Cyberpunk 2022
Trust in digital communication
How We Founded a Citizen Television StationUnser Weg zum portablen DNA-Synthesizer
US government demands direct police access to European biometric data
Kunst im UmbauK – Kulturarbeit Solidarisch essen, ackern, imkern und wohnenRaum für die schöne Welt Das Fediverse steht für Vielfalt nicht für Einfalt Das Mietshäuser Syndikat und das Neubauprojekt Görzer128Kunst und Kommerz, ein problematisches VerhältnisGeschlechtergerechtigkeit und MakingGit: Let’s f*ck up history, and then restore it«Thank you for your data» oder weshalb uns das Thema Data Analytics interessieren sollteReal citizens of Rheinfelden living in an AI painted model of Jakob Strassers hometownMetaverse und NFT
The VR360 film titled Off-network low-impact living on the cut, published on boattr.uk, for the launch of the after progress exhibition, tells the story of the researchers’ journey on the narrow-boat Quintessence (boattr.uk) on the British Waterways, looking into off-network, local network use of technologies, as a low-impact living on the cut. The ‘boattr – living on the cut’ immersive film depicts the cut and canals of the British Waterways as a digital urban commons, through the artists’ journey on the narrow boat ‘Quintessence’ and the development of the ‘boattr’ prototype in collaboration with MAZI (for “together” in Greek), a Horizon2020 research project. Having operated the boattr.uk, mazizone and 7061 art project over three years, this story, in form of a VR360 film, documents the development of this research.With the evolution the moving image inserted itself into broader, everyday use, but also extended its patterns of effect and its aesthetical language. Video has become pervasive, importing the principles of “tele-” and “cine-” into the human and social realm, thereby also propelling “image culture” to new heights and intensities. The boattr VR360 film makes use of video as theory, reflecting the structural and qualitative re-evaluation it aims at discussing design and organisational level. In accordance with the qualitatively new situation video is set in, the VR360 film presents a multi-dimensional matrix which constitutes the virtual logical grid of the boattr project.
A companion to the After Progress (2022) monograph, published by The Sociological Review, the After Progress Digital Exhibition is the result of a multiplicity of collective efforts to weave together collaborative and multimedia forms of storytelling that might help us envisage ways of living and dying well outside of the modern coordinates of progress, drawing inspiration from the “After Progress” symposium series held in 2019.The notion of “progress” is arguably the defining idea of modernity: a civilisational imagery of a boundless, linear, and upwards trajectory towards a future that, guided by reason and technology, will be “better” than the present. It was this notion that placed techno-science at the heart of modern political culture, and it was the global unevenness of “progress” that imagined European imperialism as a civilising mission inflicted upon “backward” others for their own sake. The colonial, rationalistic, and ecocidal consequences of the story of “progress” have been laid bare, yet progress remains a ruling idea capable of governing our imaginations today. At the same time, the ruins of progress are teeming with divergent worlds and collective experiments whose stories upend modern dreams, cultivating plural value-ecologies of living and dying with others on Earth. How to intensify them? How to make them felt?In 2020, amidst the profound upheavals brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic and the many public health responses to it, we issued an open call for storytelling proposals from groups and individuals from around the world, with stories that might help us envisage ways of living and dying well outside of the modern coordinates of progress. After over 175 initial proposals from every corner of the world (by artists, activists, academics, students, and many other people from different walks of life) and a long and collaborative process of development and curation, this exhibition of over 60 “stories” in a variety of genres, media, and styles, is one collective response to that call.But it is also more than that. Composed collectively by contributors, curators, designers, and collaborators alike, all navigating and negotiating lockdowns and social distancing measures and a plethora of other restrictions on our modes of sociality, this exhibition is also a living archive, a testimony of what happened and what can still happen in the interstices of such distances, when we insist in spite of all on thinking and being together (apart). And because any “after” to progress necessarily calls for the plural, what one will find here is a veritable cornucopia of experiments in storytelling that are speculative, ethnographic, poetic, drawing on or reinventing any and every genre: SF, nature writing, poetry, aphorisms, brief dramas, short films, interactive webpages, letters and epistolary forms, fictional encyclopaedia entries, instructions, auditory compositions, and many more. They each raise and pursue their own questions and their own possibilities, thickening the present through the many disparate yet interlaced threads they weave in their divergences and tensions.
We took part in the YAWYB workshops. Excerpt from Times of Maltaabout YAWYB: An artistic research project held between 2016 and 2017 questioned the effects of consumption on buyers. This year, a second edition is delving deeper into the subject and is particularly looking at the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our production, shopping and consumption habits.
