Gherasim-Proca

03/03/2018 17:00

MNLR attic / Nicolae Crețulescu 8, Bucharest, Romania

Ovidiu Gherasim-Proca will present and discuss some of the ideas he had in mind when working on the book Almost counter-discourse, published in 2017 by Tranzit.ro/Iasi.

ODD THEORY #6

About the Higher Space or, A Masquerade

Adriana Gheorghe

19/09/2017 20:00

Șelari 13, Bucharest, Romania

It might be a performative lecture with deviational strategies to produce constant displacement & wistfulness of perspective and language – a poetic and human masquerade, not so different from concepts like the higher space or generator of singularities. Let us call it a séance.