ARTIFICIAL ENTANGLEMENT
#1 Pistoriho Palace, Bratislava, 28/11/2019
#2 Café Berlinka SNG, Bratislava 09/12/2019
#3 A4, Bratislava 12/12/2019
series of lectures on art and technology in contemporary society
(picture: Margarete Jahrmann, Neurospace Art Game, performance, Computerspielemuseum Berlin 2017/ Amaze Festival 2018)
Artificial Entanglement
Artificial Entanglement is a serious of lectures and talks about algorithmic governance, AI presents and AI futures in art and society. Building of a robust technological superstructure questions the human agency and creating complex subject/object negotiation. Simple said, even if technology would create near to ideal conditions for human existence, one question would be would and could human give away social sovereignty and individual freedom to technological subject for assumed safety and care in return? Is technological progress inevitable and resistance is really futile? Should general technological innovation be steered with clear directions like for example in border science like gene technologies?
#1 Sylvia Eckermann & Gerald Nestler: „Raging Bull. Making and unmaking of entanglement by finance and other data-driven spheres“
The artists will reconstruct a development that despite its societal impact has not received much attention yet. While (possible) effects of Big Data, algorithms, automation and AI are widely discussed (for instance in Shoshana Zuboff’s “Surveillance Capitalism”) the question remains: What is the language of (bio)power in the era of technocapitalism and how does it address us? Based on examples such as the contemporary art market, social credit scores, the quantified self movement and Twitter politics the artists identify a shift from representative to performative speech of power rooted in a derivative paradigm whose financial technologies aim at anticipating and exploiting the contingency of social relations and individual behaviors.
What can be done from an artistic perspective to undermine and counter-escalate such data-driven logics of control (which primarily target affects and aim at involvement)? How can we destabilize the divisive forces of profit maximisation and escalation politics?
#2 Marek Tuszynski: Looking Through the Glass. The concept and implementation of The Glass Room – a pop-up tech store with nothing to sell
The lecture will introduce the curatorial approach of the organization Tactical Tech when conceiving the international-known exhibition „The Glass Room“ in Berlin, New York, London and San Francisco, with more than 50,000 visitors. The exhibition - intervention „The Glass Room“ communicates, engages and educates wider audiences about the impact of technology on their lives.
How can we communicate, engage with and educate wider audiences about how technology impacts their life? This talk will give an overview of the curatorial process of Tactical Tech's public intervention 'The Glass Room’, combining different visual, critical and creative strategies – from designing the space, the themes, and the visitor experience to various forms of audience engagement. The Glass Room is a three-week pop-up experience that has been realised four times between 2016 and 2019 in Berlin, New York, London and San Francisco and has hosted over 50,000 visitors. The talk will also cover some general observations about defining audiences based on other projects by Tactical Tech.
#3 Daphne Dragona / Margarete Jahrmann: Technologies of Care / Ludic experimental systems
What does the term 'technologies of care' mean? What changes does the appearance of cute robots and artificial intelligent assistants bring to everyday life? We already live in a period when playful and tireless machines continuously learn from us and respond to our needs and desires. Providing services of an affective character, they come in perfect accordance with the neoliberal call for self-care and -optimization, and they promise to be of help on an individual and societal level. This talk will address the challenges of the affective infrastructures of our times, bringing into the discussion artistic responses and critical perspectives. Special attention will be payed to the instrumentalisation and commodification of care, with references to works and topics that were discussed in the framework of transmediale festival 2019 and the Engineering Care Web Residencies by Solitude & ZKM.
How we humans are influenced by neuroscientific research can be made accessible through the playful mis en scene of such lab settings in everyday life. Follow a series of initial Ludic Role plays, performed in 2019: Epicycles of Collective motion, TATE Gallery London (June 2019); Zero Gravity/Game Experiment workshops, Neurology Klinikum Munich (August 2019); Dark Matter of Play. NIFF on Tour@CERN Geneva (November 2019); [S]care Parlor Games with Androids (November 2019 - ongoing). The talk addresses researchers, artists, and contemporary players. The Area 7 Lab plays will serve as case studies of a Real Player ride.
- Read an interview with Marek Tuszynski on purpose of his lecture (in Slovak)
- Listen to an audio
feature with Margarethe Jahrmann, Daphne Dragona, Gerald Nestler and Sylvia Eckermann (in German).
Photos by Martina Z. Šimkovičová
Concept and production:
Concept and production:
Robota / Center for Advanced Studies
Main project partner: Slovak Arts Council
Partners: Goethe Institut, Austrian Cultural Forum, City District of Bratislava-Staré Mesto.