Studium Generale Rietveld Academie 2016

Bots, Bodies, Beasts – The art of being Humble
What does it mean for art making if the “human” is but one life form among many?

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In January, February, March and April 2016, through talks, readings, discussions, performances, workshops, film screenings, a reading group* and an exhibition of student works, Studium Generale Rietveld Academie & Rietveld Uncut are collaborating on an extensive, artistic research trajectory.

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“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.” (from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, 1983)

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“In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes flashes up: the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.” (Theodor W. Adorno quoted by Anselm Franke in Ape Culture, 2015)

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‏This year’s Studium Generale Rietveld Academie is about bots, bodies and beasts. It focuses on the notion of the posthuman and the blurring of the traditional distinctions between the human and its others – be these bots or beasts. How can a notion of the posthuman be a tool for understanding the present? How can it help us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities? Can it redefine humanity’s place in the technological and biological continuums we are part of?

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In a great variety of talks, artist presentations, live performances, readings, screenings and masterclasses, we will dive into dialogue with posthumanism, (dis)embodiment and the dismantling of the liberal humanist and anthropocentric “subject”. Bots, Bodies, Beasts addresses all art disciplines, and concerns mind and matter, thinking and doing. It is explicitely not about the production of suprahuman beings, but about being humble within the current entanglements of (digital) culture and nature.

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Preliminary Program

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previous

Conference-festival

Practice and theory will come together in De Brakke Grond, a theater and exhibition space in the heart of Amsterdam’s old city center. An exhibition of student work will frame a four-day conference festival curated by Maaike Lauwaert, If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Mohammad Salemy, and Anselm Franke. These guest curators have each inaugurated a discursive and performative program of one day. If around in Amsterdam on April 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10, you are most welcome to join!

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This year’s conference is about bots, bodies and beasts. It focuses on the notion of the posthuman and the blurring of the traditional distinctions between the human and its others – be these bots or beasts. How can a notion of the posthuman be a tool for understanding the present? How can it help us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities? Can it redefine humanity’s place in the technological and biological continuums we are part of? In a great variety of talks, artist presentations, live performances, readings, screenings and masterclasses, we will dive into dialogue with posthumanism, (dis)embodiment and the dismantling of the liberal humanist and anthropocentric “subject”. Bots, Bodies, Beasts addresses all art disciplines, and concerns mind and matter, thinking and doing. It is explicitely not about the production of suprahuman beings, but about being humble within the current entanglements of (digital) culture and nature.

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Attendance & Reservations

GENERAL PUBLIC (LIMITED SEATS AVAILABLE)

Day tickets can be purchased by outside visitors (not studying / working at the Rietveld Academie & the Sandberg Institute). Day tickets grant you a seat at the front rows and full attendance to the whole day program. We highly recommend that you visit the conference at the beginning of the day in order to secure a comfortable seat.

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PRICES

Day Ticket: 15 euros


Day Student Ticket: 10 euros (upon indication of student card at the front desk)


Full Conference Pass: 40 euros


Full Conference Student Pass: 20 euros (upon indication of student card at the front desk)

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HOW TO RESERVE


General public and students outside Rietveld Academie & Sandberg Institute can reserve a Day Ticket at: 
reservation-studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl. Reservations should be made at least one day prior to the event. (Please provide full name and occupation)

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WHEN TO PAY


Payments can be made IN CASH ONLY upon arrival at the front desk.


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STUDENTS & FACULTY (RIETVELD / SANDBERG)

Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Institute Students and Faculty, do NOT need to reserve a Day ticket. FREE access is granted upon indication of your Student Card at the entrance. Notice: There are no regular tutorials during the conference / festival days and all workshops will be closed.

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR RIETVELD ACADEMIE STUDENTS

Attendance can be verified and validated by logging in and logging out with your Student Card at the beginning and end of each slot. If you forget to log out at the end of each slot, attendance will not be registered.

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ATTENDANCE: BITS

Bits for each slot are indicated on the time schedule of each day. Full day attendance to the lecture program: 8 bits. Students at basicyear and first year of specialization are obliged to acquire a minimum of 16 attendance bits.

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WHAT IS A SLOT?

A slot is a group of lectures or activities as indicated on the timeline of each day.

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION
 / TAKE NOTICE

EXPOZAAL doors will close at the beginning of each slot.

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During the conference, on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 12:00 and 15:00 the Rietveld’s Cantina will be present in the garden of de Brakke Grond selling reasonably priced, healthy sandwiches and salads for your lunch. Payments can be made BY PIN ONLY.

CONTRIBUTORS

Lexicon

MORE VERNACULAR
Afterworlds – otherworlds that souls enter after death; also netherworld, underworld, or the Vodoun Guinee, among many others

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Algorithm – from: arithmos ‘number’. Usually and especially this is a computerized system of rules for making certain calculations in a self-contained manner; this extensive tool is often used to make decision-making processes calculable. The intricate reliance and dependencies of the user and the employed computation are still unlikely to impersonate human behavior, where a gut feeling or intuition will necessarily defy calculus

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Algos – Greek: Pain, in plural the Algea are the personification of grief and sorrow and moreover they are sisters

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Alienation – creating a state of being foreign or strange; a form of othering

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Anthropocene (the) – “names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth” http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/minimal-ethics-for-the-anthropocene/ skip to: Comfort or Happy Art

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Anthropomorphism – when elements, things and processes are personified (attributed with human traits); very effective tool and method for storytelling, for example: mother earth

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Apocalypse – messengers of apocalyptic revelations are typically described as angels. From ancient Greek apocálypsis, ‘uncovering’: a disclosure of knowledge, revelation or lifting veil

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a priori – from what is before

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Art – “Art does not wait for human beings to begin.” (Deleuze & Guattari)

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atq – answer the question

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Attention economy – an economy that considers the attention of a person to be a valuable and scarce commodity, where information itself consumes attention

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Bare Life (homo sacer) – introduced by Georgio Agamben describing someone who is continuously prone to violation, without the acknowledgement of these violations as crimes. This contemporary form of slavery is located on the “threshold”, in-between the household and the city. The notion of bare life originates in the homo sacer of ancient Roman law: the man who can be killed by all, existing outside of human and divine law, who’s state of exception is effectively prescribed and governed by these laws

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bdfl – benevolent dictator for life

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Beasts –

Beast 1: Terrestrial vertebrae

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Beast 2: Computer security attack

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Beast Fable – a short supernatural story that criticizes humans and their behavior as seen by non-human characters from the animal kingdom

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Becoming – denying religious and scientific theories of existence. Becoming is not historical but a path towards something unrecognizable, new and unfamiliar – not human beings but human becomings. See: The Deleuze & Guattari Dictionary (2013)

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Bionics – The study of mechanical systems that function like living organisms or their parts of living organisms

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Bodies – Human cadavers

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Bots –

Bot 1: The larva of the botfly, which is an internal parasite of animals. It typically lives in the stomach, finally passing through the host’s dung and pupating off the ground

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Bot 2: An autonomous program or network that can interact with computer systems or users, esp. one designed to respond or behave like a player in an adventure game
bwpwap – back when pluto was a planet

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CAPTCHA – acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. A type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human

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Chimera – a genetically hybrid organism or mythical creature which has different parts of different animals. In Greek mythology, chimera is a female fire-breathing monster; also, a thing that is hoped or wished for but is not real or impossible to achieve
chohw – come hell or high water

