Theresa is the initiator and curator of this event and will be sharing her posthuman thoughts and practise throughout the event in various ways.

Theresa Schubert is an artist and curator and has a Ph.D. in Media Arts from the Bauhaus University Weimar. A key element in her artistic practice is the experiment, whereas she exceeds traditional boundaries of the visual arts by including new technologies and life sciences. She is the co-publisher of “Experiencing the Unconventional. Science in Art” (2015), curator of the interdisciplinary event “Inoculum – Connecting the Other” (2016) and has been recently awarded with a residency of the STARTS initiative by the European Commission (2018/19).

www.theresaschubert.com

In her lecture Désirée Förster will give us in insight into her research on the topic of “Hybrid Art: on performative materialities and the mediality of embodiment” (Hybride Kunst: Von performativen Materialitäten und der Medialität der Verkörperung).

Désirée Förster MA is a doctoral student and academic assistant at the Institute of Arts and Media, University of Potsdam. She studied philosophy, comparative literature and media culture analysis in Bochum and Düsseldorf, worked among other things as program assistant at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2013-2016), mainly in the projects “A Matter Theater” and “Technosphere”.  Furthermore, she curates and organizes events in collaboration with Berlin’s independent project scene. Her research interests lie in the experimental exploration of the relationship between humans and the environment, the testing of new perspectives on humans in connection with nonhuman others – as interwoven into hybrid, biotic and abiotic milieus – as well as the socio-political fields of action that are possible and necessary. Fields of research include: Art and Architecture, Phenomenology, Embodied Cognition.

http://dfoerster.org

Computers Watching Movies shows what a computational system sees when it watches the same films that we do. The work illustrates this vision as a series of temporal sketches, where the sketching process is presented in synchronized time with the audio from the original clip. Viewers are provoked to ask how computer vision differs from their own human vision, and what that difference reveals about our culturally-developed ways of looking. Why do we watch what we watch when we watch it? Will a system without our sense of narrative or historical patterns of vision watch the same things?

Computers Watching Movies was computationally produced using software written by the artist. This software uses computer vision algorithms and artificial intelligence routines to give the system some degree of agency, allowing it to decide what it watches and what it does not. Six well-known clips from popular films are used in the work, enabling many viewers to draw upon their own visual memory of a scene when they watch it. The scenes are from the following movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey, American Beauty, Inception, Taxi Driver, The Matrix, and Annie Hall.

Video Still “Computers Watching Movies” – Matrix

Benjamin Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political implications of software. Recent exhibition venues include Eyebeam in New York, Arebyte in London, Museu das Comunicações in Lisbon, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and Galerie Charlot in Paris. His works have been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, El País, Libération, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Der Spiegel. The Chicago Tribune called him the “unrivaled king of ominous gibberish.” Slate referred to his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” Grosser’s recognitions include First Prize in VIDA 16, and the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture from Stuttgarter Filmwinter. His writing about the cultural effects of technology has been published in journals such as Computational Culture, Media-N, and Big Data and Society. Grosser is an assistant professor of new media at the School of Art + Design, and co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

The Lives Beneath

Bianca Kennedy and Felix Kraus depict a world in the year 4000. Plants, animals and human beings form a worldwide super-network of consciousness. The few remaining non-hybrid humans have become obsolete for nature’s plans and are being forced to live underwater in floating shiplike cities. Humans try to convince nature that they are still valuable, using songs, meditation and yoga. The Lives Beneath examines the downfall of a society that refuses to live with nature in harmony.

On Friday evening there will be a special screening of  their trilogy “Life 3.0”. The exhibited film “The Lives Beneath” is the third part in this trilogy:

After evolution has never come to a standstill, new hybrids are now living next to humans: mixed creatures of plants, animals and humans. In their trilogy, media artists Bianca Kennedy and Felix Kraus examine a future world in which technology no longer plays a role.

Bianca Kennedy and Felix Kraus are both artists working in Berlin and Munich. When collaborating they are interested in the intelligence of plant life. They are asking questions about human role in a destructive environment and phantasize about natural utopias.