Seminar Part I

4 – 5 October, 2017
With Filipa Ramos and Vincent Normand

The seminar invites the students to undertake a collective inquiry into the history of the exhibition format, by inscribing it in the anthropological landscape of modernity: the limits, borders, frontiers and great divides which have stabilized the relationship between the modern subject and its world. If indeed modern exhibition-machines have been, throughout scientific and artistic modernity, sites of co-constitution of subjects and objects, spectators and artifacts, how crucial are they in our activity of “world-making”?

Seminar Part II

23 – 24 November , 2017
With Prof. Chus Martínez, Eduardo Navarroand David Pearce

David Pierce is defending the idea of elimination of all involuntary pain. This would imply a society that would not kill animals, genetically manipulate humans and animals to stop any form of suffering and enhancing an idea of super intelligence. As surreal as it may seem, David Pearce is with Nick Bostom the co-founder of the →Humanity + think tank in Oxford and has very few ideas on how to create a society with all these ideas. So the debate will be rich and intelligent on the need of art and artist to provide the right environment for ideas that seem socially, politically and aesthetically isolated and, at times, even dangerous.

The students will have an understanding of the relationship art and experience may built with science and technology. The input of Eduardo Navarro in this context will be the key since he really addresses many of these questions but without the optimism science has in the «future» or in «technology».

We are currently seeing the rise of the radical right in parallel with new rhetoric about communism; consumable, collegiate ideas of the left; political correctness about gender and race… It all seems to mark a limit of the political and social languages we have inherited from the social sciences, from the many mutations of humanism, and from a pallid belief in representative democracy. And yet, what to do? How do we name and talk about our desire for change? For possibility in the face of dark analyses that stress the limits of both a wealth based on labor and a public space defined by freedom? In recent decades, artists have been the best researchers of the complexity of these substances. The way they have been able to produce speculative thinking on the possibility of becoming animal, or becoming machine, as well as the space for freedom and post-racial imaginations of the social has marked a horizon of practices, works, and voices that we must put forward time and again. This—putting the practice, the voices, the thinking, the research of the artist communities forward—is the new movement, the new «revolution», if you prefer the old-fashion term. A movement that stresses the need to produce space again in a moment when the lack of public money has collapsed art institutions and private interests are taking the lead. A wave of people thinking and doing differently, but also a community of others who can listen and take on the challenge of challenging their habits, and then, hopefully, their minds too.

Lectures Session I

9 May 10am – 1pm
Chus Martínez: Opening / Introduction

Filipa Ramos: The Drunkard and the Tiger
This encounter between a drunk artist and a love letter to an extinct tiger looks beyond current strategies of political action to try to discover significant forms of new insurgence in our present times.

Tejal Shah: Not Same, Not Different, What Then?
The Fish are Swimming Upstream. Come. What can instigate a total cognitive and affective r/evolution inside? Can the knots of hatred, fear, attachment, aversion, and self-centeredness irreversibly be undone? Can we come to cherish all other sentient beings as much as we cherish ourselves? Can the line between self and other ultimately dissolve? A proposal on the nature of reality and the nature of mind – a supermundane path.

Lectures Session II

9 May 2pm – 4 pm

Trevor Paglen: Your Pictures are Looking at You…

Most of the world’s images are now invisible. From smart cities monitoring traffic flows to quality control systems in factories, to the immense repositories of photographs on social media that are continually mined for meta-data by powerful artificial intelligence systems, we find ourselves in a world in which the majority of images are made by machines for other machines. The rise of computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence represents an acute break with the visual cultures of the past, rendering traditional forms of human-to-human seeing an exception to the rule. In this talk, artist Trevor Paglen will explore the world of seeing-machines, articulate how images have gone from passive representations to active agents, and outline some of the dangerous consequences for human societies.

Ingo Niermann: Who Got the Looks?
A recent US-American study shows that on average conservative politicians are rated as more attractive than liberal politicians while it’s the opposite with academics. What are the possible outcomes of these results regarding the future of democracy and social justice?

Workshops

10 May (for Master Students only)
Workshop with Tejal Shah

11 May (for Master Students only)
Workshop with with Natasha Sadr Haghighian

Seminar Part I

22 March and 23, 2017
Chus Martínez with David Gruber and Filipa Ramos

David Gruber is a marine biologist and an ocean explorer, David Gruber searches the undersea world for bioluminescent and biofluorescent marine animals. Gruber’s discoveries are providing a wealth of new insights into a secret “language” of shining colors and patterns that help many marine creatures communicate, interact, and avoid enemies. The research of Gruber is fundamental since he has been developing a lense (cameras) that allow us to „see“ like a fish, to perceive the glowing sea life and the ability to visualize the inner workings of human cells.

