Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative
Central European University Budapest
13 February 2018
With Joana Moll, Inga Lāce and Áron Fenyvesi, introduced by Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Perpetual connectivity and the incorporation of the internet into the habits of daily life, the intercession of social media in personal communications as well as in interactions with the natural world constitute critical elements of post-internet art practice. This seminar investigates the reflexivity of such approaches in relation to the environmental aspects of the underlying infrastructure, ecological footprint and conflicting materiality of online transactions. How does contemporary art impact a post-internet ecology that confronts the wastefulness of built-in obsolescence and challenges the transformation of the internet into a monetised space of surveillance and manipulation? What are the prospects for the emergence of post-human, entangled and non-dystopian relations between people, species and the natural world?
Joana Moll:
CO2GLE
Our so-called networked society has failed so far to transpose the logic of interconnectedness into our daily life. Citizens are becoming increasingly machine-like and dependent on data, threatening the connection between humans and their (life-giving) natural habitats. Although most of our daily transactions are carried out through electronic devices, we know very little of the apparatus that facilitates such interactions, or in other words, about the factory that lies beyond the interface.
Joana Moll is a Barcelona/Berlin based artist. Her work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces. She has lectured, performed and exhibited her work in different museums, art centers, universities, festivals and publications around the world. Furthermore she is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and the co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam and Escola Superior d'Art de Vic [Barcelona]. http://janavirgin.com
Inga Lāce:
Carbon price of cloud computing: Case studies on intersections of ecology and post-internet art
The presentation will explore the intersections of ecology and post-internet art through case studies of artists’ works, recent exhibitions, as well as research and publications. Examples will help to uncover the complex relationship Internet and web-based companies have with climate, utterly based on infrastructures that use massive amounts of energy.
Inga Lāce (1986) lives in Riga and is a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA). She was a curatorial fellow at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2015-2016) where she examined the intertwined relationships between nature and culture, (art) institutions and ecology, resulting in a symposium “Instituting Ecologies” (October, 2016) and a publication (forthcoming in 2018). She has recently curated exhibitions It Won’t Be Long Now, Comrades! at Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2017, co-curated with Katia Krupennikova), Resilience. Secret Life of Plants, Animals and Other Species, Бükü – Büro für kulturelle Übersetzungen, Leipzig (2016), and Lost in the Archive (with Andra Silapetere, 2016), Riga, that took the LCCA’s archive of contemporary art as a starting point. She also curated the exhibition (Re)construction of Friendship (2014) held in the former KGB house in Riga. Lāce has co-edited the book Revisiting Footnotes. Footprints of the Recent Past in the Post-Socialist Region (with Ieva Astahovska, 2015). She has been co-curator of the 7th, 8th and 9th edition of the contemporary art festival SURVIVAL KIT (2015-17, with Solvita Krese and Jonatan Habib Engqvist). She is also co-curator of a research project Portable Landscapes tracing and contextualizing Latvian artists' emigration and exile stories throughout 20th century (at Villa Vassilieff, Paris and Latvian National Art Museum, 2018).
Áron Fenyvesi: Mythology in the Age of Algorithms: A Case Study of Pakui Hardware’s Creatures of Habit
Through contextualising the installation of Lithuanian artistic duo Pakui Hardware, which was exhibited in Trafó Gallery, Budapest, the presentation aims to highlight possible connection points between young contemporary art and pre-modern motifs. The practice of Pakui Hardware is also exemplary in the sense that it casts light on the process of how new materialism and the discourse about the post-human can create a new focus for artistic visions about the future.
Áron Fenyvesi (1983, Novi Sad), curator of Trafó Gallery, Budapest since 2011. As a guest curator he curated exhibitions in Künstlerhaus Graz and Galeria Plan B, Berlin. Beside writing for Hungarian art magazines, he also published texts in ArtReview. He held the Ernő Kállai grant for emerging art historians and he was nominated for the Lorenzo Bonaldi EnterPrize of GAMeC Bergamo.
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