TIP
SPEAKING DIGITAL 2024
See the complete programme. Speaking Digital 04 will take place on 22 May (only in person)
Keynote Speakers
We are glad to announce the keynote speakers: Michal Kindernay, Ingeborg Reichle, Elisa Giaccardi and Erkki Huhtamo, as well as their talks abstracts.
Michal Kindernay - Trajectories
Presentation of soundwalk studies and approaches to auditive research of the environment, the result are often sound maps or their equivalents in other visual art forms and sound compositions. On various examples, the author analyses the types of audio observation in the context of walking and movement, which are designed as a dialogue with everyday perception of soundscapes and current technologies.
Michal Kindernay is an intermedia artist, curator and performer. His audio-visual installations interconnect art, film, technology and science. He reflects ecological issues through various technological approaches in relation to nature environment. His works include video performances, interactive installations or experimental documentary projects or sound compositions.
Ingeborg Reichle - Speculative Futures in Current New Media Art Practices
Speculating about alternative futures of humans and non-humans opens up a common ground between the arts, speculative design approaches, technological innovations and critical humanities. To sketch this emerging field, I will introduce the interdisciplinary art practices of Canadian artist Max Liboiron, Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde, and US-based artist Pinar Yoldas, who relate their art to environmental injustice, DIY biotechnology, and the sciences, to draw attention to the irreversible destruction of our marine ecosystems are facing today. While Max Liboiron is offering community-based citizen science strategies for monitoring plastic pollution in marine animals and developing innovative research approaches with discard studies and anticolonial scientific practices, Maarten Vanden Eynde is travelling the world’s oceans to collect marine plastic debris to raise awareness about the impact of mass consumerism and environmental injustice, from which countries of the Global South are suffering disproportionately. With her speculative design approaches Pinar Yoldas is offering new visual narratives to imagine how future biologies will evolve in the Age of the Anthropocene. As a final chapter of my talk I will refer to the methodological challenges of contributing to the emerging field of critical humanities and introducing cross-disciplinary strategies in the arts and academia as well.
Ingeborg Reichle is a contemporary art historian, media theorist, and Professor in the Department of Media Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She served as founding chair of the Department of Cross-disciplinary Strategies (CDS) from 2017 until 2018, where she designed an integrated BA study programme on applied studies in art, science, philosophy, and global challenges. Her current area of research and teaching is the encounter of the arts with cutting-edge technologies such as biotechnology and synthetic biology, taking also into account artistic responses to systemic risks and global challenges such as climate change and ecological collapse in order to develop a critical understanding of the role of twenty-first century media arts. She is the author of more than 50 scientific articles and a number of books including Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art (2009) with Springer publishers
Elisa Giaccardi - Autonomous Technologies and the Challenges of Probabilistic Design
In this talk, Giaccardi calls for a fundamental rethinking of the ways in which we design in a post-industrial and post-humanist age. In this reframing, probabilistic design positions agency as foundational to our understanding and crafting of autonomous technologies as was once the notion of function to our understanding of tools. To illuminate this, Giaccardi introduces and discusses examples from healthcare, mobility and sustainability about how designers should consider what is uniquely human and uniquely artificial in the performance of agency (e.g., improvisation and foresight), and why they should attend to this co-performance as a decentralised act of design with probabilistic outcomes.
Elisa Giaccardi is Professor of Post-Industrial Design at TU Delft, the Netherlands. Her work is focused on the challenges that a permeating digitalisation means for the field of design. After pioneering work in metadesign, networked and open design processes, her research currently engages with probabilistic, more-than-human design approaches. The starting point is that digital things today are capable of both perception and effect. Thus, they ‘participate’ in design and use in ways that previous industrially produced objects could not. Her work has contributed significantly to the development of post-industrial and post-humanist approaches in the fields of design through more than one hundred peer-reviewed conference and journal papers and book chapters, and funded research projects in the domain of memory practices, ageing and the future of work. Elisa is director of the MSc program Design for Interaction at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Associate Editor for Springer HCI, and founding member of the campus-wide initiative for responsible design and engineering of AI systems AiTech.
Erkki Huhtamo - Media Archeology as Topos Study
Media archaeology can be practiced in different ways. Wolfgang Ernst emphasizes the materialities and autonomous operations of media machines, while Siegfried Zielinski represents a more traditional human-centered approach. This lecture introduces another alternative, media archaeology as the study of topoi. Topos is a commonplace, a cliché traveling in cultural formations across time and space, sometimes for hundreds of years. The talk argues that topoi have played an important role in the formation of media culture, and continue to affect our media use, also on the internet. The lecture is based on the new book the speaker is finishing after many years of work, "How to Dismantle a Fairy Engine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study.
Erkki Huhtamo is known as a founding figure of media archaeology. He has published extensively on media culture and media arts, lectured worldwide, given stage performances, curated exhibitions, and directed TV programs. He is a professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Departments of Design Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media. His most recent book is Illusions in Motion. Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (The MIT Press, 2013).
