At the present moment, the intersection of art and science represents that locus where various artistic innovations are being tested. However, it seems apparent that such testing of the new should not be viewed as simply narrowly specialized technological or aesthetic experiments, but, first and foremost, as examples of cultural expression and cultural activity.)
Only in that case can the results of the findings of scientists and artists exert a significant influence on the thinking and life of the larger society. In focusing attention on the production of contemporary art created by utilizing the most novel means of the 21st century – robotics, information technologies and biomedicine – participants in the panel discussions being held at the art exhibition “Die and Become! Art and Science as the Conjectured Possible” are attempting to clarify what it is that lies at the foundation of the emergence of the “artificial” and “technological” reality, and how this reality impacts us. Is it possible to reconfigure language, which constructs and describes the world of technology? The task of the theoretical portion of the project – lectures, round-tables, and discussions – is to show that artists are constructing new forms and new identities, but that they are doing so by acting as creators, rather than as the protagonists of a historically determined technological narrative.
Program & Speakers:
Session 1
1:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. Prof Pier Luigi Capucci (Fine Arts Academy of Urbino, Italy)
1:45 p.m. – 2:10 p.m. Dr Prof James Auger (Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, Portugal) and Jimmy Loizeau (Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom)
2:10 p.m. – 2:35 p.m. Dmitry ::vtol:: Morozov (Russia)
2:35 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. Thomas Feuerstein (Austria)
Lunch Break
Session 2
4:00 p.m. – 4:25 p.m. Prof Louis-Philippe Demers (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
4:25 p.m. – 5:10 p.m. Dr Prof Dmitry Galkin (Tomsk State University, Russia)
5:10 p.m. – 5:35 p.m. Where Dogs Run: Olga Inozemtseva, Natalia Grekhova, Alexey Korzukhin (Russia)
Coffee Break
Session 3
6:00 p.m. – 6:25 p.m. Prof Heather Dewey-Hagborg (Art Institute of Chicago, USA)
6:25 p.m. – 7:10 p.m. PhD Jens Hauser (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
7:10 p.m. – 7:35 p.m. Pedro Lopes (Hasso-Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany)
7:35 p.m. – 8:05 p.m. Verena Friedrich
Pier Luigi Capucci (Fine Arts Academy of Urbino, Italy)
THE LIFE OF CULTURE. THEORIES, NARRATIVES AND AESTHETICS OF EVOLUTION
www.capucci.org
Through sciences and technologies humans are shaping a wide and complex panorama pervaded by new devices, machines, algorithms and lifeforms, emerging from different realms. From its dawn and all along its evolution, humanity has always been representing, simulating, modifying and reinventing nature for a variety of purposes. Nature and life have been the inspiration, the solution and the event horizon in human activities, in solving practical problems to attain protection, knowledge and effectiveness in the phenomenal world. But also to invent narrations, to generate new aesthetics, to create new artforms. Today sciences and disciplines like Robotics, Artificial Life, Smart Algorithms, Synthetic Biology, Genetic Engineering, the Internet of Things, De-Extinction and more are pushing further the boundries of life and evolution. In this profound planetary transformation, many issues appear outdated and inadequate, while new ones are emerging.
Dmitry Galkin (Tomsk State University, Russia)
DIGIT AND CELL: (NON)ORGANIC SYNTHESIS
www.en.past-centre.ru/staff/galkin
Science, art and technology intersect and converge on many levels: creative, artistic, conceptual, institutional and even ontological. We apply Andrew Pickering’s theory and methodology of ‘ontological theatre’ to the complex matters of how human and non-human agencies interact in the cultural “brew” of art and technology. The technological ‘digit’ and natural ‘cell’ represent a major drama for this completely superficial encounter, with its fundamentally open-ended, decentered, transformative processes of becoming. Art, science and technology come to perform this ontological drama of late Modernity with no play prepared and not even exclusively focusing on the human Actor. But still there is a great cast: Char Davis, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Mateusz Herczka and Guy Ben-Ary, among others.
Jens Hauser (University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
WETWARE: ITS NEW MEANING FOR ART
www.art.msu.edu/profile/hauser
While artists have previously staged ‘Artificial life’ via the hardware and software of computers and robotics to simulate living systems, increasingly, in the light of today’s convergent living technologies and synthetic biology, it emerges from wetware itself. The influence of information processing technology reaches a new level in man-made ‘wet machines’, but also in the reconsideration of the innate technological capacities in supposedly primitive organisms and ancestral biological systems, whose complexity the human mind is only very slowly starting to understand – with wetware, the concepts of art, agency, and animation acquire new meanings. It thereby echoes Jack Burnham’s seminal exhibition project from 1970, titled software, showing art’s move towards “concerns with natural and man-made systems, processes, ecological relationships,” suggesting that if “we build machines in our own self-image, a separation between body and mind may be no more than an illusion fostered by our lack of scientific knowledge about human biology and communication systems in general.”
Pier Luigi Capucci (IT)
Pier Luigi Capucci (b.1955, Lugo) is a researcher and theorist in the fields of media studies and of the relationship among art, science and technology. He has published extensively in books and magazines, delivered numerous conference papers, and he written the books Reality of the Virtual (1993), The Technological Body (1994), Art and Technologies (1996). In 1994 he founded and directed the first Italian online magazine, NetMagazine, later MagNet, on the relationships between the arts and technologies. In 2000 he started Noema, a web magazine on culture-science-technology interrelations. He has participated in international conferences worldwide. He has worked as a teacher at the universities of Rome “La Sapienza”, Bologna, Florence and Urbino, at the SUPSI in Lugano, and at the fine arts academies of Carrara and NABA in Milan. He is currently a professor at the Fine Arts Academy of Urbino and the Director of Studies of the T-Node PhD Research Program of the Planetary Collegium, University of Plymouth (UK).
Dmitry Galkin (RU)
Dmitry Galkin (b.1975, Omsk) is a researcher, art theorist and curator. He earned his Ph.D. ('candidate of science' degree) from Tomsk State University (2002), and later 'doctor of science' degree in 2013. In his research he focuses on cultural dynamics in the context of technological development from digital culture to the culture of artificial life, and analyses the history/aesthetics of technology based art practices. Dr.Galkin is the author of many articles on the history and theory of digital culture; he has also published a monograph entitled Digital Culture: Shift to Artificial Life (Tomsk University Press, 2013). Dr.Galkin has been a research fellow at the George Washington University (USA) and Lancaster University (UK). He has also lectured and presented at international conferences, including the NeoLife 2015 (Perth), EdCrunch 2015 (Moscow), TEDx Tomsk (2013). He is currently Professor at the Institute of Art and Culture and the PAST Centre at National Research Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russia).
Jens Hauser (DK/DE/FR)
Jens Hauser (b.1969, Schwerte) is a curator, writer and media theorist. He holds a dual research position at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies and the Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, and is a distinguished affiliated faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University. His curated exhibitions include L’Art Biotech (Nantes, 2003), Still, Living (Perth, 2007), sk-interfaces (Liverpool, 2008/Luxembourg, 2009), the Article Biennale (Stavanger, 2008), Transbiotics (Riga 2010), Fingerprints... (Berlin, 2011/Munich/2012) Synth-ethic (Vienna, 2011), assemble | standard | minimal (Berlin, 2015), SO3 (Belfort, 2015) and Wetware (Los Angeles, 2016). Hauser serves on international juries for art awards such as Ars Electronica, Transitio or Vida, as well as for several national science foundations. He is also a founding collaborator of the European culture channel ARTE and has produced numerous reportages and radio features.