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Cloud (the) – unclear origin. The cloud was already used as a metaphor to visualize both the telephone network and the Internet, though it was officially coined in the mid-1990’s. Cloud computation shares offsite servers to optimize their use by time frames and make efficient investments, creating automated access

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Clown – Dario Fo is a famous Italian clown and controversial political campaigner – among the many hats he has throughout his practice as a performer – who uses the medieval illegitimate forms of theatre to perform social criticism from a far-left stance. His acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize for Literature was called Contra jogulatores obloquentes, Against Jesters of Irreverent* Speech

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*Irreverent: not feeling or showing deep respect or admiration for something or someone

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Comfort – freedom from pain or constraint; to make someone feel less unhappy

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Constellation – a group or cluster of related things, from Latin: stella ‘star’

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Criticality – “…in a reflective shift, from the analytical to the performative function of observation and participation, we can agree that meaning is not excavated for, but rather, that it takes place in the present.” (‘Smuggling’ – An Embodied Criticality, Irit Rogoff, 2006)

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Crystallise (to) – form crystals, coated with sugar as a means of preservation, and make something more definite and clear

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cu – see you

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Cyborg – the Cyborg is a central term in the writing of Donna Haraway, which she describes in her essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto”: “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”, within which, “nature and culture are reworked; one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other.” Haraway suggests transgressing and replacing the processes of identity formation with creating coalitions through strategies of affinity

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Data-Smog – data centers that store and process everything you do online and generally suck up electricity. Greenpeace has been campaigning for green data for many years

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Deus Ex Machina – this is a narrative scheme that allows for an unexpected turn of events, as if fallen out of the sky, and generally a dramatic gesture that critics dismiss as non-credible

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Dichotomy – cut into two parts; constituting a claim that nothing can exist simultaneously in both parts of the dichotomy
Digital Divide– this is the convoluted socioeconomic division between people with access to the Internet and its technology, and those without access to the Internet and its technology
Digital Native– a term coined by education consultant Marc Prensky in 2001 – digital natives vs. digital immigrants as a generational gap – to address the behavioral changes and educational needs of children since the domestication of Internet access
Dinosaur – a supposedly outdated person or thing, having become obsolete because of failure to adapt to changing circumstances, from Greek: deinos ‘terrible’ + sauros ‘lizard’

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(dis) Embodiment – the visible or tangible expression or representation of an idea, feeling, or quality

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Extirpate (to) – to root out and destroy completely

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Familiarity – recognizable or showing to be similar, from Latin: familia ‘household servants, household, family’, from famulus ‘servant’

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Financial Logic – a form of reasoning solely employed to foster financial gain

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Forced migration – coerced movement away from home or home region, refugees and internally displaced people (IASFM)

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Forest – a bunch of trees hanging out together with some undergrowth. You can use the expression cannot see the forest for the trees when failing to grasp the main issue because of the excessive attention to details. From Latin: foris ‘outside’

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fwp – first world problems

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Gallstones or cholelith – human made stones

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gfl – grounded for life

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Habitat – someone’s preferred or natural home, environment or surroundings, from Latin: literally ‘it dwells’

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Hacking – gaining unauthorized access to data on a computer, a form of making a rough cut, blow or stroke, and riding a horse for pleasure or exercise. From Dutch: hakken ‘cut in pieces’

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Happy Art – The artist is as much joyous and ecstatic by the small things in life as well as by immortal works of art (freely translated) Lexicon van de Actuele Kunst (1971)

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Hard Core – the most active and committed members of a group or movement, possibly willing to impose a doctrine. Also a musical genre from the 1990’s accompanied by a rhythmic dance called ‘hakken’, showing resemblance to tap-dancing, and often performed while making animalistic faces:

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when the moon / is in the seventh house / and Jupiter aligns with Mars / then peace will guide the Planet / and love will steer the stars / Aquarius / Aquarius / Aquarius / Aquarius / you can run / but you can’t hide / don’t stop / don’t look back
The Party Animals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeXR0Jp_q6o

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Human – zoology: Belonging to the genus Homo
Humble(ness)– from Latin: humilis ‘low, lowly’ from humus ‘ground’
Humble Plant or Touch-Me-Not – a species of plants that is extremely sensitive to their surroundings and may broadcast their seeds with the slightest touch
Identities – having accepted and embraced the idea that we have more than one identity and these formative processes are flexible and open to experiment, the term identity remains based on sameness and recognition: ‘the quality of being identical’, from Latin: idem ‘same’, inherently imposing a form of control

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ijdl – I just died laughing

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Intelligence (artificial) – from Latin: intelligere ‘understand’, from: inter ‘between’ + legere ‘choose’

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Internet Deprivation – how can we speak of post-Internet art and digital literacy when statistics tell us 68% of the planet’s (human) population does not have access to the Internet? Who lurks there in the dark and opaque shadow of contemporary exploitation?
Internet Literacy – because many non-native – English – speakers use the net, the English language is rapidly deteriorating! Data bots can’t read the confused language, which shows the beautiful opportunity as well as necessity to make and discover new languages and social codifications
Invisible – unable to be seen or recognized

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khaf – know how you feel

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Lithic (relations) – from Greek: lithos ‘stone’

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lu2d – love you to death

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lu4l – love you for life

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Mimesis – (formal or technical) imitation

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Mint (to) – place where money is coined, making a coin by stamping metal, also something new, or as good as. From Latin: moneta ‘money’

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mho – my humble opinion

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Myriad – countless or extremely great in number, even indefinite, which used to be ‘10.000’

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Neoliberalism – a current form of governance that favours free-market capitalism, suggesting all people have access to wealth. However this freedom is named by the regulating forces who profit from the status quo of wealth inequality and poverty elsewhere

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Object – mostly used as an aim, an objective or goal. Immanuel Kant identified an object-subject division distinguishing the human knowing subject from the passive not-human object, widely debated and objected since

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Off-roading – driving or riding your vehicle on unsurfaced roads or tracks, taking an unpaved route

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Posthuman – central term in this year’s SG Program that is perhaps best understood as an invitation to rethink the notion of the historical human. How to make and find tools for a down-to-earth understanding of the present: plants humans things animals alike unite! Read: Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013)

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Progress – forward movement, but which way is forward? It is considered a great challenge to identify the a way forward within the multitude of different possible directions

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Propaganda – propaganda is named a strategy when biased, manipulated, or misleading information is given, especially as a political tool, to direct attention away from another, more truthful reality. Deeply intertwined with marketing and brainwashing tools, constructing and directing peoples’ beliefs and actions

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Refuge – can be sought, given and taken, as providing any form of shelter or safety, to keep someone from harm, and a form of retreat

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Regress – to return to a former or less developed state, from Latin: re ‘back + gradi ‘walk’

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Rock – I build my language with rocks / Je bâtis a roches mon langage (Edouard Glissant, L’Intention Poétique)

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Script – socially accepted behaviour that one adopts through the social interactions with others

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Sense – the awareness to know something without being able to define how

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Somatechnic (relationships) – this term suggests that the body is bound up with a variety of technologies, acknowledging and examining the effects of this hybridity

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Surrogate – someone who is a performing a substitute role, especially in a form of employment, taking over someone else’s job temporarily

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Tectonics – movement of the subterranean crust of the earth, when felt these are earthquakes

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Tool – anything can become a tool! Including the words in this lexicon –

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Transparency – indicates a viewpoint that is not distorted, showing something that is easy to see. As a political tool the implication of transparency often implies the existence of an opposing reality. In computing an interface or process is transparent when it functions without the user being aware of it.

