Tactics&Practice #14: Scale
Shifting Scales: Visions, Politics and Infrastructural Violence in a More-Than-Human Planet
6 March 2023
Kino Šiška, Ljubljana
The 14th edition of Tactics&Practice, Aksioma’s discursive programme focusing on contemporary investigative art, society and new technologies, brings together artists, theorists and researchers in an ongoing exploration of the concept of scale, from nano to global and beyond.
What do nano materials and aerial technologies, sound waves and global-scale computation, optical engineering and energy networks, microchips and global warming, the H2O molecule and AI training datasets, your domestic routines and global policies have in common? They either exist or operate beyond the visible spectrum, beyond our ability to see them and develop a conversational membrane with them. In order to cope with these phenomena, we need to develop the ability to think larger or smaller than the human scale.
With: Anna Engelhardt, Anthony Downey, Bani Brusadin, Laura Tripaldi, Liam Young, Mark Cinkevich, Mojca Kumerdej, Nadim Choufi, Solveig Qu Suess, Špela Petrič and Yu Hsin Su
The Optimising Gaze and its Demons
PROJECT PRESENTATIONS / LECTURE PERFORMANCE / CONVERSATION
Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich, Solveig Qu Suess, Nadim Choufi, Su Yu Hsin
Moderator: Bani Brusadin
A myriad of computational eyes covers the planet. They sense and record, feeding calculation machines that manage, extract, predict, preempt, and destroy, often in opaque and confusing ways. Evoking both personal histories and ideological projects across different times and geographies, five artists expose a vast (and often contested) apparatus of vision that doesn’t only look but subtly inhabits organic, social, geological and infrastructural bodies. A gaze that refracts itself as a ghost of imperial power and twisted dreams of control.
Being In-Between: Material Intelligence on the Nanoscale
KEYNOTE
Laura Tripaldi
+ conversation with Špela Petrič
“Interfaces” are not abstract, two-dimensional surfaces. Instead, they are material regions where bodies construct complex networks of relations. Although we often think of bodies (artificial or natural, human or non-human) as endowed with “essences” or inherent qualities, Laura Tripaldi argues that – ontologically, cognitively and politically – the agency of bodies is a property of interfaces they themselves construct within wider material systems across different scales. In this context, the Italian writer and independent researcher has highlighted the capability of nanotechnology to extend and transform the interface, producing non-living material systems with increasing degrees of intelligence and agency. These material systems defy conventional notions of intelligence: they show the ability to adapt to their environment, detect different stimuli and solve complex problems. One of the everyday technologies that exploit the “intelligence of nanomaterials” to open a technological interface between the interiority of the biological body and the political dimension of the gendered body is also the modern pregnancy test. For this reason, the author explores the historical and scientific aspects of the pregnancy test as a concrete example of the significance of interfaces in the contemporary debate around non-human agency.
Decolonising Machine Vision: Algorithmic Anxieties and Epistemic Violence
KEYNOTE
Anthony Downey
+ conversation with Mojca Kumerdej
Although regularly presented as an objective “view from nowhere”, Artificial Intelligence (AI) perpetuates a regime of western power that maintains neo-colonial violence. This is evident in the technological evolution and martial deployment of AI in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Lethal Autonomous Weapons systems (LAWs). Programmed into the such systems, the operative and rationalising logic of algorithms are complicit with reductive determinations of what constitutes life and death in conflict zones. Predicating the ascendant “black box” logic of AI, the historical evolution of autonomous image production continues to be central in, if not fundamental to, these processes and standard operating procedures. To critically address these and other concerns, we need to observe the extent to which colonial technologies—including triangulation mapping, aerial photography, photogrammetry and, more recently, “operational images”—invariably involve the delegation of the ocular-centric, corporeal and proprioceptive event of seeing (and thinking) to the autonomous realms of machine vision. The devolution of deliberative forms of seeing and thinking to algorithms not only reveals, this talk will propose, the calculated rendering of subjects in terms of their disposability, it also discloses a causal, if not fatal, link between colonial technologies of representation and the opaque realm of unaccountable apparatuses.
Planet City and the Return of Global Wilderness
STORYTELLING PERFORMANCE
Liam Young
After centuries of colonisation, globalisation and never-ending economic extraction, the world has been remade from the cellular level up to the level of tectonic plates. In the storytelling performance Planet City and the Return of Global Wilderness, we go on a science fiction safari through an imaginary city inhabited by the entire population of Earth, where ten billion people have surrendered the rest of the world to global-scale wilderness and returned stolen lands to indigenous peoples and hon-humans. As nation states consistently fail to act in any meaningful way against climate change, a hyperdense metropolis called Planet City emerges by global consensus as a voluntary multigenerational retreat from the vast network of cities and entangled supply chains.
Produced and organised by: Aksioma | Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023
For the series: Tactics&Practice
In partnership with: Kino Šiška Center for Urban Culture, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, Lokalpatriot
Participants:
Anna Engelhardt, Anthony Downey, Bani Brusadin, Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Laura Tripaldi, Liam Young, Mark Cinkevich, Mojca Kumerdej, Nadim Choufi, Nestor Siré, Nicole L’Huillier, Solveig Qu Suess, Steffen Köhn, Špela Petrič, Yu Hsin Su
Programme curator: Janez Fakin Janša
Head of production: Marcela Okretič
Executive producer: Sonja Grdina
Production assistants: Maja Burja, Rok Krajnc
Promotion and social media management: Sonja Grdina, Tina Felicijan, Vid Hrovat, Dominika Maša Kozar, Sara Vatovec
Web developer: Igor Kovačić
Visual identity: Federico Antonini, Simone Cavallin
Coordination at Kino Šiška: Simona Jerala
Technicians: Valter Udovičić, Matej Marinček
Webcast operator: Fixmedia
In collaboration with: Kino Šiška Centre for Urban Culture, ALUO – The Academy of Fine Arts and Design of the University of Ljubljana, MGML / Cukrarna Gallery, Lokalpatriot, Ljudmila Art and Science Laboratory
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The Shifting Scales conference and all the workshops have been produced in the framework of konS ≡ Platform for Contemporary Investigative Art, a project chosen on the public call for the selection of the operations “Network of Investigative Art and Culture Centres” co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and by the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.