Interfacing life
https://www.neme.org/projects/emap/interfacing-life
“These two were together, but in reality far apart. They had left each other without leaving each other.” 1
As our interdependent ecologic, economic, and societal systems appear to be collapsing many of our hopes turn to technology. The old conundrum of whether art imitates life or life imitates art has gradually been replaced with the relationship between technology and life. Social media, and computer games imitate the structures of our societies, and recent news suggest that AI has become sentient with Google engineers suspended 2 or even fired 3 for reporting so.
Governments and private companies spend billions on the advancement of technologies but many of the advancements are purposeless, exploitative, invasive, or even dangerous. Imitating dystopian fiction, such as that of Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, and Philip K. Dick, techno-solutionism has been in public discourse for many years and inhumane automated legal, fiscal, and welfare systems are often covered in the mainstream news. The advancements of digital technologies have taken the motto of Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair, “Science Finds–Industry Applies–Man Conforms,” to a new level.
From search engine results to self-driving cars, from AI generated cures to algorithmically determined insurance premiums, networked technologies are politically desirable as they can provide seemingly easy fixes to real-world problems. This oversimplified and problematic view impacts on our new mechanisms of public and private governance.
Many conservative thinkers consider the body as natural, pre-political, and hence unworthy of inclusivity in the political arena. Many also consider technologies as being neutral; a knife can be used to peel an orange or to kill. Every hardware or software nevertheless is the result of the complex relations between social, cultural, and economic contexts, but few are fostering an ability to consider technologies critically, beyond the market. Some will criticise Google, Amazon, or Facebook within socio-political contexts but few do it through the lens of the technology we have developed a dependency to interface with. “Concerns and anxieties about various technologies are [nevertheless] recast as reactive fears and phobias, as irrelevant moral panics that will quickly fade away once users develop the appropriate coping strategies and upgrade their norms.” 4
In contrast, and in the midst of apocalyptic political, environmental, health care, and economic crises, we are witnessing focused efforts by theorists, scientists, investigative reporters, and artists to foster understanding, and provide alternative solutions for our decaying societies and rapidly changing world.
The exhibition, consisting of artworks produced by Werkleitz, FACT, RIXC, and FACT for the European Media Art platform (EMAP), will investigate some of our not mutually beneficial interdependencies and will address the conditions, trajectories, and material contradictions the artists scrutinised revealing our profoundly reshaped attitudes and behaviours and some paths for a future.
Participating Artists: T(n)C, Marleine van der Werf, Leon Butler, Total refusal, Forms of Ownership
Exhibition opening: 19:30, Friday 9 June 2023
Exhibition duration: 9-30 June 2023
Opening days/times: Tuesday-Friday, 17:30-20:30
Venue: NeMe Arts Centre, Corner of Ellados and Enoseos Streets, 3041 Limassol, Cyprus
Notes
- Henri Barbusse. Hell. tr. Robert Baldick. Chapman and Hall, 1966
- Richard Luscombe. "Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient." The Guardian, 12 June 2022. theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine
- Timnit Gebru. Twitter Post. 3 December 2020, 6:25AM. twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1334352694664957952
- Evgeny Morozov. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. PublicAffairs, 2013.
