Fillip

Reading Group: Can one move along a number line? With Brynn McNab
January 14th, 2023

1:00 p.m.

45W
45 West Hastings
Vancouver, BC

Register here

Join Fillip and writer Brynn McNab on Saturday, January 14 at 1pm at 45W, Vancouver, for a seminar-style discussion on movement and embodied mathematics.

movement / metaphor = embodied mathematics

Most of us learn mathematics through memorization, as a procedure of algorithmic steps to follow to produce a correct result. These steps are often unsituated and disorienting, the only landscape they offer being the previous step and the one afterwards. How does our understanding change if we move along a path of mathematics differently? While classical math insists on being outside of time and space, irrespective of social contexts and the bodies they are carried out through, a material and embodied mathematics might offer a different relationship to these abstractions.

This Reading Group workshop seeks to illuminate some of the basic mathematical intuitions by treating them as scores which the body habitually encounters. By focusing on small moments of embodied perception, McNab will lead the group through one of mathematics’ most aestheticized equations: Euler’s identity. It involves no previous mathematics experience, and no correct answers, but will instead consist of a collaborative process of reflection and discussions of observations and findings coming from our understanding of the body’s relationships to time, space, the world, and each other.

This workshop asks the question: What lines are there to move along?

This event is free to attend, but space is limited and an RSVP is required. Attendees will be provided with a PDF reading upon registration.

About the Presenter

Brynn Catherine McNab is a writer, researcher, and curator, currently based in Vancouver as an uninvited guest on the unceded territories of the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ) and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Nations. She is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, in the Mathematics and Philosophy departments. Her research is centred around recursive functions in mathematics and philosophy, and their material constraints. McNab holds a Master’s degree from the European Graduate School, where her research culminated in a thesis on the structure of metaphor using topological dynamical systems theory and the movement of plants. She is dedicated to working collaboratively and across disciplines, most recently between contemporary dance, publishing, computation, and philosophy. 

Venue Accessibility

Please note that 45W has a single flight of stairs and no elevator. The bathrooms are small. The entrance is through the back alley and there is a step up to the door. Please contact us with venue accessibility inquires and we will make every effort to accommodate specific needs.