Agendas for performance and seminar at the Art Festival “The Future of Demonstration; Vermögen”

 

(Trailer to the performance “Alien Introspection”. Video by Diann Bauer, Laboria Cuboniks, 2017)

Our performance agenda condensed in an abstract:

We create machines which simultaneously create us. This episode explores the human-machinic connection and the feedback loops of various influences they produce, because our self-image as human is constantly being remodeled. The episode highlights normative principals which we inscribe into technological systems – like certain kinds of ignorance/knowledge, social labyrinths and biases, as well as specific characteristics of human and machinic perception. By learning from machinic behavior, which we create ourselves, we can change actively. If a feature is considered human or technological can alternately be at disposal. Thereby the potential of blending human and humanoid features is outlined in order to remodel the human constitution and self-image is outlined. Are we the somnambulists of those potentials? Why do we individualize our indivisible bodies into ever new divided and assembled technical configurations? How would a human-humaniod conspiracy work to show what the human body is capable of nowadays? Networks machines are, by necessity, promiscuous creatures – what would it mean for humans to be alien and embrace a similar self-awareness as a challenge to ingrained (normative) individualism?

Performance by:

Laboria Cuboniks: Diann Bauer, Katrina Burch, Helen Hester, Patricia Reed.

bAm: Christoph Müller.

H.A.U.S.: Christoph Hubatschke, Christoph Müller, Oliver Schürer.

Coding: Stephanie Gross, Brigitte Krenn, Friedrich Neubarth. 

Interaction Scripting: Christian Fiedler, Patrick Lechner. 

Humanoid Scripting: Clara Haider, Matthias Hirschmanner. 

Vocal work: Joy Mariama Smith. 

Rotational speaker: Robert Pravda. 

Voice: Anna Mendelssohn.

Our seminar agenda condensed in an abstract:

In the age of automation, due to new technologies, the conventional, western, and largely humanistic understanding of the human being is blurred. The boundaries between human and machine, woman and man, subject and object, and nature and culture, are questioned and eventually breached. Together with our artificial creatures we now live in a universe of promiscuity, and the metamorphose of the human and the human world results in significant political, economic, scientific, and aesthetic changes. Posthumanists discuss this obvious crisis of the humanistic understanding of the human in the age of automation from various perspectives.

In one panel discussion, we would like to shed some light on the journey of the humanistic human being, its transformation into a posthuman, the visions of posthuman futures, the negative and positive effects, and the potential artificial alterities that we are about to meet on this way.

In the other panel, we will demonstrate the embodiment of machine intelligence in a humanoid robot to form an artificial agent. It will serve you in being your soliloquy-bot. This single entity agent is contrasted by the multi entity of a swarm of robots. Agents that do not resemble any life form on this planet but that are self-organising to adapt. 

Seminar by:

Mark Coeckelbergh, Clara Haider, Helen Hester, Janina Loh, Kristian Lukic, Christoph Müller,Oliver Schürer, Robert Trappl, Christiana Tsiourti, Marlies Wirth.