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Typology – a classification according to general type, especially used in fields of archaeology, psychology, and social sciences
Ultimate Fate Of The Universe – this is a topic in physical cosmology that shows many possible fates as predicted by rival scientific hypotheses of in/finite futures. There’s a growing consensus the universe is flat and will continue to expand forever (!)

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Uncanny – strange or mysterious quality especially in an unsettling way, the opposite of that which is familiar and often of supernatural origin or nature, occult and malicious

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Underworlds – possible worlds to be entered after death, also otherworlds or netherworlds, worlds underlying or adjacent to the ones we live in, often implying the possibility of joining one’s ancestors as a return to one’s roots

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Vernacular – an ordinary language or dialect as it is spoken in a specific locality, a mother’s tongue is not imposed: from Latin: vernaculus, ‘domestic, native,’ and verna, ‘home-born slave’

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Vestige – a trace of something that is disappearing or has already disappeared

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Vodoun – also Voodoo, Vodun, Vodou, Voudou, specifically different from Vodú,Vudú,Vodum: forms of West African religion found throughout the African diaspora ascribe significant importance to ancestry and the understanding that the living and the spirits live simultaneously side by side

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Xenofeminism – Zero, Interrupt, Trap, Parity, Adjust, Carry, Overflow http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/#firstPage

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Yoke – a thing whose name one cannot recall, does not know or doesn’t wish to specify

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Colophon

Bots, Bodies, Beasts – The art of Being Humble is the outcome of a collaboration between

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RIETVELD UNCUT

Tarja Szaraniec & Tomas Adolfs

(Coordinator / Curator)

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STUDIUM GENERALE RIETVELD ACADEMIE

Jorinde Seijdel (Head of Program / Curator in Chief)

Jort van der Laan (Assistant Head of Program / Curator)

Nikos Doulos (Host and Logistics Coordinator)

Amelia Groom (Reading Group Staying with the Trouble)

Charlotte Rooijackers (Lexicon)

Hemminkways (Travel Arrangments)

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GERRIT RIETVELD ACADEMIE

Jeroen Vermandere (Technical Assistance)

Eric Kameron (Catering Lunch)

Public Rietveld (Press & PR)

Johanna Ehde, Till-Michael Hormann, Anton Westbom Weflö (Design Team)

Fallon Does (Web Design)

Pieter Verbeke (Librarian)

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Thanks for support in a variety of ways:

Ralph Beijers, Rieneke van den Broek, David Bennewith, Willem Jan van Dijken, Annelies van Eenennaam, Steven Jongejan, Hansje van Ooijen, Wilbert van Rossum, Peter van Ruiten, Ben Zegers.

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DE BRAKKE GROND

Rietveld Uncut

Rietveld Uncut is an annual joint presentation by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Within the Rietveld the process of making, from concept to work, is an important element throughout the whole study. For this seventh edition Rietveld Uncut teams up again with Studium Generale, leading up to BOTS, BODIES & BEASTS conference festival and exhibition.

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Rietveld Uncut presents work by:

Anne Piet Hofstede – Caro de Jonge – Emma Walch – Rosita Kær, Alice Dhinau & Manon Bachellier – Rafael Romero & Daniel Farr – Didi Lehnhausen – Gabrielė Adomaitytė & Rasmus Niclas Rose Nielsen – Garance Früh &Valgerður Jónsdóttir – Ksenia Perek & Francine ten Brummelhuis – Michelle Son – Mila Bouma – Suzanne Bernhardt – Gustav Heinsen, Leonie Hennicke & Nina Schouten – Marcel Mrejen & Etienne Clerc – Kaspar Sellin, Stefán Stefánsson & Paul Girardeau – Kateryna Snizhko – Maria Naidich Chapital – Stijn Pommée & Laura Grimm – Hanna Steenbergen-Cockerton & Zofia Skoroszewska – Anastasia Afonina – Elzbieta Szota & the plants – Joeri Bosma – Kristoffer Ala-Ketola – Ivana Filip

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Participating departments:

Inter-Architecture – DesignLAB – Beeld & Taal – Graphic Design – Jewellery – Photography – VAV – Ceramics – Glass – Fine Arts – DOGtime

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Rietveld Uncut is developed and supervised by Tarja Szaraniec and Tomas Adolfs.

Conference-festival

Practice and theory will come together in De Brakke Grond, a theater and exhibition space in the heart of Amsterdam’s old city center. An exhibition of student work will frame a four-day conference festival curated by Maaike Lauwaert, If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Mohammad Salemy, and Anselm Franke. These guest curators have each inaugurated a discursive and performative program of one day. If around in Amsterdam on April 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10, you are most welcome to join!

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This year’s conference is about bots, bodies and beasts. It focuses on the notion of the posthuman and the blurring of the traditional distinctions between the human and its others – be these bots or beasts. How can a notion of the posthuman be a tool for understanding the present? How can it help us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities? Can it redefine humanity’s place in the technological and biological continuums we are part of? In a great variety of talks, artist presentations, live performances, readings, screenings and masterclasses, we will dive into dialogue with posthumanism, (dis)embodiment and the dismantling of the liberal humanist and anthropocentric “subject”. Bots, Bodies, Beasts addresses all art disciplines, and concerns mind and matter, thinking and doing. It is explicitely not about the production of suprahuman beings, but about being humble within the current entanglements of (digital) culture and nature.

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Curators

Curated by Maaike Lauwaert, If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Mohammad Salemy, and Anselm Franke.

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April 7 – Maaike Lauwaert, A Buzzing Field of Exchange
How can we obtain an expanded understanding of what objects and humans are or can be? The reality of objects, or their truth, far exceeds our knowledge or experience. We can never fully grasp the essence of an object, nor the connections between objects that surround us. They are all part of a buzzing field of exchange that remains largely hidden to us. Curator and critic Karen Archey will focus on the posthuman body, identity and sexuality; artist Cécile B. Evans will be discussing research for her new project What the Heart Wants, which explores what it could mean to be human in the future; artist Hans-Christian Dany will ask us to leave the humanist attitude of control; Neïl Beloufa will screen Kempinski, a film in which a farmer describes a world in which he is the only human left; curator Melanie Bühler will focus on the autonomy of artworks in the context of this new, expanded understanding of objects; and musician and artist Geo Wyeth will do a performance.

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Maaike Lauwaert is editor at Metropolis M, a bimonthly magazine on contemporary art. She also works as a freelance curator. Before she started at Metropolis M she worked as a visual arts curator at Stroom Den Haag, worked at the Mondriaan Foundation, and completed a PhD. in cultural sciences at the University of Maastricht. In 2016, her second book will be published with Valiz, a co-edited volume with Francien van Westrenen on value and art.

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Melanie Bühler, Vital Things and Humming Networks. Artworks and Autonomy
Drawing on my current curatorial project Inflected Objects, I will discuss the concept of autonomy as part of contemporary artistic production. I will argue that the accelerated circulation of content, the embeddedness of the art object in the world of consumption and its interdependence with abstracted processes (such as computation and the art market) have created a situation in which art objects spiral away from our reach. We cannot grasp their dynamics anymore as their influence leaks out in too many directions – art objects create mechanisms of their own, trails that cannot be anticipated. In my talk, I will discuss artistic practices that address these extending structures, interrogate mechanisms of circulation and question concepts of vitality. This perception of objects as autonomous entities relates to recent writing in philosophy that reassesses the status of the object, most notably Graham Harman’s “object-oriented ontology”. One of the central claims in Harman’s thought is that the object’s reality, or its truth, far exceeds our knowledge or experience of it. In other words, we can never fully grasp the essence of an object, as it always remains partly hidden from us: the object is there, but it is not there for us. Moreover, it highlights the connections between objects, as it describes the objects that surround us as part of a buzzing field of exchange, humming without our awareness. To use Steven Shaviro’s words: “Vitality is unevenly distributed, but it is at work everywhere.”

