Leonardo Art, Science and Technology Lecture Series | transmediale: Art & Digital Culture At Face Value
Introduced by ZHANG Ga
Time: 10.11.2017, 19:00 – 20:30
Language: English (with Chinese interpreting)
Venue: EXTRA TIME(NO.888 Changde Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai)
Co-organized by Chronus Art Center, CAFA Center for Art and Technology (CAFAcat), CAFA School of Experimental Art
In collaboration with Leonardo / ISAST
About the Lecture
Based on the thirty-year legacy of critical engagement with media art of the Berlin-based transmediale festival, this lecture makes a case for the values of speculative, interventionist practices in art and (post-) digital culture. Hybrid research and development processes that fuse art, science and technology are ever more in demand but are at the same time increasingly separated from processes of value creation. The latter are determined by the drive to datafy everything in order to implement fine-grained forms of measurement and quantification. As creativity becomes a highly sought after skill in an increasingly knowledge-driven economy we need to ask ourselves whose and what innovation is eventually being produced by artists intersecting with industrial contexts, scientific knowledge paradigms and a financialised economy. The lecture will explore artistic work produced within the framework of the festival which offer new critical imaginaries of what technological development might look like in this moment of a datafied reality, algorithmic communication cultures and post-digital breakdowns of the analogue and the digital.
transmediale 2017 ever elusive exhibition view “alien matter” © transmediale
Kristoffer Gansing
Kristoffer Gansing is a Swedish curator, writer and researcher living in Berlin where he for the past seven years acts as the artistic director of the world-renowned transmediale festival for art and digital culture. Intersecting art, theory and technology, Gansing’s writing and curatorial work is a critical interrogation of our relation to technology from a post-digital perspective where digitisation has become part of everyday life. Gansing has contributed articles to academic volumes such as Place Studies in Art, Media, Science and Technology (WDG, 2009), Online Territories (Peter Lang, 2011) and journals such as The Fibreculture Journal. His PhD Transversal Media Practices (2013) dealt with how media archaeological art practices reconfigure linear conceptions of technological development and was published by Malmö University Press in 2013. With Ryan Bishop, Jussi Parikka and Elvia Wilk he edited across & beyond – a transmediale reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions published by Sternberg Press in 2016. Prior to these activities, Kristoffer Gansing worked in between media research, art and curation, including the artist run TV channel tv-tv in Copenhagen and as co-director of the media art festival The Art of the Overhead, devoted to the near forgotten medium of the overhead projector.
