Tulip Hysteria Coordinating

At the peak of the Dutch Tulip mania of 1637, a
single bulb cost more than 10 times the yearly
wages of a skilled artisan; in Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,
Charles Mackay writes that 12 acres of land were
offered in exchange for a single Semper Augustus
bulb- Tulipmania prefigured the
hyper-financialization of art and aesthetics in
the 21st Century.



In her 1917 New York Sun review of the
Independents Show, Jane Dixon writes: " The artist
calls It 'Tulips Hysteria Coordinating.Anyone who
can think up a name like that ought to be put on
exhibition along with the 'painting'." Dixon,
admitting her mystification, describes a cubist
work comprised of splotches of paint little
resembling tulips. Even more mystifying, the work
-by Marcel Duchamp- appears to have never existed.
There is no mention of it in the show's catalog,
no mention by Duchamp, and scarcely a mention by
biographers and historians. Loosed from the
necessity of actuality, the work is one of
Duchamp's most radical, with the viral power of a
media-amplified "Popular Delusion" not unlike the
Tulip Hysteria of its title.



From the caves at Lascaux to medieval Scriptoria
to the spires of the Gothic cathedrals, the
drawings of Leonardo and Kepler to the automatons
commissioned for the courts of Rudolf II and
Catherine the Great; from the discovery of the
binary in the hexagrams of the I Ching to Leibniz'
Calculus Ratiocinator to Ada Lovelace's algorithm,
Goethe's Faust, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,
the course explores the technological imaginary
that gave rise to modernity.



From Daguerreotypomania to Impressionism, Wagner's
Gesamkunstwerk to Brecht's Epic Theatre, the
technophilia of the Futurists to the utopianism of
Tatlin's tower; from the machinic works of Roussel
and Duchamp to those of Nam June Paik, Lynn
Hershman-Leeson, Rammellzee, and the CCRU; from
Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto to Paul
Preciado's Pharmacopornographic Era, from the
techno-cultural work of Pierre Huyghe and the
Otolith Group to the bio-sculpture of Anicka Yi;
from early web-based art to the blockchain and
NFTs, the course explores the ways in which
artists have imagined and concretized modernity.



With the rise (and financialization) of digitally
and technologically-entangled art and the
ever-intensifying effect of technoscience upon the
social and natural world, the question concerning
artists' relationship to technology becomes more
urgent than ever. Tulip Hysteria Coordinating
explores artists' interactions with and approaches
to technology from 4 million BCE to the present,
examining their increasing complexity.