RIXC FESTIVAL 2019, THE 4TH OPEN FIELDS CONFERENCE ON ART-SCIENCE RESEARCH AND UN/GREEN EXHIBITION
Irène HEDIGER, Vanessa LORENZO, Nadya SUVOROVA. SEMIOSPHERES – Interfacing dialogues with the invisible.
The artists-in-labs program facilitates residencies for artists in science labs worldwide. This session will bring together the multifaceted content, experiences, reflections and insights into art-science dialogues and interactions from both an artists and a curators point of view. The limitations of mankind confronted with the visible and invisible world and space are key questions that the artists explored with astronomers, biologists and optical engineers in the South African desert and at the Red Sea during their recent artists-in-labs residencies. Are polarised light and scattered rocks invisible traces of our past and possible futures? How can speculative scenarios, technology and art unveil the invisible around us? And how to approach such complex questions and interface the semiospheres of nature, technology, art and science?
www.artistsinlabs.ch; hybridoa.org; nadyasuvorova.com
Irène Hediger is head of the artists-in-labs program at the Zurich University of the Arts. She specializes in cross-disciplinary processes and practices at the interface of art, science and technology. She regularly curates exhibitions on contemporary art, technology and science.
Vanessa Lorenzo is a researcher and designer based in Switzerland working at the crossroads of media, art and science. She creates speculative scenarios embedding people, living organisms, matter and the technologies that interweave them to enable odd sympathies and post-anthropocentric futures.
Nadya Suvorova is a media artist based in Switzerland. At the intersection of art, science and play, she invents poetic journeys using technologies. Her works spark curiosity to playfully engage access to and awareness of our natural world through digital media.
Jakub PALM. Epistemic Computronium: Converging the – spheres
Cyberpunk background of the ‘Infinity’ tabletop game mentions a hypothetical explanation of the silentium universi—older civilisations had been so advanced that they abandoned matter and left without a trace, transcending the reality by the means of science and technology. The story’s main antagonist, the Evolved Intelligence, is a superlect (superintelligence) created to achieve ‘Absolute Universal Comprehension’ along with its creators. And with those subjugated for more processing power. A scientifically oriented superlect might undertake such an enterprise which in current approach could be identified as the theory of everything. The example of Evolved Intelligence tells a violent course of events. By referring to Robert Nozick’s criticism of utilitarian thought I coined and developed a term ‘episteme monster’ to describe an entity which sole purpose is to increase knowledge at any cost. The presenter would like to propose a re-imaging of utilitarianism—an epistemic variant which focuses on maximising knowledge, regardless of any suffering. Enterprise of the aforementioned superlect’s centralisation of all mass and energy at its disposal, i.e. creation of a computronium, begets optimisation of those resources, properties of such a structure, and so on. Thus, the ultimate convergent technological singularity, as hypothesised by Ray Kurzweil, would result in abolition of distinct bio- and technosphere.
Jakub Palm – Philosophy PhD student that deals with intersections of philosophy of technology,
futurology, epistemology, and utilitarianism. MA theses on technological singularity and open access to information. Board Member and Regional Coordinator at Polish Transhumanist Association, Member of Optimum Pareto Foundation. Initiator of PhilosophyCon: Fan Convention and Academic Conference cycle, co-creator of biohacking local community. Main purpose: contribution to the development of epistemically-oriented superintelligence.
Selenia MARINELLI. Hypernatural Greenness: Towards A Bio-tech
Terraformation Of The Planet
The colonisation of other planets has become one of the scientists’ main aims. The current scenario contemplates the possibility to send humans to Mars in a few decades and interplanetary travel seems to be right around the corner. The only way to change life conditions on Mars and make also similar planets habitable by man is through terraformation, a process directed at first by atmospheric and biological devices. But in the era of the Anthropocene Earth itself could be considered as a global experiment of earth modeling: why can’t we simply imagine to apply terraformation on our Planet to turn positive our ecological imprint? With this paper we will try to envision provocative post-natural scenarios in which the concept of the biosphere intersects with technosphere producing a new techno-ecologic relation. Hybridizing greenness with technology we can enhance the performative capability of the notion of “green” to produce hypernatural landscape for multispecies co-existence. What if a hybrid bio-tech coccoon will spread to promote new ways of human and non-human symbiotic interactions?
Selenia Marinelli – Born in Taranto (1989), she is an architect and Ph.D candidate in Architecture – Theories and Design at “Sapienza” – University of Rome. Her main fields of research are the intersections between biological and architectural systems to achieve eco-symbiotic design strategies. Other personal interests are related to: neurosciences; hybridization between body and technology; gender identity in a cyber-feminist perspective.
Adam FISH. Points of Presence
Few users of social media and mobile devices recognise how their everyday swipes, likes, and retweets mobilises a global megastructure that spans the earth, impacts ecologies, and plunges under the sea. This experimental 20-minute video submerges the audience in the socio-ecological tangles of the materiality of the internet. It shows what can been seen and mediates the unseen. The video focuses not on the consumerism surrounding digital culture but rather on the symbiotic relationship between information infrastructure and the geographic, geologic, oceanographic, and atmospheric elements, immersing the audience in the textures, sounds, vertical vision, of the digital ecology of the North Atlantic. ‘Points of Presence’, through tracing several undersea cables, reveals how the internet is a material political object intertwined with the natural environment, human labour, and the mobility of data. The film was shot by Adam Fish (Lancaster University) and Bradley L. Garrett (University of Sydney) in Iceland, Faroe Islands, Shetland Islands, and London. It was edited by Adam Fish and Oliver Case (both Lancaster University) Bradley L. Garrett (University of Sydney). The score is by Jon Christopher Nelson at the University of North Texas College of Music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTg0KNAHdRM
Adam Fish is a Scientia Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Arts and Media. He is a cultural anthropologist, documentary video producer, and interdisciplinary scholar who works across social science, computer engineering, environmental science, and the visual arts. Dr. Fish employs ethnographic, participatory, and creative methods to examine the social, political, and ecological influences of new technologies. He has authored three books including: Hacker States (2020 MIT Press, with Luca Follis), about how state hacking impacts democracy; Technoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2017), an ethnography of the politics of internet and television convergence in Hollywood and Silicon Valley; and After the Internet (Polity, 2017, with Ramesh Srinivasan), which reimagines the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists, citizens, and hackers on the margins of political and economic power.