Desert of Realities

Situated Infrastructurestermin

Ort: [esc] medien kunst labor

Situated Infrastructures

What are situated infrastructures?

Infrastructures are things that move things. They often define how we live, and what we can or cannot do while claiming invisibility for themselves. In the module, we will focus on digital infrastructures like the servers and online services we use every day and how we would like to change them. Situatedness first of all means having a site, a specific location, something that possibly runs contrary to the alleged ubiquity of digital infrastructures. The philosopher of science Donna Haraway used the term in her feminist essay Situated Knowledges to describe how all knowledge is bound to specific perspectives and that these must be understood to reach accountability. As a scientist, Haraway thus looked for reliable knowledge of the world and for the possibility to critique seemingly objective and universal claims about what the world is. We want to use a similar approach concerning infrastructures.

When are servers feminist?

Haraway's thinking is one of the influences when it comes to conceptualizing current technologies in different ways. Her critical thinking is in line with an evolving wish list for alternative and responsible technologies. An early version of this list has been circulating as The Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01 since 2014. It conceives technologies no longer as centralized and isolated from human and other fugitive bodies but as something to serve all. And it radically questions the conditions for serving and service, challenging the technocratic idea of seamless functionality with holistic discursivity.

What will we do?

We want to understand digital infrastructures as political, social, and aesthetic technologies and try to address all these dimensions. We will look at contemporary discourses on such systems to conceive and build our own ones. We will learn how to set up small computers and create services that are hopefully useful or interesting for others. These can be file servers, radio stations or anything that supports our needs to communicate, express ourselves, and remember. And we will discuss our findings in this process with guests who have explored similar things in the field of arts and activism.

Should I join?

Technologies of Disobediencetermin

Ort: [esc] medien kunst labor

A collective jamming jammers* session! An opportunity to discuss, discover, enjoy exchanges with the group of participants at the worksession Technologies of Disobedience, that takes place during the week. In the garden of the studio from Constant in Brussels, the participants will be informally sharing stories, findings, experiments and delicious food.

Technologies of Disobedience looks at techniques of disobedience as a means to question and resist the paradigm of an all-controlling and regulating technology. If civil disobedience illustrates how one can and should disobey a law they consider unjust, technological disobedience is posed here as a question: what obligations do we feel are put forward by Big Tech and what it could mean to disagree, refuse, disobey them?

* A jamming device, existing or imaginary, is normally used to interfere with and disrupt communication systems such as mobile phones or GPS tracking, but we think of it as an analogy or metaphor for other type of disturbances, so a jammer can also be a hand-tool, a body-movement, a text, a language, a building, a cloth, a verb, etc.

Zu Gast im esc mkl: United Workers – Internationaltermin

Ort: [esc] medien kunst labor

8 p.m.  – Artist Talk

9 p.m. – United Workers International live

with Juan Pablo Trad Hasbun (Bass), Guillermo Villegas Alemán (Schlagzeug), Susi Rogenhofer (Electronics), Manni Montana (Electronics)

The exploitative conditions and the immanent growth logic of the capitalist economic system, both of which are ultimately responsible for the planetary emergency in which we currently find ourselves, is also the theme of "United Workers".

Prolonged: Wüste der Wirklichkeitentermin

Ort: [esc] medien kunst labor

The matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. [Morpheus in Matrix]

The title Desert of Realities quotes a scene in the first, 1999 part of the Wachowskis' Matrix Quadrology, wherein two realities are confronted.
One resembles the one the audience recognizes as theirs, with which they have more or less come to terms; the film presents this as an all-encompassing simulacrum, the Matrix. The other reality is apostrophized as the desert of reality; in contrast to the general reality of experience, this is an apocalyptic landscape of ruins. Thereby the scene refers at the same time to the simulation (by the view opening out of it the difference becomes evident) and a reality which claims to be more real by shaking by the idea of having to suffer this reality.
The duality reality/fiction or simulation has received cultural theoretical attention especially before the turn of the millennium. We are taking it into view again – today with a focus on the reality of what were previously often only speculative, theoretical and extrapolating, often addressed as appearances – for example, on realized systems of artificial intelligence and their broad application, as well as current social developments that are fueling a desertification.
Digital infrastructures and networked technologies have long since become part of everyday life, permeating almost all areas of life. The world seems predictable, our bodies and actions codable.
Responsibility and competencies are willingly handed over to machines (equipped with self-learning programs), whose modes of operation – quasi in return – successively take effect in our bodies and in our consciousness as well as in our social relationships. A new dimension of these processes was reached when we began to grant algorithms ethical-moral decisions. This development gains threatening explosiveness especially in view of autonomous systems (e.g. drones), which can decide about freedom and repression and even about life and death.
With the program Desert of Realities, in addition to looking at political as well as technical formats of "simulation" in the light of the present, a look will also be taken at realities as they become visible in the consequences of climate change, the destruction of huge areas of land in the extraction of raw materials, the pollution of the seas and lakes, of groundwater and springs. Just as in the destruction of nature, the ruinous and ruined has its counterpart in the erosion of social and democratic achievements.

From this perspective, the question arises whether a life as it is largely experienced and lived as real (in Europe) has not long since been indebted to a kind of "matrix". The metaphoric of the desert allows at the same time the question of "water" and "possibilities of irrigation". For – this is what experience and the principle of hope say – deserts can be temporarily and selectively (re)brought to bloom.

Vernissage Wüste der Wirklichkeitentermin

Ort: [esc] medien kunst labor

Vernissage of Desert of Realities with Univ-Prof. Dr. Sabine Flach and to the opening of aktuelle kunst in graz with Landeshauptmann Mag. Christopher Drexler and Kulturstadtrat Dr. Günther Riegler.

Afterwards we are looking forward to a come-together with music and visuals and drinks!   Program, Friday, May 12 at Palais Trauttmansdorff:
6:00 p.m. – aktuelle kunst in graz, opening with LH Christopher Drexler, KStr. Günther Riegler and the director of aktuelle kunst in graz Tanja Gassler
18:30 – esc medien kunst labor, Desert of Realities, Vernissage with the director of the Institute for Contemporary Art Sabine Flach
19:00 – Room of Fine Arts, Magic Hubert Schmalix, introduction by Dr. Elisabeth Fiedler, Joanneum Graz
19:30 – Gallery Grill, the place of pleasure, opening with Klaus Mosettig
20:00 – Grazer Kunstverein, sekretas, guided tour with Tom Engels, Artistic Director
21:00 – Music and Visuals and Drinks in the courtyard of Palais Trauttmansdorff

Music
21:00 – 22:00 DJ Adriana Celentana
22:00 – 23:00 DJ Ocho
23:00 – 24:00 h DJ Adriana Celentana b2b DJ Ocho
24:00 h DJ Nina Eba

Visuals
Nick Acorne
Valerio Zanini
ZhiZhi

Übersetzungtermin

Ort: [esc] medien kunst labor

Doku The Self during Eastertermin

Ort: [esc] medien kunst labor

During the 1st and the 10th of April our gallery will be closed. The current exhibition Doku The Self  will still be visible from the outside of esc mkl. Detailed information can be accessed via QR-Code.

We wish you pleasant holidays!

SALAR 2.0termin

Ort: [esc] medien kunst labor

Im Diskurs über die urbane Zukunft und die immense Rolle, die neue Technologien einnehmen, stellt sich auch die Frage nach den Ressourcen und damit nach den Auswirkungen auf die Natur und die Lebensbedingungen, die der massive Abbau von Rohstoffen wie Kupfer, Lithium und Seltenen Erden mit sich bringt.