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Melanie Bühler lives and works in Amsterdam as an independent curator. She is the founder and curator of Lunch Bytes (www.lunch-bytes.com) – a project on digital art and culture which includes talks, discussions and an online platform for which she collaborated with institutions such as the Goethe-Institut; CCA, Glasgow; ICA, London; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. among others. Her most recent exhibition projects include Inflected Objects #2: Circulation – Mise en Séance at De Hallen Haarlem (2016), Inflected Objects #1: Abstraction – Rising Automated Reasoning at Swiss Institute Milano (2015), BRANDS – CONCEPT/AFFECT/MODULARITY at S.A.L.T.S. Project Space, Birsfelden (2014). She is the editor of No Internet, No Art. A Lunch Bytes Anthology (Onomatopee, 2015) and her writings have appeared in the exhibition catalogue Kasia Klimpel. The Grand Tour (Roma Publishing, 2014), Megarave Metarave (les presses du réel/Kunsthaus Langenthal/WallRiss, 2014), and Run Computer, Run (Link Editions/CRUMB, 2014), among others.

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Cécile B. Evans, What the Heart Wants
Evans will be discussing research for her new project What the Heart Wants, which explores what it could mean to be human in the future and who gets to be ‘a person’. Expanding on previous projects such as AGNES, a spam bot made to collect and produce personal information, and Hyperlinks, an investigation of digital existence, the process of working on What the Heart Wants has introduced the artist to multiple themes that she will circle around in her presentation.

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Cécile B. Evans is a Belgian-American artist who lives and works in London and Berlin. Her solo exhibitions and commissions include: Timeline for a Copy without Origins, Bielefelder Kunstverein (2016); Frieze Art Fair New York with Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich (2015); AGNES, Serpentine Galleries, London; Hyperlinks, Seventeen Gallery, London (both 2014); The Brightness, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013). Group exhibitions (recent and upcoming) include the 20th Biennale of Sydney; COWORKERS, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Projections, 53rd New York Film Festival; Äppärät, Marfa Ballroom, Texas; Inhuman, Fridericianum, Kassel (all 2015); La Voix Humaine, Kunstverein Munich; and TTTT, Jerwood Visual Arts Foundation, London (both 2014). She has received awards including: Andaz Award, 2015; Push Your Art Prize, Orange/Palais de Toyko (2013); and Emdash Award, 2012 (now Frieze Award).

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Hans-Christian Dany, There is no Future in Humanist Dreaming
The musician Sun Ra decided in the sixties to give up his existence as a human, because humanism promised him nothing more than the continuation of his suppression. So he transformed himself into an alien from Saturn. Pre-contemporary painters like Willy Baumeister tried to find the unknown future by developing vision-objects that left the human control in friction with the material. Scientists like Karen Barad questioned what we think to know, by deconstructing the human observer as ignorant of the other parties that constitute reality. The ongoing post-innovative period that slowed down everything in the recent decade seems to be a good moment to leave the humanist attitude of control and re-open the closed horizon to a real future.

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Hans-Christian Dany (*1966) is an artist who has, for many years, been living on holiday from what he should do. As many, who don’t know where to place with themselves in this world, he writes. Sometimes this finds form in books like Speed. Eine Gesellschaft auf Drogen, Morgen werde ich Idiot. Kybernetik und Kontrollgesellschaft and recently Schneller als die Sonne. Aus den rasenden Stillstand in eine unbekannte Zukunft. He is based in Hamburg.

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Geo Wyeth, Tennis Player 2.0
Tennis Player 2.0 is dead and dead in the water. No one knows what to do now. What happens with the fight? Great script, excellent costumes we make them together, we could sell them at my Aunt’s crafting booth? She paints classy placemats because broke WASPs dig pictures of dead fish. Or let your mom make them; let the TV run, I’m going for a swim, forget about the war. The warrior in us means we like Avirex without any of my Aunt’s dragons, fishcakes anyone? Deep-fried swimming poolside luncheon? 2.0 is dead and what happens with the fight, fish dead in the water, but the light breaks and we love a good lounge. Someone fought for you. You are fighting too. Don’t forget to forget so you can finally love what’s dead.

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Geo Wyeth is a musician and artist, currently working with music, performance, installation and video. Presented at LA MOCA, The New Museum, MoMA PS1, New York Live Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Boston ICA, Kate Werble Gallery, La MaMa Theatre, Human Resources, The Pyramid Club, Joe’s Pub. S/he is currently in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten for the years 2015/2016 in Amsterdam and a candidate for an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College.

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Neïl Beloufa, Kempinski
In the video work Kempinski by artist Neil Beloufa, several lay actors standing in the neon lights of the periphery of Mali’s capital, Bamako at night describe their ideas of how the future will be. They use the present tense and talk directly into the camera. A young man says that he lives together with hundreds of oxen as the only human being while the neon light in his hand illuminates the light-brown heads of the animals surrounding him. Another man talks about fantastic creatures, speaking cars, mobile houses that roam across continents or a cliff moving from one continent to the next. Another has critical thoughts about civilisation and imagines a life without cars and telephones. The metaphorical images of a life in which there no longer seems to be a difference between humans, animals and things also include humorous science-fiction references to media such as telepathy and the speed of light. However, the speakers also have serious thoughts about already existing as well as imagined technologies.

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Neïl Beloufa is deeply fascinated by and engaged with our current human condition: fragmented, digitised, money-driven, alienated from nature and instincts. In his video works and installations he plays with and rearranges the boundaries between reality and fiction and creates settings in which actors and amateurs explore topics such as alien life, the future, terrorism, love and world politics. Beloufa has devoted several video projects to possible futures, new worlds, which despite their strangeness are conceivable because they are rooted in existing developments. It is clear that we are dealing with fiction and constructions of new realities, yet they touch upon real events, innovative technological possibilities, trends or stories that intrigue the artist. As in the best science fiction, we see a world that is firmly rooted in our world while also reaching out far ahead into the future. His visual language borrows from idioms that we know from Hollywood movies, TV shows or commercials. Hence the strange scenes and confusing stories can still feel familiar and known.

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Karen Archey, Bodies in Space: Identity, Sexuality, and the Abstraction of the Digital and Physical
One of the great failures of post-internet has been its dogmatism toward conventional modes of authorship (the objective, intellectual auteur) and the aesthetics paired with it (often described as trendy and unrelated to the subject matter at hand), which seems cognitively dissonant with the internet’s cultural democratization that it seeks to address. Rarely does post-internet work directly address the body or sexuality – two main entry points of our contemporary lived experience. The talk Bodies in Space: Identity, Sexuality, and the Abstraction of the Digital and Physical will consider how the body is variably mediated by virtual and physical space, and seeks to act as a historical corrective to recent cultural discourse dominated by academic and theoretical narratives.

