Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
Curated by Elisabeth Falkensteiner and Clemens Apprich
A cooperation with the department
of Media Theory, concluding the series of talks and performances on ‘Decolonizing Technology’
Today,
the prospects of digital technologies are both auspicious and frightening: With digital assistance and whole new virtual environments,
as well as promising advances in AI and machine learning on the one hand, and surveillance capitalism, discriminating datasets
and life-threatening cyberwars on the other. How did this conflicting situation come about? To answer this question, we have
to acknowledge that technologies are temporally and spatially produced, affected by different epistemes, ideologies, political
interests, economic forces and cultural practices. Accordingly, technological development is always fragmented.
The
starting point for the exhibition ‘Fabric of Dreams: Towards a Technodiversity’ – which is the culmination of a semester-long
lecture series – is the assumption that weal and woe of digital media technologies have always been two sides of the same
coin. Rethinking today’s techno-scientific model with its extractivist and increasingly violent logic calls for concepts capable
of moving beyond the flawed idea that universal technological solutions are the answers to our social problems; and, conversely,
the assumption that our political distortions are merely induced by technological developments. Instead, we need to lay bare
the complex – and often contested – relations we entertain with our machines.
To do so, we
need to genuinely engage with diverse understandings of technology and explore the in-between spaces of our socio-technical
situation. The exhibition raises the question of how we can escape this singular vision of technology and its rather definitive
configuration as a fully automated machine intelligence. It therefore investigates new openings, narratives, and potentials
by pursuing a two-fold goal: it seeks to address the challenges current technological transformations pose to art and artistic
practices, and, at the same time, it also asks how those practices can in turn challenge the technological status quo.
Ultimately,
the underlying concern is how art can contribute to the project of building a variety of futures, a true technodiversity.
In addition, the exhibition serves as a platform for discursive and performative interventions in technological discoveries
and inventions. For this purpose, it will be structured around three key issues:
(i) the (prosthetic) body
and disembodied experiences in the digital realm;
(ii) multiple ways of being in the world that challenge
the human condition of intelligence and sentience; and
(iii) techno-ecologies and the synthetic foundation
of organic matter.
The exhibition will engage with diverse and relatively unknown perspectives and narratives in
order to better understand the challenges posed by our technological present – and to produce critical and promising dreams
visions of its multifaceted future.
Artists:
Christina Gruber
Cyrus
Kabiru
kennedy+swan
Mary Maggic
Kumbirai Makumbe
Luiza Prado de O. Martins
Christiane
Peschek
Anna Vasof
Christian Freude/Christina Jauernik/Johann Lurf/Fabian Puttinger/Rüdiger Suppin*
*
Research Project: Unstable Bodies. Institute for Art and Architecture. Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Led by Wolfgang Tschapeller
A
Project funded by : Austrian Science Funds FWF AR574 Extended project team: Vicki Kirby (University of New South Wales), Thomas
Lamarre (University of Chicago)