You Are What You Buy (YAWYB) reacts to current issues on consumption and consumerism, offering an alternative artistic experience. The first edition was a year-long transdisciplinary project that departed from a reflection on our need to affirm ourselves as consumers. The research process and final presentation were set in a supermarket in Malta, offering a different possibility of where and how to experience art − away from the art institution.
Since then, the team continued thinking on how they could develop the project further.
“In the wake of the pandemic, it felt like a natural progression to revisit the project − it almost felt like a responsibility not to ignore all the changes in our production, shopping and consumption habits resulting from the impact of the pandemic. This is how YAWYB ‒ A Remote ReVisit came about,” artist Kristina Borg says.
“Also, YAWYB has always anticipated to catalyse change in our production, shopping and consumption habits, specifically inviting us producers and consumers to engage in more intelligent thinking processes while we produce and shop, with the aim of contributing to a new normal that guarantees responsible production and consumption for sustainable cities and communities. And what better time, when we’re affected by the pandemic, to reflect on this?” she continues.
In answering the research question (see box on right) and more, YAWYB – A Remote ReVisit moves outside and beyond the supermarket space to incorporate other spaces and places of production and consumption in our neighbourhoods. These include, but are not limited to, the local grocery store or the mini-market, the open markets, the supermarket, the household store, the clothes store, the coffee place, the restaurant and online platforms.
This second edition focuses mainly on research; however, the outcomes are presented through artistic and creative means.
Similar to the first edition, this second edition also collaborates with a group of community co-creators as well as with service providers. This was done remotely due to the pandemic, hence the ‘remote’ in the title. In the wake of the pandemic, it felt like a natural progression to revisit the project
“With this in mind, it is important to mention that such remote means allowed the project to widen its audience to a European-based one, attracting survey respondents and community co-creators based in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK,” Borg enthuses.
“This has also provided a wider spectrum of shared experiences as affected by different degrees and levels of the pandemic in different countries.”
December 2020 the New Normal artistic research book has been co-published by Strelka Press and Park Books. The New Normal publication encompasses the breadth, diversity, and intensity of activity that has taken place throughout the three-year project. From 2017–2019, The New Normal think-tank at Strelka Institute investigated the impact of planetary-scale computation on the future of cities in Russia, and globally. The work was conducted by ninety interdisciplinary researchers from thirty different countries and over forty faculty members, drawn not only from the field of architecture but also from the areas of computer science, philosophy, art, cinema, economics, and more. Projects ranged from short-form cinema and software design to proposals for new political systems and economic models. At stake for the work is not only what the urban future looks like, but also how it works; how it circulates ideas, value, and power. The twenty-two interlinked projects which were developed show how speculative urban design can move upstream in the decision-making processes.
Coined by Carl Schmitt and expanded by Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception”—the exhibition’s Chinese title—refers to a political situation in which the normal laws and regulations of a society are abruptly suspended, replaced by temporary conditions that in turn become a new status quo. States of exception have been imposed at moments of crisis throughout modern history. Crisis today is constant, as ideals of freedom, equality, and openness, once held by some as universal values, give way to mass shootings, aborted ceasefires, violated norms, and tainted elections. In 2015, the Chinese leadership introduced “the new normal,” a way of talking about economic growth rates that, while lower than during the exuberant years of the early 2000s, continue to trump those of most other major economies. China’s assertively capitalist, internationalist response to these increasingly acute dynamics—recently typified by President Xi Jinping’s address to the World Economic Forum in Davos—might also be considered a “state of exception,” one that runs parallel to the new patterns of globalization that inform artistic cosmopolitanism today.
