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
Category Archive: other reports
Reconsidering the boundaries between self and other, human and machine, natural and artificial
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
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From the art of photoprompting to the fact that many of the “godfathers” of the VR industry were in fact women
The participating artists used scientific marine data to shape thought-provoking scenarios that make us consider with new eyes life conditions in polluted marine environments
Asking us to leave behind the darkness of daily news streams, the KIKK festival weaves “tales of togetherness” and spotlights the forces and fictions that bring us together as human beings
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The festival deploys art and technology to lead its audience beyond the usual clichés and binaries such as urban vs rural or traditional vs innovative
While the Meta.Morph festival explored society’s love for nature, Laura Beloff probed into ecophobia and more specifically the disgust we feel towards creatures like ticks and other parasites
Tiny Mining is a mineral exploration co-operative and community committed to the open source exploitation of the interior of the human body for rare earth and other mineral resources
An oracle inspired by Marxism, a School of Algorithmic Solidarity, a bot that follows Socrates’ encouragement to “know yourself”, a poetical exploration of the asynchronicity between human and computer times, an archive of body parts that resist patriarchal technology….
While weather patterns have been disrupted -sometimes irreversibly- by technologies reliant on extractivism, these same technologies are now hailed as saviours that can protect the planet through weather manipulation
A panel that looked at how activists, thinkers, researchers and creative minds are trying to make digital technology more “frugal” or sustainable
The DAOWO Global Initiative asked groups of artists, curators and thinkers from Berlin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Minsk to design new prototypes to address key questions about the potential of blockchain to replace outmoded models, decentralise power structures and rewire the arts
In her keynote, Manuela de Barros explored the limits of Earth resources, the responses to climate change, the sharing of a limited territory with non-human beings, the energy and ecology transition and other environmental issues through the lens of artistic proposals
My notes from a round table with curator and COAL co-founder Loïc Fel, artist Claire Bardainne as well as artist and activist Joanie Lemercier
Where i saw VR tapestry, learnt about Russian military deception and discovered that ravens are even smarter than i thought
A festival dedicated to art by young talents, independent research, experimentation and unconventional curatorial gestures
This year’s edition of the STRP festival in Eindhoven decided to look at the future with an open, critical and -dare i say- hopeful eye. Their take on the future is not about being naive and resolutely utopian though
Despite a theme anchored in digital media, the event doesn’t have the ambition to be a new media art exhibition but a contemporary art event that explores the many ways technology challenges society today
The artists invited by curator Katerina Gregos investigate change. In particular, how change, because of its relentless speed and much proclaimed inevitability, seems to escape robust critical scrutiny
The exhibition gives a broad and ambitious overview of online art developed in America since 1994 while also trying to ponder upon the form and meaning of arts that dematerialize
Enter The New Newsroom where journalists, technologists, artists and designers investigate innovative formats, analyse the news and present their findings in stimulating visuals and installations
We’ve all been following the debates around the impact that AI is having on art and on the specificity of human creativity. But does art have a voice when it comes to understanding and shaping AI?
Surveillance and censorship are mutually dependent; they cannot be viewed separately
Hybrid war, fake-news, post-trough, surveillance, immersion and artificial intelligence – these are just a few of critical topics that were discussed and explored during this year’s RIXC Festival
Together artists, designers, curators, scientists and philosophers delved into technodiversity, contemporary utopias and dystopias, the future of money, Glitch Feminism and cultural resistance, and the human-technology relationship from an artistic, philosophical and scientific point of view
At MUTEK_IMG in Montreal, i got to hear some very interesting and, at times, provocative ideas about artificial intelligence, post-truth media, human-machine choreography and automated storytelling tools
The conference brought together leading artists and thinkers from the world of art, technology, science and documentary. The food was a bit revolting. Everything else was amazing
What aesthetic and political strategies may counter the quest for collecting data and measuring and predicting human behaviour, characteristic of informational capitalism?
The internet is everywhere. Set free from the websites and the screens, it now penetrates our thoughts and our bodies and everything around us. Each day, the digital and physical become more integrated – but how does this effect our experience and how do we express the new, augmented reality?
Alienation represents a potential to expand the horizons of our current lives, to think and act progressively and usher in change. Thus M9 wants to welcome the alien, also the alien in us, without preconceptions of familiar and foreign. It wants to welcome the alien as a challenge to the present as well as a promise of better, extraordinary futures
Momentum 9, The Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, opened a few days ago in Moss, Norway. Its focus is Alienation, a pertinent theme for a time characterized by deep social and economic inequalities, new forms of rabid colonialism, atmospheric turmoil, transhumanism, closing borders and relentless questioning of democracy
The festival’s rallying cry was that time had come to discuss the economy without inviting the economists to the table. The videos of the keynotes are online and i’d like to highlight 2 of them: Frank Trentmann‘s chronicle of the consumerist society and Geerat Vermeij‘s theory about how a closer study of biological ecosystems can teach us more about the economy than we might suspect
The short films, animations and documentaries screened at the festival exposed the world of finance under the most human perspectives: from the bank robbery that goes terribly wrong to an economic system so complex they become incomprehensible for humans, from the bankers trying in vain to avoid massive troubles to people forming endless queues in order to receive free soup and bread, etc.
Why not start by treating economics like any other technology? Play with it, hack, use input from other disciplines, unleash science fiction on it, approach it in an artistic manner
This year the theme, Senses & Sensors, explored perception: how we perceive ourselves and the world around us. How we absorb and comprehend what we see, and how rapidly progressing technological advances expand and augment our perceptions
Hybrid ecologies unfold through complex interactions between actors and elements: human, non-human, biological, mineral, robotic, artificial, etc. There has always been some forms of interaction between humans and their immediate biological environment (through agriculture, bee keeping, fermentation techniques, etc.) but contemporary science is speeding up the synergies and frictions
The actors of hybrid ecologies are many. They are genetically engineered plants, cloned trees, animals used as sensors. Or they are robots, software and networks that encroach on the biological and sometimes manage to fuse with it. Some of this hybrid ecology is the direct result of human actions but increasingly, we see signs that biological and technological entities are escaping human control and are transforming the planet
Albedo suits are designed to increase the solar energy reflectivity (albedo value) in the forests; this way cooling the climate and mitigating the climate change. The work plays with the notion of geoengineering and forest management as a geoengineering project
The 11th edition of this festival of unconventional and radical art was anchored into the most banal manifestations of our networked society, one that is made of surveillance, social bullying, aesthetics of power, communication guerrilla and disintegration of the space of free speech and ideas that internet was meant to be