Keynote speakers

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.