Anya Yermakova: ArtScience for Historiographic Methods

Friday, March 9 at 2:00 p.m.
Sever 416

Anya Yermakova will showcase several creative projects in sound, movement and experimental laboratories, that have been instrumental in developing a mediated lens on critical issues of scholarship in the history and philosophy of science-making.

A presentation will be followed by a discussion. All are invited to contribute to the conversation about Art as Research. Workshopping someone’s concrete idea or process is particularly welcome.

RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com

Re-discovering foundational spaces that interlink methods and modalities, we play in re-combining them via dynamic, at times non-existent logics. Foregoing bridge-building across disciplines and ways-of-knowing, we instead focus on the kinds of selves that inhabit them, including ourselves – as sites for research. We treat Foundational Principles as conditions for possibility — of playfulness, of “progress,” of corporeality.

Yermakova’s creative work supports the translation and amplification of the the precarious voices of the subversive mathematicians in pre-revolutionary Russian Empire. “Refusing to refuse” professionalization, they are at once “serious” and dispersed, “intuitive” in both a mathematically-praiseworthy and suspiciously-mystical ways. While #neo-Platonist, #universalist, #spiritual are all accurate associations for their mathematical practices, differentiating their universalism is a task that requires an ontology based on rethinking their fundamentals in their kind of modernity, which has left little trace.

Curious to intuit their self-identification as Methodologists and Symbolists, and to treat seriously the possibility for broadening mathematical subjectivity, the research begins with a project of integrating foundational laws of astrophysics with embodied knowledge. Dimensioning relevance of the space inbetween, emerging new foundational principles are taken into co-composing and improvising with sounds and structures. Diagrammatic notation, historically-embedded assumptions of genre, fluidity of language, and relaxing the categories of “science” — surface and bend, necessarily, in service of “tuning” and “tuning in.” Mathematical practice gains potential to be embedded in a framework of collective responsibility.

Experimenting with creative practice on ourselves that upholds the fundamental indeterminacy of this collective, exposes missing pieces of a mathematical sanctuary enwrapped in multi-dimensional precarity, removed from our intuition by a gap in spacetime.

Anya Yermakova is a PhD candidate in History of Science at Harvard, with a Secondary in Critical Media Practice.

For short bio see anyayermakova.com