Hello and welcome.

I am many things, but my practice as a scholar and a maker is probably best understood as a sort of strange phenomenology. I am working on problems related to objecthood and thingness in art objects and digital archives, thinking about duration and use. My current research explores how the art object happens (comes into being), can be handled, is allowed to perish (or be used up), or how such an object could or should be ‘saved’ or preserved.

Taking up a critique of new materialisms and conservation studies, this work is spanning concerns from Plato to Bergson, Heidegger, and Deleuze, seeking to understand the iterative and the incorporeal in such varied and diverse art practices as Japanese Boro, African American quilts recently accessioned by the Berkeley Art Museum, the making and remaking of the Grand Ise Shrine, the restoration practices of classic car enthusiasts, and the ontological status of the tin encasements commissioned to ‘save’ traditional wheaten wreaths by artist Ana Lupas. Further work in progress turns these questions of ephemerality towards hauntology as a method in the archive— how it is that we may phenomenologically encounter the other in the form of a digitally recorded media file. Both projects aim to build a concept of iterative ontological futurity that is both grounded in and operating beyond the subject-object encounter.

I serve as Associate Professor of Writing and Aesthetics at Antioch College, where I support students in self design majors that engage the craft of writing, oral history, archive theory, and philosophical aesthetics. I heat with wood in an 1842 homestead on a small farm, and share my textile studios with a toolmaker.

I owe a great deal of my mental life to the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, a program that engaged me in residencies with some of the world’s most thinking thinkers. I’ve enjoyed the teachings of Howard Caygill, Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Santiago Zabala, Giovanni Tusa, Jean-Luc Nancy, Silvia Mazzini, Chris Yates, Simonetta Moro, and Dejan Lukić, roaming streets and museums and artist studios of Rome, Florence, Venice, Berlin, Paris, Athens, and NYC. I am eternally indebted to those who made my undergraduate study in a revolutionary World Classics Program for nontraditional students at Antioch University possible, a history of ideas program that filled my head with the trials and tribulations of the human experience from speculative pre history to the Frankfort school. This program transformed how I view learning, while grounding my practice in participatory, applied, and public acts of thinking and making.

This site is where I curate digital teaching resources for my classes and independent studies, and explore emergent ideas. Reach out! bbryan <@> antiochcollege dot edu.