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Karen Archey is an art critic and independent curator based in New York and Berlin. With a focus on feminist practices and the intersection of art and technology, her writing is regularly featured in Frieze, Art Review, and Art-Agenda. She is Editor of e-flux conversations, and a 2016 Arts Writers Grant recipient for short-form writing. Archey recently served as Curator-in-Residence at Abrons Arts Center and as the Editor-at-Large of Rhizome at the New Museum. She co-curated the survey exhibition Art Post-Internet at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014) and edited the PDF publication Art Post-Internet: INFORMATION/DATA, available at post-inter.net. Archey has recently contributed to anthologies published by van Abbemuseum, MIT Press, New Museum, Whitechapel, Sternberg Press, and more. She is the founder of the feminist working group Women Inc., which supports emerging women in the arts and responds to various feminist issues through group writing and events. She also regularly speaks about contemporary art at public symposia and art fairs, most recently at the Renaissance Society at University of Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, the Forum on Contemporary Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, e-flux, MoMA PS1, ARCOmadrid, National Slovak Gallery, and the Digital-Life-Design conference.

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April 8 – If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Propositions on the Subject
The program of the day comprises the presentation of three works of art that connect theory with artistic practice: Xavier Le Roy’s performance Product of Circumstances; Keti Chukhrov’s film Love Machines; and a new live experience by Alicia Frankovich. Each of the artists’ works intersects with a number of disciplines, from biology and choreography, philosophy and poetry, and visual arts and performance, to create artistic and experimental propositions that speak to the complexity of living bodies.

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From its office in Amsterdam, If I Can’t Dance produces artworks and thematic programmes. Departing from a spirit of open questioning and long term enquiry with artists, If I Can’t Dance is dedicated to exploring the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art. Since it was founded in 2005, If I Can’t Dance has borrowed the model of collaborative working from the theatre by investing in an elaborated programme that develops through its very enactment, at each event and at each location, over time. This is manifest in If I Can’t Dance’s long-term collaborations with artists, researchers and partner organizations, that take form in two-year editions of commissioned productions that are presented at different institutions in the Netherlands and abroad. If I Can’t Dance’s current programme Edition VI – Event and Duration (2015-2016) is curated by If I Can’t Dance director Frédérique Bergholtz and curator Susan Gibb.

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Keti Chukhrov, Love Machines
Keti Chukhrov will present a lecture that questions today’s shift to a post-humanist philosophy. This will be followed by Love Machines (2013), a dramatic poem that questions this philosophical turn, in terms of its dismissal of the notions of love, mercy, pity, and collective sensitivity as components of an outdated human culture. The film was adapted from Chukhrov’s original play of the same name, and features staged action in the style of a teleplay. The lecture and screening will be followed by a conversation with Nataša Ilić, of WHW.

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Keti Chukhrov holds a ScD in philosophy, and is an associate professor at the Department of Art History at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow; visiting professor at the European Un-ty, St. Petersburg; and runs the theory department at the National Center for the Contemporary Art, Moscow. Since 2003 she has served on the editorial board of Moscow Art Magazine. In 1997-2005 she was the editor of Logos Publishers. Chukhrov has authored numerous texts on art theory, culture, politics, and philosophy, which have appeared in periodicals such as Afterall, Moscow Art Magazine, Artforum, Brumaria, Documenta magazines, e-flux journal, New Literary Review, Logos, and Springerin, among others. Her full-length books include To Be – To Perform. ‘Theatre’ in Philosophic Critique of Art (Spb: European Un-ty, 2011); Pound &£ (1999), and two volumes of dramatic poetry: Just Humans (2010) and War of Quantities (2004). Chukhrov lives and works in Moscow. With her latest video-play Love Machines she participated at the Bergen Assembly and Specters of Communism (James Gallery, CUNY, NY, 2015).

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Nataša Ilić, What, How & for Whom
What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb and Berlin. Its members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHW organizes a range of production, exhibition and publishing projects and directs Gallery Nova in Zagreb. Since its first exhibition titled What, How & for Whom, on the occasion of 152ndanniversary of the Communist Manifesto, that took place in Zagreb in 2000, WHW curated numerous international projects, among which more recent ones include: Festival Meeting Points 7 that took place in Zagreb, Antwerp, Cairo, Hong-Kong, Beirut, Vienna and Moscow under the title Ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks in 2013 and 2014; the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2014; So You Want To See at e-flux gallery in New York in 2015; and David Maljković Retrospective by appointment in Gallery Nova, Zagreb.

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Alicia Frankovich, a new live experience
Alicia Frankovich will present a new live experience across multiple acts that furthers her interest in embodiment and formats of art encounter that include performance, temporal exhibition experiences and other material sequences. The work is situated within the day, and also responds to it, drawing on the space and logistics of the de Brakke Grond theatre.

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Alicia Frankovich was born in Tauranga, New Zealand, and holds a BVA in sculpture from AUT, Auckland. She lives and works in Berlin. She is interested in embodiments, and becoming-bodies, and works with performance, temporal exhibition experiences and other material sequences. Frankovich’s exhibitions include: The Female has Undergone Several Manifestations, Starkwhite, Auckland (2016); Complex Bodies, Kurator at Alte Fabrik, Gebert Stiftung für Kultur, Rapperswil, Switzerland (2015); Today this technique is the other way around, Kunstverein Hildesheim (2013); and Gestures, Splits and Annulations, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2011). She has participated in group exhibitions including Test Run: Performance in Public, Modern Art, Oxford (2015), Le Mouvement: Performing the City, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland, Framed Movements, Australian Centre For Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014); and Nouvelles Vagues: The Real Thing?, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013). Frankovich has presented performances at MAVRA, Berlin (2015); Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; Tophane-I Amire Gallery, Istanbul; The Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montréal (2013).

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Xavier Le Roy, Product of Circumstances
Of his performance Product of Circumstances, Xavier Le Roy has said: “I began to take two dance classes a week at the same time that I started to work on my thesis for my Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology. It’s been now eight years that I have submitted my thesis and stopped to work as a biologist. Since I work as a dancer or choreograph I am very often presented as an atypical dancer or as a dancer molecular biologist. It became my currency in the ‘Society of the Spectacle’. I was invited to prepare and present a lecture for an event on theory and praxis in performance (Body currency, Wiener Festwochen, 1998)…” Xavier Le Roy’s Product of Circumstances is biography as theory: an autobiographical conference becoming a performance, his body as the raw material of social and cultural organization, and as the practice of critical necessity.

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Xavier Le Roy holds a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Montpellier, France, and has worked as a dancer and choreographer since 1991. He has performed with diverse companies and choreographers. From 1996 to 2003, he was artist-in-residence at the Podewil in Berlin. In 2007-2008 he was “Associated Artist” at Centre Chorégraphique National de Montpellier, France. In 2010 Le Roy was an Artist in Residence fellow at the MIT Program in Art Culture and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2012, he began a three year residency at Théâtre de la Cité Internationale, Paris. Through his solo works such as Self Unfinished (1998) and Product of Circumstances (1999), he has opened new perspectives in the field of choreographic art. His latest works such as the solo Le Sacre du Printemps (2007); Untitled (2014); the group piece low pieces (2011); and works for exhibition spaces such as production (2011) created together with Mårten Spångberg; untitled (2012) for the exhibition 12 Rooms, Retrospective first realized in 2012 at the Tapiès Foundation-Barcelona; Temporary title (2015) created at Sydney in the frame of John Kaldor Public Art Project; and For The Unfaithful Republica at CA2M Madrid, produce situations that explore the relationships between spectators/visitors/performers and the production of subjectivities.