Seminar Part II

27 April and 28, 2017
Chus Martínez with Volker Sommer, Marcus Coates and Filipa Ramos

Sommer is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology in the University of London. His research interests focus on the evolution of primate social and sexual behaviour, cognition, rituals, biodiversity conservation, animal rights and evolutionary ethics. Born into a farming community in Holzhausen am Reinhardswald, he grew up in a village situated in the oak forests of central Germany. Here, the Brothers Grimm had recruited native informants for their early 19th-century fairy tale collection. Animals possess human-like characteristics in these indigenous stories. As part and parcel of Volker Sommer’s childhood, these narratives inspired him to pursue a career as a zoologist and ethologist.

The symposium will present the practice of two artists whose practice embodies very well this search and interest in how different types of knowledges, ideas, languages and ideology sets may co-exist in an art practice alert to a sense of wonder crucial to maintain a feeling of possibility, still. Both very into the world of ideas but more practically driven that the previos installment on innocence, those interested in the symposium need to be ready to participate and to be game in a sort of think tank that will reflect on manuports, sticks, and Pokemon Go as part of the same need to create tools and proxies and mirrors that look back at us. 
 
Did you notice this? No matter if you swap bodies with someone else – you can’t tickle yourself… what triggers it is the hands of others surprising your skin, your brain. We just need to be curios about those hands…

We are currently seeing the rise of the radical right in parallel with new rhetoric about communism; consumable, collegiate ideas of the left; political correctness about gender and race… It all seems to mark a limit of the political and social languages we have inherited from the social sciences, from the many mutations of humanism, and from a pallid belief in representative democracy. And yet, what to do? How do we name and talk about our desire for change? For possibility in the face of dark analyses that stress the limits of both a wealth based on labor and a public space defined by freedom? In recent decades, artists have been the best researchers of the complexity of these substances. The way they have been able to produce speculative thinking on the possibility of becoming animal, or becoming machine, as well as the space for freedom and post-racial imaginations of the social has marked a horizon of practices, works, and voices that we must put forward time and again. This—putting the practice, the voices, the thinking, the research of the artist communities forward—is the new movement, the new “revolution,” if you prefer the old-fashion term. A movement that stresses the need to produce space again in a moment when the lack of public money has collapsed art institutions and private interests are taking the lead. A wave of people thinking and doing differently, but also a community of others who can listen and take on the challenge of challenging their habits, and then, hopefully, their minds too.

Artists Nabil Ahmed has been for some time working together with NASA scientist Mike Alonzo in the project Mimika Land Rights Project – West Papua. The aim of this research project is to map the vegetation disturbance in Western Papua that can be attributed to either acid mine drainage from the Freeport-Rio Tinto mine or to population pressures (clearing for agriculture, urbanization) associated with increased mining activity. The mapping will have different focus like animated visualization of land cover change from 1987 – 2014, dated disturbance map from 1987 – 2014 and landscape complexity map illustrating the number of «states» of every pixel from 1987 – 2014. Also part of the research project is to quantify the growth of the acid mine drainage area (ADA) by year and correlate with existing mine production data.
West Papua is the remote Melanesian province of Indonesia that has an abundance of gas, mineral and timber resources. Together with Papua New Guinea, in terms of biodiversity, West Papua contains 5% of the world’s tropical high-biodiversity terrestrial ecosystem. At the same time West Papua is a conflict zone with heavy Indonesian military presence, as there is a decade’s long independence movement waged by Papuans. The military has a long history of dealing heavy-handed with political protest and civilians alike and there are numerous cases of well-documented human rights violations that amounts to a slow genocide.
At the symposium we talk about different approaches of mapping the environment and the society to develop new strategies.

Part I – III

21 March, 2016
With Mike Alonzo, Nabil Ahmed and Chus Martinez

22 March, 2016
With Mimika Land Rights Project, Nabil Ahmed and Mike Alonzo

23 March, 2016
With Mike Alonzo and Nabil Ahmed

Nabil Ahmed is an artist, writer and researcher. His transdisciplinary research explores contemporary eco-politics in spatial relation to law, conflict and evidence. More recently he has participated in the Taipei Biennale (2012), Cuenca Biennale (2014), Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin where he has been part of the two-year Anthropocene Project (2013-14) and Dhaka Art Summit (2015) where he was part of the Critical Writing Ensemble. His writings have appeared in academic journals, magazines, and various art and architecture publications recently commissioned by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Third Text, Volume, Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routlege, 2014) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014) and many others. He is co-founder of Call and Response, a sound art organization based in London. He initiated Earth Sensing Association, a research organisation for the diffusion of knowledge at the intersection of environmental change, conflict and cultural production. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London where he is a member of the Forensic Architecture Project. He is a lecturer at The Cass School of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (2014-16). In 2016 he will be leading one of the five interventions strategies as part of the Oslo Architecture Triennale’s core program, In Residence. He lives and works in London.

