With contributions by Sophie Jung, Omsk Social Club, Johannes Paul Raether, Tabita Rezaire, Pamela Rosenkranz, Nishant Shah, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Lucie Tuma, Hannah Wallenfels.

“Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. We’re living in a world of connections—and it matters which ones get made and unmade.” Donna Haraway, 1985

Recent conceptualizations of the world are increasingly determined by divisions into micro- and nanostructures and their translation into patterns and metadata. Feeling molecularized? will engage with the latent imaginaries of extreme fragmentation, hybrid diffraction, and virtual abstraction in our quotidian environments.

It raises the following questions: How can these manifold changes—which are often mere assumptions—modifications, and modulations, focusing on the minutest level, be negotiated when there are so few conventions governing how we speak about, show, or perform them? Could artistic practices play a role in allowing us to affect and activate these molecular strategies in bodies, materialities, and ecologies? Can the tactics of opacity, monstrosity, and hapticality intersect with the cybernetic strategies of counting, measuring, and optimizing?

The term “molecular” in this symposium does not necessarily refer to “molecules” in the scientific sense. The power of the molecular goes beyond the biotechnological and nanoaesthetic forms of life sciences and algorithmic governance.

Feeling molecularized? demands that we think about, act upon, and counter the binarities of matter vs. form, content vs. expression. It proposes that we move away from the idea of a “matter” that is forced into a “form” and focuses rather on forces of becoming, deterritorialization, and multiplicity.

At the two-day symposium, artists, writers, and curators will be invited to lectures, performances, workshops, and joint discussions with students in order to ask and examine how aesthetic/artistic repertoires can engage with forces of molecularization. It will also reflect on the conditions in which art and critical thinking themselves are localized and find a voice. Feeling molecularized? sets out to explore the kinds of gestures, practices, fabulations, and exhibitions that can be invented in such highly molecularized ecologies of deep access and appropriation.

Concept by Johanna Bruckner and Yvonne Wilhelm.

Schedule

Wednesday, 27 March
Kunstraum, room 5.K12, Toni Areal

9:30 Welcome by Donatella Bernardi, introduction by Johanna Bruckner and Yvonne Wilhelm
10:00 Keynote by Nishant Shah: Who are we when speak to machines: The algorithmic turn
11:15 Pamela Rosenkranz: Our Product
12:00 Omsk Social Club: Deep Nation – Omsk Social Club
14:00 – 17:00 Parallel workshops by Shah, Omsk Social Club and Sophie Jung
19:00 Keynote by Johannes Paul Raether: Protektorama narrates Identitecture [ 5.4.9 ]

Thursday, 28 March
Kunstraum, room 5.K12, Toni Areal

10:00 Lucie Tuma: Ecologies of Attention
10:45 Hannah Wallenfels: Practices of Diffraction: Are we talking Metaphor or Method?
11:30 Evelyn Taocheng Wang: Transcultural Perspectives: Evelyn Toacheng Wang
14:00 – 17:00 Parallel workshops by Tuma, Wallenfels and Toacheng Wang
19:00 Skype-Keynote by Tabita Rezaire: Decolonial healing: Technology, Spirituality and the Erotic
Kino, Toni-Areal, room G.03, in cooperation with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst

The keynotes are open to public. If you want to register for the workshops please contact Johanna Bruckner under johanna.bruckner@zhdk.ch.

Free admission.

www.zhdk.ch