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April 9 – Mohammad Salemy, Systems of a Greater Sum
In Technics and Civilization (1929) Lewis Mumford identifies language and the cognitive system for making sense of empirical data as the two most significant technologies to emerge from the integration of humans’ physical and mental capabilities. Juxtaposing this insight against Bernard Stiegler’s concept of technogenesis which details the evolutionary overlap between biology and technology, Systems of a Greater Sum begins from the assumption that humans have always already been posthuman and will be about the expanded concept of technology towards the twin tasks of politicizing what is at stake in the ongoing cybernetic revolution while shedding light on the technological underpinnings of the larger social fields.

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Mohammad Salemy is an independent New York-based artist, critic, and curator. His writings have been published in e-flux, Flash Art, Third Rail, and Brooklyn Rail. He has curated exhibitions at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Access Gallery, and Satellite Gallery in Vancouver as well as Tranzidisplay in Prague. In 2014, he organized the Incredible Machines conference. Salemy holds an MA in critical curatorial studies from the University of British Columbia and is one of the organizers of The New Centre for Research & Practice.

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Amanda Beech, Maps, Mirrors, Projections
The dead end of cultural critique is now tacit. Culture’s predilection for picturing the human as a contingent subject of history and an agent of cause defines this critique. Modernity and post-structuralism remind us that culture itself becomes the avatar for contingent nature when the human is understood as a being that is captured within and alienated by systems of its own making. These descriptions of human power and the human condition manifest in a mode of explanatory aesthetics. Culture is an illuminating mirror of a paradoxical human identity. An art that portrays this proves the destitution of cultural horizons. In my presentation, I will question the ways in which culture has embedded its comprehension of critique as an incorrect and unworkable form of transcendental picturing. At its root is a pathological rejection of culture’s rational and representational operations. By working through these sustained pathologies of critique I question the aspirations and methods for another comprehension of reason for art, one that brings forms of thought, image and method into the space of reasons and one that returns us to speak to and of power without the regressive principles of humility, tragedy and finitude.

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Amanda Beech is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in What Hope Looks Like After Hope, Beirut City Forum (2015); Agitationism, the Irish Biennial; L’Avenir, Montreal Biennale (2014); and Speculative Aesthetics, Tate Britain, (2015). Beech’s writing includes essays for the anthologies Speculative Aesthetics (Urbanomic, 2014); Realism, Materialism, Art (Sternberg Press, 2015) and catalogue contributions for the Irish and the Montreal Biennales. Her artists’ books include First Machine (2015); Final Machine (2013); and Sanity Assassin (Urbanomic, 2010). Beech is Dean of Critical Studies at CalArts, California, USA.

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Manuel Correa, #Artoffline
What happens to art in the Internet age? The philosophers, artists and exhibition makers in this documentary believe that endless reproduction liberates art from a turbid art market and an undemocratic exhibition circuit. In 2015, making selfies became part of the experience of visiting a museum. Digital technologies have completely transformed the experience of art forever; #Artoffline provides an insider’s view of the contemporary art world, and explores the significance of audiences choosing to experience art primarily through digital devices. The spirit of Walter Benjamin circles above the documentary. The German culture philosopher argued in 1936 that the technological reproducibility of artworks changes the nature of art in an essential sense – the aura of the work could not possibly survive such doubling. Almost everyone you hear in the film – philosophers, artists, exhibition makers – disagrees with Benjamin. They think that in the era of the Internet and virtual reality, the demand for authenticity has become irrelevant. The focus on the value of physical objects is a form of fetishism – to their minds, one that is maintained by museums and galleries.

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Manuel Correa is an artist and filmmaker from Medellin, with a BFA in Film & Video from Emily Carr University in Vancouver (British Columbia). #Artoffline is Correa’s first film and had its international premiere at Rotterdam Film Festival in 2016. Correa’s texts have been published by &&& Journal, NY; Theory and Practice, Russia; Terremoto Journal of Contemporary Art in the Americas, Mexico; and e-flux Superconversations.

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Allen Feldman, Xenophobic Technicities: A Media Archeology
The predominant moralizing and psychological reading of xenophobia associates this practice and discourse with irrational fears and cultural-regression antithetical to modernity and liberal society. The force of technology and media in the formation of xenophobia has been neglected, or rendered secondary in being reduced to a tactical tool for phobogenic imaginaries and policies such as the erection of walls and camps. This neglect of phobogenesis as mediology ignores the symbiosis of optical apparatuses, scopic regimes and physiognomic imaginaries as technologies of typification from the 19th century onward. As early as the 1850s the optical typification, frontality and panorama-zation of alien bodies fabricated “pre comprehended” collectivities “as chunks of the real” (Spivak, 2000), that is to say, as maneuverable forms of life, as magnetizing triggers and phobogenic objects of visual and haptic assault. I propose a media archeology in which technicity can be excavated as a ge-stell or enframement for making or cutting out (decoupage) xenophobic scenographies and tableau, and not only as reporting the latter. In this approach, technicity would not be considered solely as a means to a political end, or as an afterthought or tactical supplement to xenophobic ideologies and mentalities, but as fabricating and fictioning phobogenic objects, procedures and even algorithms such as securocratic facial recognition programs.

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Allen Feldman, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication (NYU), is the author of three books, including Archives of the Insensible: War, Photopolitics and Dead Memory (2015); and Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991). He has published numerous articles on political violence, the political philosophy of the body and the senses, and on transitional justice. He teaches the politics of the gaze and philosophy of media at New York University.

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Victoria Ivanova, Mediating Freedom
Human rights and contemporary art are both inscribed into larger projects of global ordering. From producing archetypes of universal subjecthood to organising how agency, ethics and reality are conceived, both have historically functioned as technologies for propagating mutually reinforcing strands of the global liberal project. This talk contends that despite all of their institutional, discursive and operational distinctiveness, both regimes rely on and reproduce the concept of a universal individuating subject. Furthermore, as sociopolitical difference and ambiguity have increasingly become the norm, the contemporary art regime has effectively stepped into the shoes of the human rights project as the dominant framework for understanding the relationship between subjecthood and reality. The talk assesses the functions and limitations of both systems’ mediating powers, and considers their relevance in dealing with some of the most pressing issues facing us today.

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Victoria Ivanova is a curator (currently Assistant Curator for Public Programmes at Tate, London). Having previously worked in the human rights field, in 2010, she co-founded a multidisciplinary cultural platform in Donetsk, Ukraine. Ivanova is also one of the founding members of Real Flow – a research and development platform for socialising finance. Her practice is largely informed by systems analysis and her interest in infrastructures as mechanisms for shaping and (re)producing socio-economic and political realities. Ivanova’s recent publications include Turborealism: Neither Bow nor Arrow (co-edited with Agnieszka Pindera), ‘Art’s Values: A Détente, a Grand Plié’ in PARSE 2: The Value of Contemporary Art (2015), and ‘Novelty Intermediation and the Future of Accelerationist Politics’ in Reinventing Horizons (2016).

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Adam Kleinman, All-Seeing Eyes & The Lands of the Blind
This presentation visits four discrete case studies to discuss how vision, both literal and figurative, is weaponized. The first will follow recent military and civilian programs aimed at developing remote infrastructures for the purposes of surveillance, targeting, and general communication. As a dialectic counter to how these systems portray the so-called ‘bad internet’, I will introduce how a new breed of journalists utilize geo-location to map conflict today – this constitutes the second part of the presentation. Ultimately, my talk will conclude on the subject of disinformation so as to highlight how various regimes try to cloak and/or apply the above. In particular, I will focus on contemporary propaganda methods promoted in Russia as well as share the historic ‘formula’ the United States has relied upon to sell regime change to its people.

