The New Centre for Research & Practice, 4739 University Way NE, Seattle, WA (2026)

09/03/2026

We have extended our deadline to apply for Certificate Scholarships at The New Centre.

Join us for our Fall/Winter 2026–27 Season, shaped by the work of our Programming Committee in bringing together a diverse range of emerging and established thinkers across philosophy, aesthetics, literature, art, political theory, science, and transdisciplinary research.

Applicants from the Global South automatically receive 50 percent off tuition
Full scholarships available based on merit and financial need
Half of our Full Scholarships go to Global South applicants and half to women
Lifetime membership and access to 4000+ hours of seminar archives
Live auditing access to all current Seminars as a Certificate Student

Apply by September 8th, 23:59 ET with a cover letter and writing sample describing your intellectual interests and financial need.

To learn more about the application process and read about the Seminars, Workshops, Instructors, and events featured in this Season, please visit our Call for Curators announcement, link in bio.

IMAGE: Judy Radul and Geoffrey Farmer, Room 302, 2005. Courtroom furnishings and DVD projection, dimensions variable.

09/02/2026

Our Instructor and Certificate Student Eric Meier Graete has published a new essay, “Design Paradigms as Political Imaginaries,” along with two digital collages, in the latest issue of the art zine Silicity Protocols 𝒮𝒾𝓁𝒾𝒸𝒾𝓉𝓎 𝒫𝓇𝑜𝓉𝑜𝒸𝑜𝓁𝓈 , issue #6: “404.”

To learn more, please visit the link in our bio or story.

09/01/2026

As part of our Fall/Winter 2026–27 Season, we present our Workshop, "Nostalgia as Method: Tokyo-3, Lost Futures and the Media Archaeology of the Present," by Fernando Wirtz, which will start on January 10.

The Workshop treats nostalgia as a method for reading the present rather than a private ache for the past. Rather than approaching nostalgic attachment as conservative longing, it treats old cultural objects and media environments as instruments for reading how a sense of the future was built and later abandoned. Japanese science fiction, anime, cyberpunk, video games, and digital culture serve as the primary archive: Tokyo in ruins, the cyborg body, the adolescent pilot, the psychic child, the abandoned arcade, the corrupted machine. Each image is read as evidence of a specific historical desire, not simply as content to admire or revisit.

Sessions move through Mark Fisher's and Svetlana Boym's accounts of hauntology and lost futures, then into Miki Kiyoshi's philosophy of myth as a force that shapes how people imagine and remake their historical world, and finally into Azuma Hiroki's account of platform culture and database consumption. Reading Akira and Neon Genesis Evangelion alongside vaporwave, Frutiger Aero, and liminal-space aesthetics, the Workshop asks why entire generations feel nostalgic for futures they never lived, and works toward a media archaeology that connects personal memory to postwar reconstruction, economic stagnation, and the wider collapse of collective futures. Participants close by tracing one media object from their own memory into an analysis of a present-day social, technological, or political condition.

Session 1: Nostalgia Is Not Memory: Lost Futures as Method
Session 2: Tokyo-3: Catastrophe, Infrastructure, and the Anime City
Session 3: Myth Machines: Miki Kiyoshi and the Politics of Imagination
Session 4: Database Animals, Platform Nostalgia, and the Method Presentations

To learn more and enroll, please visit the link in our bio.

IMAGE: Chiharu Shiota, Between Worlds (Dünyalar Arasında), 2024

08/31/2026

As part of our Fall/Winter 2026–27 Season, we present our Seminar, "Modeling the (Dis)Embodied: From Flesh to Interface," by Morgane Billuart. Morgane Billuart

The Seminar considers the female body as a site of technical intervention within contemporary techno-capitalist culture. Biomedical discourse, FemTech applications, fertility technologies, and hormonal management render femininity measurable and subject to constant adjustment, an approach the Seminar treats as a design problem as much as a medical one. Culturally coded traits such as care, adaptability, and constant availability recur as models for AI assistants and affective computing systems. The body becomes a template for interface logic itself.

Sessions draw on Susan Sontag, Paul B. Preciado, Caroline Criado Perez, Judy Wajcman, Silvia Federici, Alexander Galloway, Ruha Benjamin, Legacy Russell, and Ghislaine Boddington to move between medical framing and interface design, then toward feminist cyborg narratives and posthuman imaginaries. The Seminar asks whether these figures still offer a way out of the systems that already put the female body to technical use, or whether they have become part of the same machinery.

Session 1: The Female Body as Technical Problem
Session 2: The Female-Perceived Body as Interface
Session 3: (Dis)Embodied and Cyborgian Revisions
Session 4: Modeling Otherwise?

To learn more and enroll, please visit the link in our bio.

IMAGE: Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell, 1995

08/30/2026

This week on &&& Triple Ampersand, we are publishing “Sophie’s Choices: Freedom or Annihilation?” by Anima Kadyszewska ∆.

In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Kadyszewska places Sophie Xeon in a genealogy that runs through Walter Benjamin’s account of aura and mechanical reproduction, Andy Warhol’s pursuit of total replication, and Wendy Carlos’s synthesized Bach and Beethoven. Each of these figures treated the gap between an original and its copy as either something to mourn or something to close. Sophie closes it decisively, making the artifice long associated with electronic music sound, for the first time, completely natural.

That closing is not simply a technical achievement. Theodor Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason rested on representation always falling short of what it tried to picture, a failure that exposed capital’s own incompleteness. A synthesis without gaps, the kind Carlos first proved possible and Sophie later made intuitive, exposes nothing; it only demonstrates its own power. This is why the essay reads Sophie’s music less as liberation than as a genuine and unresolved choice between absolute freedom and total annihilation.

To read the full text, please visit the link in our stories or bio.

