expanded bodies. biopolitical matters and media art

Based on this relationship between art, technology and science, EMAP – European Media Art Platform, a network that gnration is a part of since 2022, promotes a new Capacity Building Workshop, curated and moderated by contemporary art critic and curator Marco Mancuso, with the partecipation of Zach Blas, artist and filmmaker, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, artist-in-residence and biohacker at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and affiliate of Data & Society organization, and Jussi Parikka, professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture and leader of the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) at at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Contemporary art in its relationship with technoscientific research nurtures the appropriation of a series of cultural and knowledge tools, as well as possible tactics and strategies, which induce an ethical and critical reflection on recursive data, operational images and data practices of remote sensing in AI and biotechnologies. They influence and model our bodies, identities and the socio-political-ecological environment in which we live in the relationship with the surrounding human-non-human context. A practice of this type has been carried out in the last years by a group of artists and theorists who, in the dialogue with algorithms and networks and in the wet embrace with biology, have imagined, speculated and activated new narratives and favored experiments on the biases and the potentials of this complex and increasingly topical field of investigation. A praxis conducted within an international circuit of media labs, citizen labs, academies and institutions that have carried forward an interdisciplinary productive and cultural discourse articulated through artworks, exhibitions, seminars and educational activities. What emerged is that, by widening the boundaries of posthuman thought to the dialogue between art, design, performance, philosophy and critical theory, the contamination with the techno-scientific “other” suggests on the one hand the need to study a possible reformulation of the ontogenesis of reality and on the other the freedom to address a subjectivity that gradually becomes more and more fluid and queer in its very nature in constant transformation. And to probe the bio-political component of this contamination through community and collective practices of sharing knowledge, strategies and experiences.

Marco Mancuso is PhD in Digital Cultures at Iuav Venice University, full professor at Bergamo Art Academy, adjunct professor at Bologna University and lecturer at Node Center for Curatorial Studies Berlin. His books and research focus on how interdisciplinary discourse observe the ways in which technoscience influences society and the relationship between human beings and environment. Zach Blas’s practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction, engaging the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, biometric recognition, predictive policing, airport security, the internet, and biological warfare. Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s controversial biopolitical art practice places at the intersection of art and biology asking questions that are philosophical, scientific and political using a creative and narrative method which is like playing detective in a novel that is always changing; there will be no grand reveal at the end, but the work is a process of constant discovery. Jussi Parikka was elected as member of Academia Europaea in 2021 and his books have addressed a wide range of topics contributing to a critical understanding of network culture, aesthetics and media archaeology of contemporary society.

photo Zach Blas, 576 Tears, Website, Screenshot, 2022, Courtesy of the Artist

european media art platform is a project co-funded by the european union