[worksession] Possible Bodies I: Stuttgart

img.: "Circlusion", Bini Adamczak and Diane Haefner (2016)

From May 6 to 14, a transdisciplinary group of researchers gathers at Akademie Schloss Solitude to collaboratively activate an inventory of software, games, animations, concepts, artworks and digital documents. This activation happens through software performance, collective reading, bug reporting, and disobedient action research.

The project starts from the very concrete and at the same time fictional entities that »bodies« are. What are the material conditions of possibility that render them present? This question becomes especially pertinent in contact with the performative as well as representational practices of 3D-scanning, modeling and printing that shape the industrial production of imaginaries within the military, gamer, cinematic and pharmapornographic complex.

Possible Bodies interrogates the corpo-realities and their orientation through parametric interfaces and looks at anatomies that are computationally constrained by the requirements of mesh-modeling. It invites the generation of experimental renderings, wild combinations and digital and non-digital prototypes for different embodiments.

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On Friday, May 12, the inventory will be opened up to the public with a workshop, guided tours and performative lectures:

10 am–1 pm           
Hands-on workshop – Sina Seifee, Brussels (interdisciplinary artist working in the field of computer art, writing, drawing and performance)
3 pm                      
Guided tour I / The Biovision Hierarchy Format – Adva Zakai, Brussels (choreographer and performer, interested in appearances and disappearances of the body: from private to public, from physical to digital and virtual) & Femke Snelting, Brussels (artist, designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and Free Software)
5 pm                         
Guided tour II / lecture – Helen Pritchard, London (artist, researcher, bringing together the fields of computational aesthetics, software studies, environmental practice, feminist technoScience and new feminist materialisms)
6 pm                        
Guided tour III / performance – Mar Medina, Barcelona (dancer, performer, somatic researcher) & Jara Rocha, Barcelona (cultural mediator, doing research and text logistics on the materialities of present cultures)
7 pm  Drinks

Possible Bodies is initiated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting. With: Maike Klein, Phil Langley, Maximilian Lehner, Mar Medina, Simone C. Niquille, Tirso Orive, Helen Pritchard, Sina Seifee, Sophie-Charlotte Thieroff, Wendy Van Wynsberghe, François Zajéga, Adva Zakai.

The event will be held in English. Admission is free. Place are limited. Please register until May 5, 2017 via e-mail to Luzi Gross, lg@akademie-solitude.de, + 49 (0) 711 99619 134

The event takes place as part of the 15th anniversary of the art, science & business program of Akademie Schloss Solitude and was developed by fellow Femke Snelting as part of her research period at the Akademie in 2015.

This iteration of Possible Bodies is made possible with support from Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Flemish Government.

http://possiblebodies.constantvzw.org/inventory/

»Objetologías: a conversation with Femke Snelting«

*Sunday, 8.2., 4 pm, ABR-Library (2nd floor)*
AKADEMIE SCHLOSS SOLITUDE
(Stuttgart)

What is the attraction of an algorithm? Do servers have a gender? Can a book be a disobedient object? Is it possible to understand an infrastructure as a poetics? Jara Rocha presents Objetologías, a line of research she carries with Josianito Llorente, Jaron Rowan and Carla Boserman. Working on the aesthetics and politics of objects and technologies in their different material conditions, they speculate about the potentials and relatedness of humans and non-humans. Their attempt at a post-humanist approach brings together studies of culture, science and technology, actor-network theory, new materialisms, speculative realism, futurology and affects theory. Objetologías considers the ethic, erotic, aesthetic and political agency of objects, and studies their material conditions in a broad sense: scale, durability, weight, volume, attraction, dispersion. Instead of studying the social use of objects and technologies, they shift their attention to ontologies, understanding processes of individuation, co-production and articulation as basic gestures that act symmetrically in the complex web of materiality.

Tea and cake served!



*CROSS-READING*

Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology (Duke University Press)
Bennett, J.,(2010) Vibrant Matter. A political ecology of things (Duke University Press)
Bogost, I. (2012) Alien Phenomenology, or What it's like to be a thing (University of Minnesota Press)
Braidotti, R., (2002) Metamorphoses. Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Oxford: Blackwell)
Butler, J. & Athanasiou, A., (2013) Dispossession. The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press)

Haraway, D., (1992) "The Promises of Monsters", at Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (New York; Routledge) , pp. 295-337.

Harman, G.,(2012) The Third Table (dOCUMENTA(13))

Hayles, K., (1999) How we became Posthuman (University of Chicago Press)

Kittler, F., (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (writing science) (Stanford University Press)

Latour, B. (1993) We have never been Modern (Harvard University Press)

Meillassoux, Q.,  (2008) After Finitude. An essay on the necessity of contingency (NYC: Continuum Books)

Thrift, N., (2008) Non-Representational Theory. Space, Politics, Affects (NY: Routledge)

Lampland, M. & Star S.L., (Eds) (2009) Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)
 

Rethinking the Infrastructures of Knowledge Production

meanwhile in Stuttgart...

public library

A conference about today’s conditions of knowledge production: from the neoliberal politics of education and the monopolization of “intellectual property” to alternative critical and anarchistic ways of sharing and “borrowing” knowledge.

with 

Aaaaarg.org, Vuk Cosic, Kenneth Goldsmith, Library Genesis, GeoCities Research Institute, Herman’s Library, Monoskop, Postcapital Archive, Praxis, Cornelia Sollfrank, UbuWeb, andere, Daniel García Andújar, Dusan Barok, Vuk Cosic, Hans D. Christ, Sean Dockray, Iris Dressler, GeoCities Research Institute, Jan Gerber, Herbordt / Mohren, Henrik Hillenbrand / Oliver Kraft / Björn Kühn / Anna Romanenko, Olia Lialina, Sebastian Lütgert, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, Irit Rogoff, Simon Sheikh, Femke Snelting, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder, Jean-Baptiste Joly, Sophie-Charlotte Thieroff and others.