IMAGE: Renata Raksha, promotional photograph of Sophie, 2017.

08/28/2026

As part of HYPER ANNOTATIONS 5.0 conducted during the opening days of the 2026 edition of Venice Biennale of Art, Leila Kaarina Barber speaks with Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa, Curator of the Zimbabwe Pavilion.

&TNC is presenting a new conversation from HYPER ANNOTATIONS 5.0 every week, featuring artists, curators, and art professionals from different pavilions, engaging with the themes, questions, and curatorial arguments of the 61st International Art Exhibition, In “Minor Keys”, curated by the late Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh.

To watch the full conversation, please visit the link in our stories or bio.

08/27/2026

Our Seminar, "Necrophilanthropy: Nonprofit Killers and the Carceral State," by Emily Rose Apter emily apter (rose) and Charles de Agustin Charles de Agustin , will start on September 27.

"Necrophilanthropy," the term at the center of this Seminar, draws on necropolitics and necrophilia to describe how capital seduces through death. Emily Rose Apter and Charles de Agustin open by mapping the nonprofit industrial complex, a network of public and private interests, funded by grantmakers and the ultra-wealthy, that has absorbed and softened movements for social transformation over the last four decades. The Seminar traces this history from the late-nineteenth-century "scientific charity" movement through the decline of the welfare state and the rise of mass incarceration, then turns to art and culture, examining the 1990s rise of "social practice," the use of artists to beautify the carceral system, ongoing labor struggles inside arts nonprofits, and the proposed US "nonprofit killer" bill, which would strip nonprofit status from organizations labeled "terrorist supporting," including groups doing even modest Palestine solidarity work.

The second half turns to participants' own work, using student presentations, case studies, and power mapping to consider how to evade mechanisms of elite capture, before culminating in individual final projects: an essay, a presentation, a direct action, or a speculative organization. Readings draw on Robert Allen, Chloë Bass, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Larne Abse Gogarty, Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Jeniffer Wolch. Artists and cultural workers, salaried or unwaged, are especially encouraged to register, alongside anyone from other sectors who shares an interest in these questions.

To learn more about this Seminar, please visit the link in our bio.

IMAGE: Live Aid Concert, 1985

08/26/2026

We have extended our deadline to apply for Certificate Scholarships at The New Centre.

Join us for our Fall/Winter 2026–27 Season, shaped by the work of our Programming Committee in bringing together a diverse range of emerging and established thinkers across philosophy, aesthetics, literature, art, political theory, science, and transdisciplinary research.

Applicants from the Global South automatically receive 50 percent off tuition
Full scholarships available based on merit and financial need
Half of our Full Scholarships go to Global South applicants and half to women
Lifetime membership and access to 4000+ hours of seminar archives
Live auditing access to all current Seminars as a Certificate Student

Apply by September 8th, 23:59 ET with a cover letter and writing sample describing your intellectual interests and financial need.

To learn more about the application process and read about the Seminars, Workshops, Instructors, and events featured in this Season, please visit our Call for Curators announcement, link in bio.

IMAGE: Diane Simpson, Cape, 1990. Courtesy the Artist; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; and James Cohan, New York.

08/25/2026

Our Instructor Rômulo Moraes ear vortex has published a review in Pitchfork.

For the magazine, Moraes reviewed Bruno Berle's new album Sem Fronteiras, tracing how the Brazilian songwriter fuses lo-fi dream pop with música popular brasileira into what Moraes calls a "hyperbossa." The review places the record within a broader Brazilian lineage: the psychedelic Northeastern sound of Zé Ramalho and Geraldo Azevedo, and the Maceió bedroom pop scene where Berle got his start.

For this New Centre Season, Moraes is teaching a Seminar titled "Collecting Brazilian Music as an Obsession," starting December 11, which examines the decades-long international fascination with 1970s Brazilian music and the politics of collecting, taste, and cultural extraction that surround it.

To read the full review, please visit the link in our stories or bio.

08/24/2026

As part of our Fall/Winter 2026–27 Season, we present our Seminar, "Collecting Brazilian Music as an Obsession," by Rômulo Moraes ear vortex , starting December 11.

Over the past three decades, international record markets have built a sustained fixation on 1970s Brazilian popular music, buying, archiving, and sampling once-obscure albums by artists like Arthur Verocai, Pedro Santos, and José Mauro until their careers and the wider canon of Brazilian music were reshaped from outside. This Seminar traces the material and allegorical roots of that fixation, reading it through the history of collecting alongside the revival of MPB. It follows the routes connecting niche record stores in Tokyo and London, reissue labels built around world music, and the specific journeys that first put foreign DJs in contact with Brazilian artists worth "elevating," setting these networks against a longer history of Brazilian music's export to the United States through samba, bossa nova, and jazz fusion.

What does it mean to sample a culture only partly understood? The Seminar asks how the working vocabulary of collecting, terms like "digging," "haunting," "vibes," carries an entire imagination of Brazil as territory, of the 1970s as an era, and of the encounter with a racial other. Drawing on ethnomusicology, media theory, phenomenology, and Brazilian sociology, sessions work through where Afro-diasporic cultures converge and where they diverge, asking whether the current international enthusiasm for Brazilian music amounts to a new form of extraction or a genuine opening toward post-racial alliance.

SESSION 1 — THE LONG HISTORY OF BRAZILIAN MUSIC EXPORTATION
SESSION 2 — WORLD MUSIC, AURAL TOURISM, COLONIAL ARCHIVES
SESSION 3 — DIASPORIC MULTIPLICITY VS BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS
SESSION 4 — ALGORITHMIC TASTE AND NEW METAPHORS OF AUTHENTICITY

To learn more and enroll, please visit the link in our bio or story.

IMAGE: Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66, Look Around, 1968

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