Mike Alonzo is an expert in biogeography and remote sensing. Biogeology, the study of the geographic distribution of plants and animals, is concerned not only with habitation patterns but also with the factors responsible for variations in distribution. Strictly speaking, biogeography is a branch of biology, but physical geographers have made important contributions, particularly in the study of flora. He will use the session to explain his focus on improving ecosystem analysis. Through very complex systems of mediation, Mike has been focussing on the observation on the development of forests and how mining and other industrial activities have degraded nature and underrate water.

Chus Martínez has a background in philosophy and art history. Currently she is the Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland. Before she was the Chief Curator at El Museo Del Barrio, New York. She was dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department, and Member of Core Agent Group. She was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008–2011), Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005–08) and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05). For the 56th Biennale di Venezia (2015), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Catalonia with the filmmaker Albert Serra; for the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005) she also curated the Cyprus National Pavilion; in 2014/2015 served as alliance of the 14th edition of the Istambul Biennial; in 2008 served as a Curatorial Advisor for the Carnegie International and in 2010 for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo. Martínez lectures and writes regularly including numerous catalogue texts and critical essays, and is a regular contributor to Artforum among other international journals. Her most recent exhibition The Metabolic Age (MALBA Buenos Aires, 2015–2016) serves as a preamble for a book of the same title she is currently working on.

Analyzing Brian Massumi’s considerations on animal play (What Animals Teach Us About Politics, 2014), and his promise to launch animal politics that bypasses the notions of competition and survival of the fittest at the heart of most Social Darwinist theories, this presentation will propose innocence as a form of setting up interspecies ludic exchanges and of decreasing the too human in the human animal.  
This seminar will be a good continuation of the Innocence Symposium in October. The sessions will be conducted by Filipa Ramos and Chus Martinez and will have Dr. Marta Moita as a guest. Filipa Ramos is an expert on animal theory and she has been developing a very interesting research on how artists are approaching new scientific evidence on animals and how these theories are at the basis of a redefinition of new forms of organization, and a broader aesthetic concept. The idea of this seminars is to approach feminism, politics, ideas on gender and even performance under an unusual point of view. The goal is to understand perception and experience under a scope that is radically different from the one traditionally represented by art history and art theory.

Innocence, yes. It has nothing to do with morality here. It names the complex operation of challenging the old ways of understanding the function of art, and the old assumptions about experience and perception. It is—actually—the radical expansion of perception: it is not only us who feel; we are felt by beings and machines who are inviting us to introduce the term innocence.
Oh! Some decades ago we often talked about «openness». But the metaphor is not strong enough for the effort we need to make in order to turn around our ideas of experience, consciousness, and the way art is a thinking that absolves and transforms perception. Art is perception not because it is a producer, but because it is the organ where consciousness is sensed differently, as well as nature and gender. Innocence here is introduced as an «after-critically thinking form». Or, better said, innocence is proposed here as a transitional attitude toward a new philosophy, one that is not modern but that is not yet there either.

This conference is motivated by the desire to start thinking aloud—with different thinkers, artists, scientists—about the importance of being exposed, of absorbing different ways of exploring the sensing of the world. The conference takes place on the first day of a three-day meeting, and while it is primarily intended for the participants of Master students (CH Pool), it is also open to all who are interested.

The second and third days are closed for the groups interested, and are an opportunity to further explore the subject through interaction with particular participants.

The conference is part of the project The Next Society that is made possible by the Schering Stiftung, Berlin. The Next Society is intended to bridge the gap between science and art, and to investigate how far art can prostate from the nature of knowledge and the logic of science. The conference is a first step to challenge the way we think about the curriculum and discuss, first among, cultural analysts.

Symposium

27 October, 2015
Chus Martínez with David Gruber and Filipa Ramos

Workshops

28 October, 2015 (for Master Students only)
Workshop with Boris Groys and Natascha Sadr

29 October, 2015 (for Master Students only)
Workshop with Kristina Buch and Prof. Klaus Lunau

David Gruber is a marine biologist and an ocean explorer, David Gruber searches the undersea world for bioluminescent and biofluorescent marine animals. Gruber’s discoveries are providing a wealth of new insights into a secret «language» of shining colors and patterns that help many marine creatures communicate, interact, and avoid enemies. The research of Gruber is fundamental since he has been developing a lense (cameras) that allow us to «see» like a fish, to perceive the glowing sea life and the ability to visualize the inner workings of human cells.

We chose an immunologist, Miguel Soares, since one of the crucial aspects we want to touch in this first seminar is how to adapt the art curriculum to science and the work methodology of this science.  The two days will be dedicated to listen to Miguel Soares and trying to learn from him about the possibilities of adaptation, body response and interaction, all three key concepts for immunology. Since Julieta Aranda and Miguel Soares already did work together, the students will be presented with an understanding of why is an artist interested in this science as well as, what are possible subject matter in common.