In order to lay the foundations for a discussion around the argument that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies benefits the powerful few, focussing on their own existential concerns, the paper will narrow down the analysis of the argument to social justice and jurisprudence (i.e. the philosophy of law), considering also the historical context. The paper explores the notion of humanised artificial intelligence in order to discuss potential challenges society might face in the future. The paper does not discuss current forms and applications of artificial intelligence, as, so far, there is no AI technology, which is self-conscious and self-aware, being able to deal with emotional and social intelligence. It is a discussion around AI as a speculative hypothetical entity. One could the ask, if such a speculative self-conscious hardware/software system were created at what point could one talk of personhood? And what criteria could there be in order to say an AI system was capable of committing AI crimes?The paper will discuss the construction of the legal system through the lens of political involvement of what one may want to consider to be powerful elites. Before discussing these aspects the paper will clarify the notion of “powerful elites”. In doing so the paper will be demonstrating that it is difficult to prove that the adoption of AI technologies is undertaken in a way which mainly serves a powerful class in society. Nevertheless, analysing the culture around AI technologies with regard to the nature of law with a philosophical and sociological focus enables one to demonstrate a utilitarian and authoritarian trend in the adoption of AI technologiesThe paper will then look, in a more detailed manner, into theories analysing the historical and social systematisation, or one may say disposition, of laws, and the impingement of neo-liberal tendencies upon the adoption of AI technologies. The regulatory, self-governing potential of AI algorithms and the justification by authority of the current adoption of AI technologies within civil society will be analysed next. The paper will propose an alternative, some might say practically unattainable, approach to the current legal system by looking into restorative justice for AI crimes, and how the ethics of care, through social contracts, could be applied to AI technologies. In conclusion the paper will discuss affect and humanised artificial intelligence with regards to the emotion of shame, when dealing with AI crimes.
The conferences “Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science” include theoretical presentations and artists’ talks focusing (a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality, as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, and (b) on the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art.A brainchild of Dalila Honorato, Assistant Professor at the Ionian University, the first two conferences, TTT2016 and TTT2017 were held in Corfu, Greece, organized by the Department of Audio & Visual Arts and supported by public and private institutions, mostly local. In the first two years the conferences were attended by Stelarc, Roy Ascott, Adam Zaretsky, Manos Danezis, Polona Tratnik, Gunalan Nadarajan, Irina Aristarkhova, Marta de Menezes, María Antonia González Valerio, Andrew Carnie, and Kathy High as guest speakers. The third TTT conference, TTT2018, took place in Mexico City, hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the Centro de Cultura Digital as part of the N Festival. At the invitation of Marta De Menezes, Ana Ventura Miranda, and María Antonia González Valerio, the conference was co-organized by the Research and Creation Group Arte+Ciencia, UNAM (MX), Arte Institute (USA), Cultivamos Cultura (PT) as well as the Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University (GR).Since its beginning TTT seeks to provide a comfortable setting for the interaction of its participants and the students of the academic institution hosting it. This is accomplished through coordinating the conference’s agenda with the development of other activities such as art exhibitions, screenings, live performances, book presentations, poster exhibitions, and workshops developed within the hosting institution in collaboration with other organizations.In 2016 and 2017, among other events, TTT teamed up with the Audiovisual Arts Festival and the Municipal Gallery of Corfu to host the exhibitions “Stelarc: Alternate Anatomies”, “iGMO: Adam Zaretsky”, and “Body Esc” which included works by artists Andrew Carnie, Alkistis Georgiou, Marne Lucas, Joseph Nechvatal, Kira O’Reilly & Manuel Vason, Nikos Panayotopoulos, Ayse Gul Suter, Hege Tapio, and Adam Zaretsky. TTT2018, coordinated in partnership with the program of the FACTT 2018 – Festival Art & Science Trans-disciplinary and Trans-national within the N Festival, included in its agenda the opening of the exhibition “Espacios de Especies” with artworks, among others, by Brandon Ballengée, Andy Gracie, Bios ex Machina, Jaime Lobato, Kathy High, Lena Ortega, Marta de Menezes, Plataforma Bioscénica, Robertina Šebjanič, and Victoria Vesna. The conference in Mexico was preceded by the TTT Satellite Physiological Bioart – Body Performance Live Art Event “BioCuerpos Perfor|m|ados”, organized by the Grace Exhibition Space in collaboration with Casa Viva Gallery, Paranoid Visions UTA, and Anemonal, with performances, among others, by Boryana Rossa, Alexander Romania, Praba Pilar, Adam Zaretsky, Alejandro Chellet, Marita Solberg, Jacco Borggreve, Margherita Pevere, Cecilia Vilca and Lorena Lo Peña.The conference proceedings of 2016 and 2017, available as free e-books published by the Department of Audio & Visual Arts – Ionian University, can be accessed via the official TTT website. Both are edited by Dalila Honorato and Andreas Giannakoulopoulos, Associated Professor at the Ionian University and webmaster of the conferences’ webspace. Selected texts from the TTT2017 and TTT2018 were published in the Special Issue vols. 15:2 and 16:3 of the journal Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, at the invitation of Roy Ascott (editor-in-chief) to Dalila Honorato (guest-editor). The free digital edition of the proceedings of TTT2018, edited by Dalila Honorato, María Antonia González Valerio, Marta de Menezes and Andreas Giannakoulopoulos was released in November 2019 by the Ionian University Publications.The fourth international conference “Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science”, taking place November 26–28, 2020, would be in Vienna, hosted by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, at the invitation of Ingeborg Reichle, Professor and Chair of the Department of Media Theory. Due to the COVID-19 crisis the conference will be exclusively online: TTT2020 Vienna/Online.The TTT conference series is supported by its Steering Committee whose members include Roy Ascott, Plymouth University (UK), Andreas Floros, Ionian University (GR), Dalila Honorato, Ionian University (GR), Gunalan Nadarajan, University of Michigan (USA), Melentie Pandilovski, Riddoch Art Gallery (AU), Stelarc, Curtin University (AU), Polona Tratnik, Alma Mater Europaea (Slovenia), and Adam Zaretsky, Marist College (US).
