SOFT CONTROL » Keynote speakers

Art, Agency and the Technological Unconscious

samo — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:42:24 +0000

Our technological unconscious is a problem, perhaps the problem. We dream of mastering the cosmos, from quarks and the most primitive layers of matter up to ecosystems and the global economy, but our dreams turn increasingly into grim nightmares stalked by mechanisms gone bad. I am interested in artworks that help straighten out our dreams and bring them closer to reality—works that evoke a neo-Taoist ontology of decentred flows and reciprocal transformations, that we are caught up in, by no means in control. If the Western tradition aimed at representational realism, the works I have in mind aim at what one could call agency realism—not the portrayal of how things look but how things go. I discuss examples of works that foreground the agency of nature and machines; that function as technologies of the self, transforming our inner being; and that stage dances of agency between human and nonhuman actors. One thread that runs through these examples is an evocation of temporal emergence, becoming, the appearance of unpredictable novelty in the world. Dreams of mastery deny emergence and lapse into horror when it inevitably shows up. We can find a few examples of artworks that confront us with this, and many examples of works that thematise instead an experimental openness to emergence, and adaptation rather than control. Of course, dreams themselves are not the problem, but we tend to act them out in broad daylight.

Liminal desires: The Cadaver, the Comatose and the Chimera

samo — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:38:54 +0000

The body is an evolutionary architecture that operates and becomes aware in the world. To alter its architecture is to adjust its awareness. We certainly need to undermine the simplistic idea of agency and the individual. The body has always been a prosthetic body, one augmented, amplified and equally exposed by its instruments and machines. There has always been a danger of the body behaving involuntarily and of being conditioned automatically. A Zombie is a body that performs involuntarily, which does not have a mind of its own. A Cyborg is a human-machine system that becomes increasingly automated. There has always been a fear of the involuntary and an anxiety of the automated. Of the Zombie and the Cyborg. But we fear what we have always been and what we have already become. To be an intelligent agent one has to be both adequately embodied and intimately embedded in the world. But why not see the body itself as a mobile, monitoring and transmitting system that can be logged onto (and yes, hacked into) and accessed physiologically and phenomenologically?

Technoetic Creativity

samo — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 11:43:19 +0000

My interest is in the building of organisms of learning and research that can elicit and develop a technoetic creativity that is at once syncretic and ubiquitous. I shall briefly examine a number of dynamic models in whose design I have been centrally involved over the past several decades in England, Canada, Austria, and currently China. In every case, both analogue and digital processes and systems are addressed, prioritizing issues of behaviour, multiple identity, and connectivity. Whether media employed is immaterial or moist, questions of consciousness are central to the advancement of art. I take the position that consciousness, like space, is primordial. The suggestion that it is generated by the brain is as unlikely to me as the idea that space is generated by the body. Just as visual and auditory organs have evolved to register and negotiate space, so the brain has evolved to access consciousness. Science tells us that we see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum, and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. We have no measure of the degree of consciousness that can be reached, but many technologies over the millennia have been developed to widen or intensify the access, both somatic and chemical. Science cannot provide an explanation of how and why we have qualia or phenomenal experiences; technoetic art, by contrast, argues for the navigation of consciousness through a diversity of technologies, both archaic and contemporary. As for personal identity – what it is to be a Self – the isolated, solitary self of western culture since the Enlightenment is giving way to the emergence of the generative self. We see that the single-self organism is evolving into the multiple-self, which participates in the evolution of a variable field of multiple realities.

Media Archaeology as Topos Study

samo — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 08:00:45 +0000

This lecture will introduce a certain way of doing media archaeology by developing a theoretical-historical contextualization of the topos, a notion adopted from the literary scholar Ernst Robert Curtius and turned into a “tool” for explaining the recurrence of clichés and commonplaces in media culture. Huhtamo has applied the idea to various media forms ranging from “peep media” and the moving panorama to mobile media. In this intervention the approach will be delineated theoretically, discussing its predecessors and demonstrating how it can be applied to various facets of media culture. The task is identifying topoi, analyzing their trajectories and transformations, and explaining the cultural ‘logics’ that condition their ‘wanderings’ across time and space. Topoi are discursive “engines” that mediate themes, forms, and fantasies across cultural traditions. Predictably, they have also been appropriated by the culture industry.