Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art | New York City 2019 Free Public Lecture Series
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Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art | New York City 2019 Free Public Lecture Series Performance Space New York 150 1st Avenue, 4th floor New York, NY 10009 Building upon our past four year engagement with topics concerning estrangement, individuation, collectivity, art and politics, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2019 will launch our first New York City program with a focus on “States of Consciousness in Cognitive Capitalism”. As we have witnessed firsthand in the 2016 U.S. election, the political potential stored in the complex networked analytics of information and their neural analogues are now being fully engaged as apparatuses of control. Economies of attention and dis-attention, click bait, cloud analytics, memes, social media and fake news have now taken center stage in the process of subjectivation and the interiorization of domination. Could the spreading wave of Populism worldwide be the result of forms of embodied and extended cognition linked to contemporary neoliberal apparatuses? The central thesis of this year’s program posits that these are the initial constituents and first signs of an impending crisis that define a later stage of cognitive capitalism characterized by the subsumption of the information and knowledge economies by one that is neural or brain-based. Technologies like brain- computer interfaces, artificial neural networks, artificial intelligence and cortical implants are just a few such technologies that may make human cognitive labor as we know obsolete. At this year’s symposium we will together attempt to understand what these transformations might mean for human consciousness and its various social, artistic and cultural expressions and permutations. A central feature of SFSIA is a Public Lecture Series, which is free and open to the public to invite conversation, debate, and inquiry across communities. SATURDAY, JUNE 1 MONDAY, JUNE 10 7:30pm Agnieszka Kurant 7:30pm Christiane Paul MONDAY, JUNE 3 TUESDAY, JUNE 11 7:30pm Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky 7:30pm Luciana Parisi TUESDAY, JUNE 4 WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 7:30pm Alva Noë 7:30pm Yann Moulier-Boutang WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5 THURSDAY, JUNE 13 7:30pm Joseph E. LeDoux 7:30pm Martha Schwendener THURSDAY, JUNE 6 FRIDAY, JUNE 14 7:30pm Coco Fusco 7:30pm Daniel Pinchbeck FRIDAY, JUNE 7 SATURDAY, JUNE 15 7:30pm Reza Negarestani 1pm Carlo McCormick 4pm Sanford Kwinter SATURDAY, JUNE 8 7:30pm Barry Schwabsky 1pm Suzanne Dikker 4pm Patricia Clough 7:30pm Warren Neidich ABOUT SFSIA Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory. SFSIA stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art was founded and is directed by Warren Neidich and is co-directed by Barry Schwabsky. Sarrita Hunn is the artistic coordinator. Please see our website or contact [email protected] for more information. LECTURERS BIOS Patricia Ticineto Clough is a professor of sociology and women studies and currently is teaching in Performance Studies at NYU. She is the author of a number of publication, among them, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology, editor of The Affective Turn; Theorizing the Social, co-editor of Beyond Biopolitics Essays in the Government of Life and Death, and most recently, The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure. She is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she also teaches at Institutes for psychoanalytic training. Suzanne Dikker is a research scientist affiliated with Utrecht University and New York University. Her research merges cognitive neuroscience, education, and performance art in an effort to understand the brain basis of human social interaction. Together with media artist Matthias Oostrik and other collaborators from both the sciences and the arts, she uses portable EEG in a series of crowd-sourcing neuroscience experiments / interactive brain installations that investigate the role of brainwave synchronization between two or more people in successful communication. These experiments are executed outside of traditional laboratory settings, such as schools and museums (e.g. American Museum of Natural History, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Eye Institute Amsterdam). After completing her PhD in Linguistics at New York University, Suzanne received postdoctoral training at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology and New York University. Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and the Andrew Banks Endowed Professor of Art at the University of Florida. She is a recipient of a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), BAM’s Next Wave Festival, The Liverpool Biennial, the Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, Mercosul, VideoBrasil and Performa05. Her works have also been shown at the The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, KW Institute of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) and The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas(1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). Her latest book Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba was issued by Tate Publications in 2015, and a Spanish translation was published by Turner Libros in 2017. Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). Conceptual artist, Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic and ecological systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, surveillance capitalism, AI and the evolution of culture, labor, knowledge and creativity, she investigates automation, crowdsourcing, data exploitation, evolution of memes and social movements, artificial societies, mining industries and energy circuits in the context of art production. Her works often behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines. Collaborating with professionals from various fields, from biologists to computer scientist, Kurant explores the hybrid and shifting status of objects in relation to value, authorship, production and circulation. Her past projects include a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015), a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York (2013). In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (with Aleksandra Wasilkowska). Her work was also featured in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Modern, Witte de With, Moderna Museet, MUMOK, Bonner Kunstverein, Grazer Kunstverein, Albright Knox, CCA in Tel Aviv, Stroom Den Haag, SFMOMA, MoMa PS1, MOMA in Warsaw, The Kitchen, Frieze Projects and Performa Biennial. Kurant’s writings were published in Frieze, Artforum and Cabinet magazine. She is the co-editor of Joy Forever. The Political Economy of Social Creativity, Mayfly, 2014. She is an artist in residence at MIT CAST and a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute and the Berggruen Institute. Sanford Kwinter is a theorist, writer, and editor, Professor of Science and Design at the Pratt Institute in New York City and University Professor of Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Kwinter holds degrees from Canada, France and the United States and a Doctorate from Columbia University in New York. In the early 1980s he co-founded the journal ZONE and the independent publishing company Zone Books as a transdisciplinary project to integrate philosophy and cultural production. He has contributed numerous essays and articles (many of which have been translated into a variety of languages) to periodicals such as: Art in America, L’autre Journal, Harvard Design Magazine, Yale Journal of Architecture, Assemblage and PRAXIS, among others. He curated the first ever Harvard University-wide art exhibition “The Divine Comedy” in 2011 where for 8 years he co-directed the Masters in Design Studies department and the “Art, Design and the Public Domain” program. As diverse as Kwinter’s books are, Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001) is considered “a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts.” Whereas his second book, Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008), is “an extended meditation on infrastructure, war, computation, mechanical and material intelligence, and other multivariate facets of modernity,” which was followed by Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010) an urban textual requiem that “addresses the sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal transformations that characterized the modernization processes set