Nocturne
With a shift of light, things change.
A curtain becomes a ghost, colleagues become friends, the exchange of knowledge becomes shared thinking.
Nocturne is the state of night — nocturnal thinking, nocturnal writing, nocturnal discussion, nocturnal rehearsal, nocturnal gathering, nocturnal celebration, nocturnal plotting, nocturnal potentiality. The nocturnal is more than just a time of day for us. It is a situation or thisness, something that changes everything we do. At night, all we have begun during the day changes.
As a platform, Nocturne aims to provide a space and time for all those practices that emerge between institutions. A time in which the production and transmission of knowledge become collective practices, in which techniques of teaching become experimental procedures, and in which art and science do not enter into exchange but have already begun to work together in new ways.
We founded Nocturne as a place for projects of experimental knowledge production and transmission. The impetus and concern of this endeavor was and is the need for other formats and techniques of knowledge production and distribution. For a long time, the problems of the university and publishing landscape, as well as the art world, have been a recurring topic among colleagues and friends. These complaints, however, have often been accompanied not only by numerous proposals for how academic and artistic practices can come together differently, but also insights into how these have already been practiced differently for some time in seminars, reading groups, rehearsals, and in the studio. Nocturne is an evolving attempt to provide a platform for these alternative practices, to disseminate and strengthen them. For the moment, we have started with a speculative manual.
