Plato Enters the Pit del professore Jon McKenzie, Cornell University, USA
(A cura di professoressa Aleksandra Jovicevic, Discussant professore Fabrizio Deriu, Università di Teramo)
La lezione si svolgerà al Dipartimento SARAS (Dottorato di ricerca in musica e spettacolo) La Sapienza, Università di Roma
Aula Levi,ex-veterie Sciarra, 122 via dei Volsci, Roma
26 ottobre 2026 dalle h 18
La lezione si potrà seguire anche dal remoto: https://meet.google.com/idy-vwit-geg
Plato Enters the Pit
“Plato Enters the Pit” stages a reversal of the Platonic platform: the philosopher of form, ascent, and original/copy governance is carried into crowd, mud, festival, and performance design. This essay uses the poster as a theoretical object to diagnose critical stupidity as critique’s blindness to its own platform, genre addiction, local centralism, and explanatory flattening. It then connects Platonism, Descartography, recursive calculation, AI, Benjamin’s Angel of History, and StudioLab/BeyngLab’s Helyx/Toryx counter-geometries. The aim is not anti-theory, but theory after reorientation: danced, diagrammed, prototyped, transmediated, and taught to fly.
Professor Jon McKenzie, PhD is Director of StudioLab, a critical design lab at Cornell University whose teams connect researchers, designers, and organizations working in education, healthcare, and environmental and human rights. His research shuttles between the disciplinary paradigms and performative desiring-machines of cultural, organizational, and technological performance and their perfumative emissions, the AI atmospherics of our everyday lifedeath. His transmedia work includes the books Perform Design Act: Provocations in Performance Design (with Dorita Hannah and Olav Harslov, 2026), Transmedia Knowledge for Liberal Arts and Community Engagement: A StudioLab Manifesto (2019) and Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2001, 2027), as well as the experimental play Lifelines: Blavatsky Freud Experience, and the films The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r (2012), Lifelines: Jaroslav Mokosh Experience (2024), and S/CARE PACKAGES: Crises of Care of Self, Community, World, (with Ana Vujanovic, featuring Bernard Stiegler and Daniel Ross, 2021). Jon’s essays, videos, comics, workshops, etc., can be found at labster8.net and studiolab.world.
