Master Class @Art & Design Research at Avans University, NL

30 Jan., 2018

30 January, 2018 from 10:00-16:30 for 20 participants. Topic: Art, Subjectivity and the ‘Cold World’. Visit the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology Website for details…(and the fancy .gif)

Topic: Art, Subjectivity and the ‘Cold World’. The ‘Cold World’ describes our technosphere, composed (intentionally and/or accidentally) of amassed bits as the convergence of digital, atomic, and hydrocarbon age. It is an alienating world of big data, finance-capitalism, and planetary-scaled crises underscored by the seeming impossibility of understanding what this world is. The term ‘Cold World’ indexes not only the complex world ‘out there’ that overflows epistemic traction, but our general existential crisis as humans within it. No human brain can grasp or master this world, despite the fact that we’ve built it. The reactions to this ‘Cold World’ can be largely classified as withdrawing from complexity, across the political spectrum. This masterclass looks beyond the “either-or deadlock” of techno-fetishism* versus techno-pessimism** while investigating how our current reality forces us to contend with a world where we are no longer the radiant centre of activity and how this fundamental alters our self-understanding as human. This transformed self-understanding produces a series of cascading consequences: How do we evaluate ‘human experience’ when much of this world is not available to us sensorially? How do we understand (or rewrite) the role of art in this world (or preferably, the otherworld)? What role do humanities play in a world utterly dominated by big-tech? What new alien-alliances and collective subjectivities need to arise for political mobility?