During a break between the presentations, I had a very insightful discussion with the attendees. So far, It looks like most of this festival has focused on non-literal notions of immortality, that is, on those instances of immortality that concern leaving a trace of ourselves on this world, rather than […]
speaking about memory and preservation in the near and not-so-near future , Line Dezainde ponders the precarious status of collective memory now archived digitally, both in terms of its arbitrary /curatorial nature and in terms of its ephemerality as a resource prone to obsolescence and loss. in the last few […]
Amber is a resinous material associated with an insoluble bituminous substance. It comes in liquid form,but when it solidifies, it has the property of preserving any object that has been trapped in it. many fossilized insects and small animals have come to us from remote past encased in amber . Amber is […]
“What does immortality mean in terms of a non-human centered world?” Our current world is a diverse mix of many worlds and many dimensions, we are ourselves a combination of the biological and the informational, we live in connection with processes that are outside and beyond ourselves. According to curator […]
What does immortality mean? Does it mean surpassing the thresholds that define our mortal existence? and how? using what instruments? As I mentioned before, there are many ways to interpret this “transcending” mortal existence. We are all aware that it would be impossible to cover the diversity of approaches that […]
I was forwarded this article that will appear tomorrow on the globe and mail (the only national newspaper here in canada) entitled “What happens when our machines get smarter than we are? (No, don’t ask Siri)” by Geoff Pevere. It introduces the theme of the festival and of course the subtheme of (insert […]
Subtle Technologies Festival starts officially tomorrow with the opening of the exhibition The Beyond Category at the Beaver Hall gallery, but let me talk about this workshop organized by Ryan Jordan. Tonight Jordan introduced Retro-Death-Telegraphy with his workshop at Interaccess. using a piece of germanium from the experiments conducted by […]
A short preview of what is going to happen this week end at Subtle Technologies and a bit of history of the Festival
Remember these? Last year, Subtle Technologies Festival ended with a talk on Henrietta Lacks: her life was cut short by a cancer of the cervix, yet her cancer cells were discovered to be immortal. Today, these cells, known as HeLa Cells are widely used in biological and medical science. She died, […]
When I was writing this long and rambling report, I realized that every title contained a question mark. is it a sign of our failure to embrace this complex and difficult notion? does the question mark symbolize uncertainty (uncertain present and future, uncertain methods, fear of uncertainty ? The entire […]
Another fascinating stream at Mutamorphosis was Crossbreeding Sensibilities moderated by Franco Torriani What are the hopes and fears of becoming a hybrid in a de-modern scenario? How to understand neo-biological civilization and its anxieties? Can artists and creative practitioners substantially contribute, by cross researches and productions, to the treatment of major […]
One of The most interesting aspects of Mutamorphosis is both its disciplinary and thematic diversity. gathered under the same thematic umbrella, artists, scientists and theorists engage in inspiring conversations ranging from the internet of things to the networks of power (Phillips), deal with the full spectrum of living and semi-living […]
Being an attractor myself, I had a special investment in learning how artists and scientists understood and dealt with uncertainty. Upon meeting the artists and academics in my stream Beyond Uncertainty we agreed that despite the title of the conference, nobody had attempted to define uncertainty yet. after one day […]
Following her multi-year project on bacteria and the bacterial sublime, Anna Dumitriu presented a well balanced panel where artists (Dumitriu, Adam Zaretsky and Tagny Duff) and scientists (Kevin Cole and James Price) dealt with news on looming epidemics, mutations and lab waste: the antibiotic-resistant superbugs plaguing many hospitals, or multidrug […]
Everything preceding and during the conference highlighted an overall difficulty to deal with anything unexpected or unpredictable, starting from the fact that the program was only released a few weeks before the event. this caused some people to become impatients: this conference about uncertainty was indeed, very uncertain. I found […]
…with a little delay, and after a few inspiring days and a trip that felt like eternity, it is time for me to start transferring my remarks on the Mutamorphosis festival here. While I was traveling back home I noticed that early comments on the festival have already made their […]
Alondra Nelson is well known for her research on ancestry and the implications of DNA in genealogy. Her book Body and soul, the Black Panther Party and the fight against Medical Discrimination explores the way discrimination, far from being limited to the social realm, intervenes at the medical and genetic level […]
Day three of the festival was a bit more relaxed but not less intense. The day was dedicated to a movie screening and a key note lecture by Alondra Nelson (with Heidi McKenzie and Jeff Thomas as respondents) The topic for today was “the immortal body” It was also an […]
Thinking about the various definition of ecology, symbiosis is one of the terms that come to mind. Take a mushroom: how much of an influence does a mushroom has over our body? once we inject it, is it going to dissipate in our body? or is it going to continue […]
From the behavioral science of dancers, Rachel Mayeri directed our attention to primatology and, well, how our anthropocentric identification with primates can lay bare and ridicule our social habits.Her Primate Cinema was hilarious and somehow sad to watch, as the split screen– one side showing scenes of animal sociality and […]
Last night we attended a dance performance of EXPERIMENTS, where Logic and Emotion Collide, a collaboration between dancers and animal behavior scientists and ecologists. the piece is the product of a collaboration initiated in 2007 by dance choreographer Gail Lotenberg who approached Mark Winston, professor of biological science at Simon […]
