SUPERCONVERSATIONS: MACHINES THAT MATTER

SUPERCONVERSATIONS: MACHINES THAT MATTER

Connie Zhou, The Dalles, from the Google series, 2012. Google data center in Oregon. © Google, 2012.

SUPERCONVERSATIONS: MACHINES THAT MATTER
Date
December 11–12, 2015
e-flux
311 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002
USA

Superconversations: Machines that Matter brings together a range of thinkers and artists concerned with the intersection of technology and immanence, questioning the logic of vitalism while developing that of mechanism. The symposium builds upon several themes from e-flux’s Supercommunity / Superconversations project for the 56th Venice Biennale and forms the final installment of The New Centre’s Symposia 2015, a planetary series of in-person and simulcast video conversations that began in Graz and Melbourne in July and August.

The New Art panel concerns the status of art in the era of computation. If aesthetics has historically been defined in terms of the binary of techne and poiesis, what might a machinic art that takes the third step of deploying poises through techne look like? The implications of such a rethinking will address the extension and revision of the human via modes of virtuality as a form of collective imagination. The panel seeks a synthesis of prior theories of the relationship between art and technology, paving the way for new interventions.

The Science Fiction panel concerns the question of transgalactic emancipation as presented in the form and content of science fiction film, literature, and music. It examines collectivity in the era of interplanetary computation, departing from prior pieties of terrestriality and embodiment, with broad implications for the inhuman whole. Rather than beginning from the ubiquity of life, the panel focuses on science fiction that begins from the ubiquity of machines, heralding new possibilities for collective transformation that are irreducible to the social yet inseparable from the political.

The Computation panel concerns pan-computationalism, according to which, “if the laws of the universe can be reduced to binary code, there might be no actual difference between the universe and the computer,” and critical computationalism, in which intelligent machines are descendants of the long trajectory of inhuman prostheses which revise and extend the human beyond its biophenomenological substrate. Examining the emergence of artificial intelligence, the panel engages the process through which multiple, overlapping measurements result in ever more robust virtualizations.

Friday, December 11, 6–9pm

6pm: New Art panel
Maria Lind (via Google Hangout), Olivia Leiter, Aaron Gemmill, Gregory Sholette, and Ana Teixeira Pinto (via Google Hangout), moderated by Mohammad Salemy

8:30pm: Film screening
A Museum of Immortality, a collaboration between Anton Vidokle and Oleksiy Radynski

Saturday, December 12, 3–7pm

3pm: Science Fiction panel
Renata Morais (via Skype), Ben Woodard, Ed Keller, McKenzie Wark, and Mark Dery, moderated by Jason Adams

5pm: Film screening
Julieta Aranda, Stealing one’s own corpse (An alternative set of footholds for an ascent into the dark), 2014

5:30pm: Computation panel
Antonia Majaca (via Skype), Ekaterina Zavyalova, T’ai Smith (via Skype), Troy Conrad Therrien, and Reza Negarestani, moderated by Tony Yanick

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SUPERCONVERSATIONS: MACHINES THAT MATTER, New Art

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SUPERCONVERSATIONS: MACHINES THAT MATTER, Science Fiction

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SUPERCONVERSATIONS: MACHINES THAT MATTER, Computation

Follow Karen Archey’s live coverage of the event on e-flux conversations.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Category
Aesthetics
Subject
Science Fiction

Gregory Sholette is a New York–based artist, writer, and activist whose latest book, The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, is published by Lund Humphries (2022). Together with Chloë Bass he codirects the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–funded Social Practice initiative “SPCUNY” at CUNY Graduate Center. He blogs at Welcome to Our Bare Art World.

Anton Vidokle is an editor of e-flux journal and chief curator of the 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema.

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films have been screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Docudays IFF, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), S A V V Y Contemporary (Berlin), and e-flux (New York) among other places, and have received a number of festival awards.

McKenzie Wark (she/her) teaches at The New School and is the author, most recently, of Love and Money, Sex and Death (Verso, 2023), Raving (Duke, 2023), and Philosophy for Spiders (Duke, 2021).

Julieta Aranda is an artist and an editor of e-flux journal.

Antonia Majaca is a curator and writer based in Berlin and Research Leader at the Institute for Contemporary Art at the Graz University of Technology.

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