This year’s edition of IDFA DocLab questioned the twofold power of technology. On the one hand, VR, AR, AI and other technologies can produce virtual life-like creatures, immaterial wealth and absorbing software constructs. On the other hand, those same technologies can bring about physical experiences and authentic feelings. And none of those experiences are simulated
Author: Regine
The massive Venice Biennale talked about forced migrations, colonialism and its stubborn influence, climate (in)justice, exile, indigenous voices feeling like foreigners on their own land
Reconsidering the boundaries between self and other, human and machine, natural and artificial
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Sensing machines mapping the Arctic, hormone-altering vapour, sweating bacteria, songs from the swamps…. This year’s Open Fields Conference was packed with mind-blowing discoveries
In this episode, Maja talks about her research into human/dog/wolf co-evolution; the possibility to create a hybrid of the human and the dog species; her experiments with biologically manipulating her own body so that she could breast feed a puppy; taboos around the female body and more
An artist, performer and LGBTQ+ rights activist, La Chola Poblete explores themes such as the branching of the Inquisition, the heritage of colonization and the permeating influence of global capitalism
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In this episode, the conversation goes from “Wouldn’t it be fun to have extra sexual organs?” to “Why wouldn’t a loving and cute robot be better at ruling over the lives of citizens than human high-ranking officials?”
Risk Landscape is inspired by new technologies that attempt to predict, simulate and monetise possible futures
Can everything – including vision, flexibility, imagination and other skills often associated with creative practices – be turned into data? Can you automate artistic processes and gestures? And how does socially applied AI enable a transition towards authoritarianism?
From early robots to toys like the iconic Speak & Spell to Apple’s Siri, Vox ex Machina tells the fascinating story of how scientists and engineers developed voices for machines during the twentieth century
In this episode, Carmen and Doma talk about the need for social autonomy, the emergence of new grey zones, police confiscating bots, excellent customer service on darknet markets. And more.
Evan Roth talks about his adventures to find and film the coastal sites where the internet submarine cables reach the land, the beauty of sharing and connecting in online space without interacting, slowness and speed, ideologies embedded in landscapes, etc.
The anti-military tactics and subversive procedures presented in the show range from sabotage to deconstruction of military symbols, from desertion to grassroots resistance against economic macrosystems that feed military culture
Can you make video games about environmental justice or labour? How about religion, the military, gun violence, mass incarceration, immigration or the Anthropocene?
The book analyses how the remnants of utopias and ideologies of the 20th century continue to influence and interact with contemporary culture, capitalism and the environment
During the conversation, we talked about her adventures with the Dutch secret service, with the New York City Police Department, CCTV operators in Liverpool and the art historian who hid Luis Barragán’s professional archives in a Swiss bunker. But we also discussed surveillance, censorship and the privatisation of culture
The Net.art pioneers and media hackers talk about auctioning the votes of U.S. citizens, making DICK NFT and never suffering from nostalgia about the olden days of internet
The photo festival looked at topics that ranged from ufology to gender transition, from family abuse to Albania’s search for a new identity, from gay porn magazines to environmental crisis
In this episode, Nora Al-Badri talks about decolonisation, repatriation of cultural artefacts and why she used deepfake to make the directors of important Western museums admit “the truth about imperial plunder—confessing their crimes, speaking about healing, restitution, shame, or art as critical knowledge”
While acknowledging the potential of some AI, AI Snake Oil uncovers misleading claims about the capabilities of AI and describes the serious harms AI is already causing in how it’s being built, marketed and used in areas such as education, medicine, hiring, banking, insurance and criminal justice.
I interviewed artist and geographer Trevor Paglen about suspicious activities in the night sky, classified programmes and the weaponisation of human perception in the context of military and civilian influence operations
Gender identities, tensions between natural and artificial, confusion between real and virtual, climate anxieties, transhumanism, etc. The BIP biennial portrays the world entering unchartered, unruly but often exciting territories
The book outlines new approaches to understand scientific practice in general and art-science in particular, showcasing how art can provide a unique perspective on the meaning and potential of collaboration
32 artists and artist groups were challenged to contemplate their presumed significance for a future they will no longer experience and whose measures of value are still completely unknown to them
Photographer Max Pinckers collaborated with Mau Mau war veterans and Kenyans who survived colonial atrocities to give a visual existence to the fight for independence from British colonial rule in the 1950s
From the art of photoprompting to the fact that many of the “godfathers” of the VR industry were in fact women
Inspired by the Dieselgate scandal, the work recontextualizes the industry’s own visual marketing tools to reveal the stark contrast between its professed environmental narrative and actual practices
War does not only manifest itself as a military conflict on battlefields with clear physical fronts, but it also appears more abstractly in our society in various places. I Died 22 Times shows and questions the way our culture deals with warfare outside real battlefields
PL’AI is a process lasting several months in which plants grown from seed and an AI-robot whose perceptual world is limited to them, interact with each other
What role do public spaces play in the “reputation economy”? How does your experience of a place change when you check only 1 star reviews on Google Maps?
The installation parodies our anthropocentric worldview, whereby everything revolves around us and we deploy the most sophisticated technologies to satisfy an absurd desire to find our own image in tiny grains of sand
Alana Hunt’s work makes visible the manifestations of Australia’s colonial mindset
15 years of investigation by the Center for PostNatural History. Featuring essays and photography by founder Rich Pell, and a catalog of PostNatural organisms
The theatre performance is played for an ultra niche audience of 5 chickens. Humans are tolerated, but they are relegated to the periphery of the stage
How do artists, designers and activists use performance, biohacking, robotics, synthetic biology, photography or gaming to probe and challenge the capitalistic abuses of plants, soils and the communities that take care of them?
The series combines speculative elements with rigorous scientific material to explore the impact that biotechnology, commercial logic, legislation and socio-political values can have on our concept of “nature”
The book chronicles the many tactics that ordinary people develop to evade (even if only temporarily) the constraints of algorithmic power and pursue their own political, economic, cultural or social agendas
The installation uses ordinary objects to bring together the history of the museum, Tabet’s personal memories and the quick succession in Lebanon of a revolution, a pandemic, a massive explosion, a seemingly endless recession and increased tensions with Israel
Photography and video games are products of the industrial, military and ideological apparatus of the West and embody its cultural biases. Both are characterised by the presence of a code, which conditions the user’s freedom, and by the link with exploitation processes typical of late capitalism that monetise the investment of time and energy of players/photographers. Playing then becomes an act of exploration, deconstruction and negotiation…
The exhibition brings together experimental documentaries and artist films capturing the mechanics, manual routines and poetic experiences of labour in old and new sites of production, while they engage with the history of its representation through the moving image.