LASER Talks in Vienna: SIGNOIDS – Part 1: Transversal Subjectivities

EVENT INFO

When: 12th September 2023, 6:00-8:30pm CEST. 

Where: Vienna, University of Applied Arts, AIL, Georg-Cochp-Patz 2

Online registration via ZOOM - Passcode: 722220

The interplay between Nature and Technology influences human perception, giving rise to cultural signs that we refine through understanding. These signs serve as tools for comprehending and reshaping both nature and technology. This dynamic interaction raises a compelling query: How can we interweave the intricate interplay of nature, technology, and human culture within the creation of saturated single signs, the signoids?

SIGNOIDS is a series probing human sign systems as living materials, inquiring into mutual benefits. How can we reshape these systems as live agents, envisioning their transformation amidst Post-Capitalocene's biopolitics? The lectures gather artists recontextualizing signifiers—language, patterns, algorithms—forging a path to post-anthropocentric unity and novel transversal subjectivities, as well as emphasizing productive untranslatability as a catalyst for creativity.

Chairs’ statements:

• Klaus Spiess (AT) Why Signoids? Klaus Spiess leads the Art&Science Program at the Vienna Medical University as an associate professor.
• Jens Hauser (DE/FR) Signoids and Biomediality. Jens Hauser, a guest professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, is a researcher and curator

SPEAKERS BIOS:

Adam Brown (US) (online) investigates the influence of invisible microbial agents on human history and its belief systems.  In “miracle on demand” the artist uses a microorganism that grows on bread and produces a viscous fluid that is very similar to blood. Adam Brown is a Full Professor at Michigan State University and Intermedia artist. His work incorporates living and biological systems, molecular chemistry, and emerging technologies.

Agnes Meyer Brandis' (DE) (online) work ‚Microfluid Oracle Chip & Autopoesis Answering Machine‘  features an oracle functioning as a cybernetic agent, propelled by droplets coursing through handwritten text like sap through plants. Agnes Meyer-Brandis is a Berlin based artist, who creates works on the fringes of science, fiction and fabulation in fields such as climate research and environmental studies. Her work has been awarded with two Prix Ars Electronica Awards of Distinction.

Verena Friedrich's (DE) work ERBSENZÄHLER Quality SorterV2 critically probes the implications of increasingly anonymous and automated complex decision-making processes entrusted to "intelligent" systems. Verena Friedrich is an artist creating time-based installations with organic, electronic and sculptural media. She received the International Media Award for Science and Art from ZKM Karlsruhe 2005; and a honorary mention in the Prix Ars Electronica 2015.

Ruth Alison Clemens (NL) (online) posits the interaction between a sign system belonging to two different realms isn't framed as a problem in need of resolution but rather a  'productive untranslatability‘.Ruth Alison Clemens is a lecturer in literary studies at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and also at Utrecht University. Her work focuses on modernist literature and aesthetics, feminist new materialism, posthuman theories of language and translation, textual materiality and book history, and Deleuze.

In Cecilia Vilca's (PE) works titled 'Ancestral Typography,' and La Verdad a living object metamorphoses into a living culture, an integral facet of an indivisible, polysemic, and synesthetic entirety woven by ancestry and ritual. Cecilia Vilca is a Peruvian transartist, exploring the relationship of technology with gender, society, and nature. From a decolonizing vision she connects ancient technologies with the new ones.  She was Committee of ISEA2020 Member. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts Reviewer.

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