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Adam Kleinman is a writer, curator, educator, and sometime performer. Former dOCUMENTA (13) Agent for Public Programming, he is currently Editor-in-Chief and Adjunct Curator at Witte de With Center for Contemporary art, and Associate Curator at Office of Contemporary Art Norway.

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Matteo Pasquinelli, On the Technosphere of the Anthropocene: The Planetary Computation of Energy and Information into Cyberfossil Capital
The history of the industrial civilization can be depicted as a bicephalous chimera whose heads grew out of the same machine, innervated each other and, after further metamorphoses, also attempted to subjugate each other. The two heads are Energy and Information and they bifurcated out of the industrial machine of the 19th century, although at different tempo. Confronting the Anthropocene paradigm with Guattari’s machinic ecology (that is with an ecology that includes the inorganic, organic, technological, social and psychic in the same Umwelt), my contribution attempts to recompose the “metabolic rift” between Energy and Information that was provoked by industrial capital and then amplified by cybernetics and the digital revolution. The carbosilicon machine is the assemblage of the industrial machine and the information machine, the coupling of a Turing machine with the governor device of a thermodynamic one. The carbosilicon apparatus is the automaton that has been organizing the division and multiplication of manual and mental labor in the industrial factory throughout the cybernetic society and the datacenters of planetary computation. The history of political economy and critical thought have alternatively underlined opposite aspects of the capitalistic development – sometimes the hegemony of information and cognitive labor, other the hegemony of fossil energy and manual labor. History shows that the two regimes of information labor and manual labor are coupled into something that can be called cyberfossil capitalism – the most archaic biosphere and the most abstract technosphere united by capital.

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Matteo Pasquinelli is a philosopher and Assistant Professor in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, New York. He recently edited the anthology Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas (2015) among other books. Together with Wietske Maas he wrote the Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism. In 2014 at NGBK Berlin he co-curated the exhibition The Ultimate Capital is the Sun and the symposium The Metabolism of the Social Brain. Website: http://matteopasquinelli.com

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April 10 – Anselm Franke, Mapping and Being Mapped. Navigation Systems, Control Environments and Cognitive Maps
What does it mean to be led astray by a map, taken ‘offroad’, for instance by your GPS? Is art perhaps offering ways of leaving a scripted space or a cognitive scheme, reflexively inducing a cognitive crisis, an experience of ontological groundlessness? How can art explore and respond to the cognitive crisis of capitalist technologies? Last year Google demonstrated what their neural networks, after having been fed with millions of images, learned to see in a cloudy sky: a strange landscape of fantastic animals, an LSD-like map of monsters and orientalist ornamentations. What is the nature of our cognitive crisis if it is not merely the triumph of instrumental reason in a “totally administered world” that has thoroughly extirpated mimetic becomings and the vestiges of animism, but if it is now machines that mimetically engage with clouds and see shapes in them? Will the clouds be submerged to the pattern recognition machines? And what will then be the next refuge for complexity and resilience?

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Anselm Franke is a curator and writer based in Berlin. He is Head of Visual Art and Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where he co-curated The Anthropocene Project (2013-2014), and the exhibitions The Whole Earth; After Year Zero (both 2013), Forensis (2014), Ape Culture (2015) and Nervous Systems (2016), among others. In 2012, he curated the Taipei Biennial, and in 2014, the Shanghai Biennale. Franke’s exhibition project Animism has been presented in Antwerp, Bern, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul and Beirut in various collaborations from 2010 to 2014. Previously, Franke was curator at KW Berlin and director of Extra City Kunsthal Antwerpen. He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths College London.

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Brian Holmes, Driving the Golden Spike: The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space
C02 is colorless, odorless, intangible, invisible. How can the knowledge of its effects be shared, along with the responsibility they bring to us? This talk by Brian Holmes will propose not a concept, but an ‘aesthetics’ of Anthropocene public space. It will invite you to see and to touch what the artist Gyorgy Kepes once called “the new landscape of art and science”. Such a proposal, however, cannot take place in a vacuum outside of history. Instead it must constitute an active challenge to the dominant aesthetic experience of the present: the flux of sensations through the cybernetic interface.

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Brian Holmes is an art and cultural critic with a taste for on-the-ground intervention. His essays revolve around art, free cooperation, the network society, political economy, and grassroots resistance. His books include Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society; Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering; as well as a recent co-authored book on the Chicago financial markets entitled Volatile Smile (with photographers Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann). In Chicago, where he now lives after twenty years in Paris, he is a member of the Compass group and teaches at the University of Illinois. Recent collaborative projects can be seen at: http://southwestcorridornorthwestpassage.org http://midwestcompass.org/watersheds/map.html http://environmentalobservatory.net/Petropolis/map.html

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Alex Anikina, On (De)Anthropocentric Camera: Notes for a Future Film
In the realm of the film-making industry, be it a little-known medical case from 1990 describing discovery of rare earth deposits in the body of deceased movie projectionist, or a contemporary Steadycam operator donning his heavy vest, the human body often appears as an obsolete technology: as a fragile element, always slightly expired, submerged within the industrial demands. The camera(man) moves and captures according to a detailed choreographed score. Somewhere else, on the far end of image-production economy, chaotic videos produced by the unfortunate GoPro cameras that were lost at sea by their surfer owners, suggest a presence of some other, less human-dependent production of visuality, and certain aesthetics of human absence. In the case of artist-filmmaker, the agency can be more complexly distributed, or even willingly surrendered to the technological artefact. Making notes for a future film, I suggest a mapping of material encounters between human bodies and film as conditioned by the perpetual technopresence. Can a human artist inhabit the movement of the apparatus in order to engage with the world on non-human terms, and in order to reveal, reverse or shift the prevalent perspective? Here, the idea of walking through space and specifically a practice of strannichestvo (‘wandering’) becomes a background for inducing a more radical awareness of the camera/body movement through internal architecture of the film, and through this, a reconquest of space.

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Alex Anikina is a Russian-born artist, currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her artistic and academic practices revolve around the exploration of ‘technical mentality’ of the artist and economies of knowledge through experimental film and language-based works. Anikina participated in VI Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; screened at HKW, Berlin, Anthology Film Archives, New York, and NCCA Moscow. Her works are held in the collection of National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow.

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Jan Peter Hammer, Gamification and the Cognitive Turn
Building on the research I initiated for my video Tilikum, I will talk about the transition between behaviourism and the new research paradigm in psychology, which is based on neural networks (transmitted electrical nerve impulses, quantitative threshold values, and feedback loops), a shift which is often referred to as the ‘cognitive turn’. While the classic behaviourists engineered behaviour through – somewhat sketchy – humanisation of nature, the concept of neural networks introduced a sort of general apriori, which was at once mathematical construct and powerful metaphor.

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Jan Peter Hammer is an artist and filmmaker. His works were shown at MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Saltwater, 14. Istanbul Biennale 2015; Art Basel 2014; IFFR – 40th, Athens Biennale 2013; Bergen Assembly Triennial 2013; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2013); International Film Festival Rotterdam. He works and lives in Berlin, Germany.

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Ana Teixeira Pinto, Feed-Back Forms: Behaviourism, Cybernetics, Autopoiesis
Cybernetics is, simply put, the treatment of feedback as a conceptual abstraction, which defines itself by establishing an operational dichotomy between ‘system’ and ‘environment’. This dichotomy, in turn, gives rise to the notion of ‘information’ as what the system extracts from its environment. The concept Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana came to name ‘autopoiesis’ describes how a biological system can be, at once, operationally open and informationally closed. A frog’s visual system, for instance, registers the movement of jittering insects but fails to report on a conspicuously still human observer. There is no world ‘out there’ being represented ‘in here’; rather the activity of the nervous system is determined by the nervous system itself. Autopoiesis, one could say, mirrors the main insight of structural linguistics: that language may be interpreted as a formal system of differential elements.