Adnan Hadzi presented the Immersive Lab University of Malta (ILUM) project at the ELIA Biennial. In the Immersive Laboratory University of Malta (ILUM), as well as in the Visual Narratives Laboratory (VNLAB) of Lodz Film School, researchers, artists, and filmmakers investigate and create different kinds of immersion. Researchers from Malta will focus on the insights with state-of-the-art immersive experience (IX). After the presentation, participants will be invited to join the walk-through of Lost in a garden of clouds, virtual show of works that are engaging with aspects of the climate emergency and its negationism, with the places where natural or urban ecosystems connect with the digital ones and with the exploitation of natural resources and chemical pollution.
Expanding the Arts
An online extravaganza that will energise, inspire and kindle connections throughout the entire arts education community. In partnership with Zurich University of the Arts, thought leaders from the arts and academia, producers and practitioners, will explore the brightest, boldest transdisciplinary ideas, question the art of the possible and where boundaries lie. Be part of a rich tapestry of provocation, interrogation and co-creation crossing over 40 presentations, walk-shops, workshops and a myriad of opportunities to connect with collaborators. Together let’s re-imagine Arts Education as a catalyst for change in the post-COVID world.
In 2020, the year when first NONUMENT! Book is to be published, many recently still lively public spaces and city centers have been transformed into nonuments. In the past, Nonument was devoted to decaying, destroyed and abandoned monuments, buildings and public spaces of the twentieth century. At the third NONUMENT! Symposium, we will combine these thoughts with new thinking about the possible strategies of thought and intervention in a continually transforming contemporary city. Through the cases of transforming buildings, squares and cities, guests from Ljubljana and abroad will think about the open use of space as the condition of survival.
Adnan Hadzi presented Machine Learning and Environmental Justice at the the RIXC Art and Science festival: ECODATA.
The RIXC Art-Science Festival: ECODATA aim is to explore the ‘ecosystematic perspective’. More than just rising awareness that living organisms are highly interdependent on each other and their environments, this year’s festival edition aims to reveal a web of connections that interweaves biological, social and techno-scientific systems, living and digital data, artistic and scientific approaches.
ECODATA exhibition is the central axis of the festival, which forms the rest of the program, made in collaboration with Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics” research group led by researcher and theorist Yvonne VOLKART, (Basel, Switzerland). The purpose of this exhibition is to bridge the gap between technological and ecological as well as to incorporate technological issues into ecological art. This year’s exhibition will feature twenty artworks by internationally acknowledged artists working in the field of media art, science and ecology.
