Speakers and Researchers

Speakers:

Marie Pier-Boucher / Useful Mismeasures
At the intersection of therapeutic and socio-economic power, I will speculate on the potential for nonlegitimated practices of knowledge production (levitation and hypnosis) to give rise to new health modalities and durational experiences. Departing from the mismeasures of time and health in microgravity, I will dwell on how non-legitimated practices problematize a modality of being that effects a difference, rather than establishing a recognizable truth (be it fake or not).

Marie-Pier Boucher works on the impact of science and technology at an interplanetary level with a specific focus on the design of habitats for sustaining life in a extreme environments, contemporary urban planning, perceptual activity, biotechnology and global health. She is co-editor of Being Material (MIT Press, 2019), Heteropolis (2013), and Adaptive Actions (Madrid) (2010). She is an active collaborator on the Adaptive Actions’s platform (adaptiveactions.net) and at the KOSMICA Institute (kosmicainstitute.com). Her research residencies include: Johnson Space Center, NASA; Banff Center for the Arts; Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and; SymbioticA: Center for Excellence in Biological Arts. She is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Toronto.

Agnes Meyer Brandis / * SMEAR = Station for Measuring Ecosystem Atmosphere Relations

Agnes Meyer-Brandis will talk about her artistic research taking place at the SMEAR* climate and forest research station in Hyytiälä, Finland and other forest research stations in Europe over the course of the past couple of years. The lecture will speculate on a cup of tea and take the audience into the woods, the clouds and the hovering matter in between, looking at artistic and scientific methods to measure the invisible.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis studied mineralogy for a year, then transferred to the Art Academy in Maastricht, the Düsseldorf Art Academy and the Cologne Media Art Academy. She comes from a background of both sculpture and new media art. Her work, exhibited worldwide and awarded, is exploring the zone between fact and fiction - an artistic research on the quest for a degree of reality within constructions. www.ffur.de

David Familian / Unanswered Question
Unanswered Question looks at the history of media through the lens of chance, montage and other forms of expanded media.

David Familian is the Artistic Director of the Beall Center for Art and Technology at University of California Irvine. He started working at the Beall in 2005 where he has curated one-person exhibitions of artists Shih Chieh Huang, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Chico MacMurtrie, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Nam June Paik, Eddo Stern, Victoria Vesna and Zimon. He has also curated group exhibitions such as: Grand Text Auto, exploring new forms of gaming and narratives; DataVIz, data visualizations made by artists across media; Live, works that employed live, real-time data; Play in Three Acts, a trio of interactive installations and Sight and Sound, sound art projects ranging from noise to music.

Jens Hauser / ‘Green’ – a metaphoric proxy? Sketching the Limits of a Normative Fetish
Are we ‘green’? The entanglement between symbolic green, ontological greenness and performative greening poses challenges across disciplines that provide an epistemological panorama for playful debunking: ‘green’, symbolically associated with the ‘natural’ and employed to hyper-compensate for what humans have lost, needs to be addressed as the most anthropocentric of all colours. There has been little reflection upon greenness’ migration across different knowledge cultures, meanwhile we are greenwashing greenhouse effects away. Indeed, a morbid odour clings to the charm of the pervasive trope of greening everything, from mundane ‘green burials’ to transcendental ‘greening of the gods’, and even ‘green warfare’, taught in Military Studies. Despite its, at first sight, positive connotations of aliveness and naturalness, the term ‘green’ incrementally serves the uncritical, fetishistic desire to metaphorically hypercompensate for a systemic necropolitics that has variously taken the form of the increasing technical manipulation of living systems, ecologies, the biosphere, and of very ‘un-green’ mechanisation. Paradoxically, green plays a central role in human evolution and self-understanding – as colour, percept, medium, material biological agency, semantic construct, and ideology. In its inherent ambiguity, between alleged naturalness and artificiality, employed to reconcile humans with otherness as such, greenness urgently needs to be disentangled from terms—both putatively non-technological—such as ‘life’ and ‘nature’.

Jens Hauser is a Paris and Copenhagen based media studies scholar and art curator focusing on the interactions between art and technology. He’s currently a researcher at University of Copenhagen’s Medical Museion, following a dual post-doctoral research position at the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences. Hauser is also a researcher at the Art/Science Chair at École Polytechnique Paris-Saclay, a distinguished affiliated faculty member of the Department of Art, Art History and Design at Michigan State University where he co-directs the BRIDGE artist in residency program, an affiliated faculty member at the Department for Image Science at Danube University Krems, a guest professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and a guest professor at the Department of Arts and Sciences of Art at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne.

James Housefield / "La bataille s'est engagée: Art, Science, and Measurement from Duchamp to Now."
James Housefield is an Associate Professor of Design History, Theory, and Criticism, whose research and teaching analyze art and design since the late eighteenth century. Housefield’s research focuses on the interaction of art and design with each other and with the cultures of literature and science, particularly astronomy and geography. He is especially interested in the histories of exhibition design and modern cultures of immersive experience. His past research has focused on trans-Atlantic modernisms and the French cultures of art and design, including the francophone cultures of the colonial and post-colonial world. His current research emphasizes the heritage of nineteenth-century ideas on modernism, especially considering the impact of the Symbolist movement on aesthetics, book design, and the creation of immersive experiences.

Erkki Huhtamo / Useful Fictions - a Media Archaeological Perspective
Our ideas about media and technology are influenced by clichés and commonplaces that spread like viruses in media networks. Media archaeology shows a way of becoming aware of them, helping us to acknowledge their power over minds and to dismantle them. These clichés, or topoi (from the Greek singular: topos) can be hundreds of years old. They have been given different meanings and uses in countless earlier contexts before emerging again in today's technoculture. Media culture as topos study probes the foundations of the media culture that affects us every day.

Erkki Huhtamo is an internationally renowned media historian and theorist, and also a specialist in the history and aesthetics of media arts. He is one of the founders of an emerging approach to media studies known as media archaeology. Huhtamo has published extensively, lectured worldwide and given multimedia stage performances using both modern and original 19th-century media technology such as magic lanterns. Huhtamo is a professor in UCLAʼs Department of Design and Media Arts.

Participating Researchers:

Univeristy of California, Davis
Jiayi Young | Timothy Hyde | James Housefield

École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, France
Samuel Bianchini | Manuelle Freire | Antoine Desjardins | Ianis Lallemand

University of California, Los Angeles
Victoria Vesna

University of California, Irvine
David Familian

University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne
David Bihanic

Politecnico di Torino
Simone Leantan

Michigan State University
Jens Hauser

Université of Paris-Saclay
Filippo Fabbri

University of Cambridge
Stuart Dalziel