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Ana Teixeira Pinto is writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is currently a lecturer at UdK (Universität der Kunste) Berlin and her writings have appeared in publications such as e-flux journal, art-agenda, Mousse, Frieze/de, Domus, Inaethetics, Manifesta Journal, or Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of The Reluctant Narrator, published by Sternberg Press (2014) and has recently contributed to Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas, edited by Matteo Pasquinelli and published by Meson Press (2015).

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Filipa Ramos, The Tiger and the Threshold
This presentation addresses the subject of animal embedment in a given territory through the analysis of three artistic representations of tiger-human encounters. It considers three tiger figures, in Heinrich Leutemann’s lithograph print Road Surveying Interrupted in Singapore (c. 1885), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Tropical Malady (2004), and in Phillip Warnell’s film Ming of Harlem (2014) to investigate the speculative constitution of the animals’ relation to territories and boundaries. Taking in consideration the various relations that the different animals establish with the sets where they are situated and with those who traverse them—how Road Surveying Interrupted in Singapore depicts a leaping tiger surprising an urban planner and his team; how in Tropical Malady a were-tiger haunts his feverish lover across the jungle; and how the Bengal tiger Ming defends his house/den from a menacing police officer—it observes how these animal-images are traversed by an anthropocentric gaze that assigns them specific tasks while proposing that nonetheless they still manage to evade these sites of control and exist in blank spots.

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Filipa Ramos (1978, Lisbon) is an art critic based in London. She has lectured at several universities and educational institutions in Europe and is currently teaching in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts of IUAV – University of Venice and in the Experimental Film MA program of Kingston University, London. She coordinated “The most beautiful Kunsthalle in the world” research and editorial project at Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, and collaborates with the Swiss Institute of Rome. Ramos is currently curator of Vdrome, a programme of screenings of films by visual artists and filmmakers. She is former Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal, former curator of the Research Section of dOCUMENTA (13), and co-author of the book Lost and Found – Crisis of Memory in Contemporary Art (Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2009). She has been a guest curator at several public and private art spaces and is a regular contributor to several international publications.

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LD Garnier, I Don’t Swallow Stories, workshop first year students
Voices overheard in a cocktail bar: “Where is the cocktail list, please?”, “Oh look this is a 1935 vintage in a 1866 recipe!”, “This is a spirit from 1978!”, “An artisan producing in Patagonia”, “Oh, he started his company in a garage”, “I see a Malevich reference here”, “Nick Land used to drink it before he turned into a Tory” or “hummm… I noticed that what my partner wants to smell…is my breath”…
When I am in the mood for a cocktail and I search for a cocktail bar, I first check with my nose – or maybe it is because my nose checked first with my brain. Then I look to the stock that they have behind the bar. The outfit of the bartender. Then I look at the shake. The gesture. The choreographed creation and delivery. A hard shake lets you believe the bartender is making it happen. Composing recipes is an art of investigation and precision. I am proposing a workshop on the making of cocktails and concoctions, with outfits, recipes of movements, and a publication, all dusted with sparse thoughts. We will be working with our olfactory capacities, and trying to overcome our attachments to the exclusively visual. The cocktail is a time-based and multi-sensory experience. I don’t swallow stories.

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The practice of artist, perfumer and alchemist LD Garnier revolves around our encounters with the world, odorant material, and the ideas that underpin the way we understand and experience that material. Shared interactions in both public and private space through the construction of narratives are often overlaid with institutional system codes, engaging notions such as traces, time and distance, often forming the locus of his works. His artistic mediation blends experience and intellect through uncertainty’s adaptation.

Attendance & Reservations

GENERAL PUBLIC (LIMITED SEATS AVAILABLE)

Day tickets can be purchased by outside visitors (not studying / working at the Rietveld Academie & the Sandberg Institute). Day tickets grant you a seat at the front rows and full attendance to the whole day program. We highly recommend that you visit the conference at the beginning of the day in order to secure a comfortable seat.

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PRICES

Day Ticket: 15 euros


Day Student Ticket: 10 euros (upon indication of student card at the front desk)


Full Conference Pass: 40 euros


Full Conference Student Pass: 20 euros (upon indication of student card at the front desk)

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HOW TO RESERVE


General public and students outside Rietveld Academie & Sandberg Institute can reserve a Day Ticket at: 
reservation-studiumgenerale@rietveldacademie.nl. Reservations should be made at least one day prior to the event. (Please provide full name and occupation)

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WHEN TO PAY


Payments can be made IN CASH ONLY upon arrival at the front desk.


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STUDENTS & FACULTY (RIETVELD / SANDBERG)

Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Institute Students and Faculty, do NOT need to reserve a Day ticket. FREE access is granted upon indication of your Student Card at the entrance. Notice: There are no regular tutorials during the conference / festival days and all workshops will be closed.

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR RIETVELD ACADEMIE STUDENTS

Attendance can be verified and validated by logging in and logging out with your Student Card at the beginning and end of each slot. If you forget to log out at the end of each slot, attendance will not be registered.

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ATTENDANCE: BITS

Bits for each slot are indicated on the time schedule of each day. Full day attendance to the lecture program: 8 bits. Students at basicyear and first year of specialization are obliged to acquire a minimum of 16 attendance bits.

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WHAT IS A SLOT?

A slot is a group of lectures or activities as indicated on the timeline of each day.

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION
 / TAKE NOTICE

EXPOZAAL doors will close at the beginning of each slot.

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During the conference, on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday between 12:00 and 15:00 the Rietveld’s Cantina will be present in the garden of de Brakke Grond selling reasonably priced, healthy sandwiches and salads for your lunch. Payments can be made BY PIN ONLY.

Rietveld Uncut

Rietveld Uncut is an annual joint presentation by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Within the Rietveld the process of making, from concept to work, is an important element throughout the whole study. For this seventh edition Rietveld Uncut teams up again with Studium Generale, leading up to BOTS, BODIES & BEASTS conference festival and exhibition.

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Rietveld Uncut presents work by:

Anne Piet Hofstede – Caro de Jonge – Emma Walch – Rosita Kær, Alice Dhinau & Manon Bachellier – Rafael Romero & Daniel Farr – Didi Lehnhausen – Gabrielė Adomaitytė & Rasmus Niclas Rose Nielsen – Garance Früh &Valgerður Jónsdóttir – Ksenia Perek & Francine ten Brummelhuis – Michelle Son – Mila Bouma – Suzanne Bernhardt – Gustav Heinsen, Leonie Hennicke & Nina Schouten – Marcel Mrejen & Etienne Clerc – Kaspar Sellin, Stefán Stefánsson & Paul Girardeau – Kateryna Snizhko – Maria Naidich Chapital – Stijn Pommée & Laura Grimm – Hanna Steenbergen-Cockerton & Zofia Skoroszewska – Anastasia Afonina – Elzbieta Szota & the plants – Joeri Bosma – Kristoffer Ala-Ketola – Ivana Filip

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Participating departments:

Inter-Architecture – DesignLAB – Beeld & Taal – Graphic Design – Jewellery – Photography – VAV – Ceramics – Glass – Fine Arts – DOGtime

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Rietveld Uncut is developed and supervised by Tarja Szaraniec and Tomas Adolfs.