'Headstone to Hard Drive, Monument to Folly 2'
9.30 am – 5.00 pm, October 25, 2015
9.30 am – 5.00 pm, October 25, 2015
Central
Saint Martins, London
Image: Clare Rowan
“The evolution of the “prosthesis”, not itself living,
by which the human is nonetheless defined as a living being, constitutes the reality
of the human’s evolution, as if, with it, the history of life were to continue
by means other than life: this is the paradox of a living being characterized
in its forms of life by the non-living – or by the traces that its life leaves
in the non-living”
‘Technics and Time:
The Fault of Epimetheus No. 1’, Bernard Stiegler [1]
‘Headstone to Hard Drive, Monument to Folly 2’ is the
second of three events addressing the issues
of exteriorisation, technique and technology as they affect, inform and
construct the 'visual' arts. Taking its cue from
André Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of exteriorisation, the event will
consider the agency of technology and media as a co-author of content, an
approach that imbues media with an inherent semiotic and physiologic power and
relevance. The aim is to consider the consequences and effects for critical and
artistic practices of the ”liberation of memory” performed by technical
prosthesis, a “liberation” about which Leroi-Gourhan and others have
written extensively.
This second event, following the first
symposium in October 2014, draws contributions from artists, philosophers of
technology and media, curators, and financial derivatives software providers.
It includes presentations by Elie Ayache, Ami Clarke and Richard Cochrane,
Steven Claydon, Felicity Colman, Annabel Frearson, Sarah Jones and with a
keynote address by Bernard Stiegler.
The growth of digital databases, acting
simultaneously as storage, circulation and calculation technologies, magnifies
the artistic dialogue between authorship and automation; a socio-cultural
dialogue familiar within the visual arts from the histories of photography and
the readymade. Both of these historic ‘techniques’ drove a wedge into the
traditional supports of aesthetic experience; communication and
production. This is the backdrop against which the three symposia question
aesthetic theory’s robustness in the light of technological development.
Whether we view technics either as extensions or as appropriations of human
physiology, the question remains: how can aesthetics, mired in anthropocentric
bias and organicist analogy, make space for the inorganic or the
technical? Where now are we able to locate a spectator moving between the
sentient human and the auxiliary non-human or the auxiliary human and the
sentient non-human?
Whilst the
discursive topic incorporates contemporary developments in technology, the
approach of the symposia is not to consider such technologies’ import as
existing in developmental isolation, rather they are seen to have retrospective
agency, in historical reconstruction, in the obsolete and in the survival of
the anachronistic. Also, technology gains calculative and prospective agency,
not through an unfolding end-point but in a ‘purchase’
of, and a ‘loan’ to, the future. It
is through a chiasmic image of the present, a revolving door, that the
con-temporality of technology is proposed.
The series of events bridge historical and
contemporary mnemo-techniques; the alphabet; financial trading software;
micro-processing; extra-terrestrial architecture; plaster-cast replicas of
antique statues; phonography; photography; 3D data capture; heritage
industries; archives. These are examples of mnemo-techniques and
technologies, derived from the architectural monument to the semi-conductor
microchip - from the headstone to the hard drive - encompassing the actual and
the virtual.
This
question of the temporality of technology is developed across the three events
by exploring archaeological and historical approaches and their ability to
provide points of purchase for considering the impasse of aesthetic theory when
faced with the technical. A tension is staged between the epistemological value
of technical memory and a media-archaeological understanding of technology; concern
with data, material fragments, “decisive mutations”[2]. What noise, supplementarity or redundancy might accompany this
tension?
[1] Stiegler, Bernard, Richard Beardsworth, and George
Collins. Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus No. 1. Stanford,
Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998. p.50
[2] Ernst, Wolfgang and Parikka, Jussi. ‘Digital Memory and The Archive’,
University of Minnesota Press, 2013. p.48
'What about an art of hyper-control?' Bernard Stiegler:
'Speculative data: creativity and Robert Smithson'. Felicity Colman:
'Low Animal Spirits'. Ami Clarke and Richard Cochrane:
'Pierre Menard's Don Quixote'. Elie Ayache:
'Affectation correspondence'. Annabel Frearson:
'Ad Apsis'. Steven Claydon:
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