EMAP (European Media Art Platform) promotes a new Capacity Building Workshop, curated and moderated by contemporary art critic and curator Marco Mancuso, with the participation of Zach Blas, artist and filmmaker, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, artist-in-residence and biohacker at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and affiliate of Data & Society organization, and Jussi Parikka, professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture and leader of the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) at at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Contemporary art in its relationship with technoscientific research nurtures the appropriation of a series of cultural and knowledge tools, as well as possible tactics and strategies, which induce an ethical and critical reflection on recursive data, operational images and data practices of remote sensing in AI and biotechnologies. They influence and model our bodies, identities and the socio-political-ecological environment in which we live in the relationship with the surrounding human-non-human context. A practice of this type has been carried out in the last years by a group of artists and theorists who, in the dialogue with algorithms and networks and in the wet embrace with biology, have imagined, speculated and activated new narratives and favored experiments on the biases and the potentials of this complex and increasingly topical field of investigation. A praxis conducted within an international circuit of media labs, citizen labs, academies and institutions that have carried forward an interdisciplinary productive and cultural discourse articulated through artworks, exhibitions, seminars and educational activities. What emerged is that, by widening the boundaries of posthuman thought to the dialogue between art, design, performance, philosophy and critical theory, the contamination with the techno-scientific “other” suggests on the one hand the need to study a possible reformulation of the ontogenesis of reality and on the other the freedom to address a subjectivity that gradually becomes more and more fluid and queer in its very nature in constant transformation. And to probe the bio-political component of this contamination through community and collective practices of sharing knowledge, strategies and experiences.

This talk will be broadcasted on gnration’s website and YouTube channel.