ECODATA Exhibition
Guided Tour Through the Exhibition
ECODATA Opening Keynote Session: Art and Science Discussion
ECODATA Artist Talks
CODATA and A/I (artistic intelligence): Opening Performance by the Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared
ECODATA Exhibition Opening
Session 1: Technologies of Ecological
Session 3: BioSensing and Ecosystematic Perspective (1)
Session 4: EcoAesthetics
Thematic Session 5: Atmospheric Experience
ECODATA Thematic Keynote Talk
Session 6: BioPolitcs and BioDigital Poetics
Session 8: EcoAesthetics and Data
Session 9: Living Data and AI
Closing Session 10: GREEN REVISITED – Encountering Emerging Naturecultures
Closing Keynote Talk
Closing Program (Part 2): PLA(N)Tform Online Exhibition
Closing Program (Part 1): FOREST GARDEN GREENHOUSE Concert
Eva Eicker writes about the show: In her first UK solo show, Egyptian artist Heba Y. Amin presents ongoing projects combining various media such as video, appropriated archival photographs, performance and real footage. The title When I see the future, I close my eyes lends itself from the song ‘Excellent Birds’ (by Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson) for Nam June Paik’s reflection of digital media Good morning, Mr Orwell (1984). In her research-based practise, Amin is tackling the history of the technological influence on politics and the construction of territorial power with a focus on the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. This work could not be more relevant than during these times of global political threats.Inspired by the news in 2013 when Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage because of an electronic device fitted to its body – Amin combines colonial narratives with the records of modern technology. In the video work As Birds Flying (2016), she depicts savannahs and wetlands, including settlements in Galilea (Northern Israel), which were captured in found drone footage. The audio presents dialogues from Egyptian actor Adel Imam’s film Birds of Darkness and discusses political tension, censorship, democracy and surveillance, such as “The government wants credibility, but no one trusts them.” Opposite this work, the artist presents wallpaper composed of appropriated archival aerial shots of Palestine and its history over time, again mimicking the (spying) bird’s perspective. The General’s Stork (2016-ongoing) shows a stork’s life and its famous owner Lord Edmund Allenby in Cairo, the British High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan from 1919 to 1925. In the photographs the artist appropriates the bird’s colour: flipping from b/w to colour. The work immediately gains a manipulated artificiality, intensified by the stork’s tall, out-of-proportion (but factual) appearance. Here she mashes up reality and appropriation, culminating in a speculative yet satirical approach. “What does it read like in a different context? I wanted to erase and dominate the narrative”, Amin remarked when we met.This ties over to her second project, Operation Sunken Sea (2018-ongoing); installed as a long table with flat lightboxes in a dimly lit space, the work evokes a governmental feel to it. At one end of the room is a b/w portrait of the artist – powerful, tall, a quasi-persona of a dictator. Opposite on the rear wall is a video projection of Amin’s speech recorded in Malta 2018 in front of a live audience. Stitching together quotes from famous dictators ranging from Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini to Former Premier of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev – the artist is mimicking dictators and proposes a solution to the so-called migration crisis by relocating the Mediterranean Sea within the continent of Africa. Occasional and affirmative sounding (if not very staged) cheering interrupts the overall silence of the piece or space, suggesting a focussed and serious listening is required. The lightboxes feature archival material supporting and recording the early twentieth century utopian visions of draining the Mediterranean Sea supported by various world leaders and scientists. This also includes a re-staging of Herman Soergel’s portrait, where Amin poses as the German engineer claiming to unite Europe and Africa as one continent to gain power, which the New York Times called at the time a “utopian phantasm” (14.4.1929). In 1956 a confidential CIA recommendation to Eisenhower proposed to funnel water and ‘create’ peace in the Middle East, stating it hoped “it would keep Nasser’s mind on other matters, because he needs some way to get off the Soviet Hook.”It is easy to become completely absorbed by the sheer visual and audio absurdity of human megalomania. While the politicians seek justification for their action or settlements with the proof of technology or photographs – the artist is taking them out of context opening the discourse: “Can you look at them and remove the context?”The third work, the multi-channel video installation Project Speak2Tweet (2011 – ongoing) features anonymous voice messages left at an online platform initiated by a group of programmers as response to the Egyptian Governments’ Internet shutdown during the 2011 uprising. Posted on Twitter, the uncensored messages by activists and the public resulted in moving messages to update families and friends. Here the artist gives a voice to the people – and the world was listening. Most touching is a man leaving a message not knowing if he will return from his trip to Cairo’s central square. Brilliantly installed as a metal construction, the visitor navigates looped snapshots of destroyed urban structures in Cairo as though meandering through a prison-like interior representing a corrupt dictatorship.For a short-lived moment, this work resonates as a good example of technology in juxtaposition to the other two bodies of work. This is nothing like the unstable-democratic realm and the ideal of ‘never trust the internet’, which we are adopting as norms. The messages are not publicly accessible anymore, and saved on the Twitter server.Eventually the paranoia of stork-espionage was discredited and evidently the bird was part of migration research by zoologists. Subsequently released, the bird was apparently caught and eaten. Without simplifying the complex themes, the exhibition equally manages not to overload the experience in the space and offers plentiful resources. The artist brilliantly dissipates the distinction between the truth and narrative in her projects by manipulating archival material and mimicking the political language and fascist mannerisms to open up debates. One is also left with a bitter aftertaste – the shifting between absurdity and reality is aching. The satirical element is overshadowed by the fact this is not shocking rhetoric anymore: we have become very numb to the increasing politicisation of news and media.
