Date and Time: Thursday 20 March, 16:00 – 18:00
Venue: MA Common Room, Room 3023, Level 3, Eastside Building, Winchester School of Art
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Overview
Culture, including art, is natural. Since humans are makers this means art is fundamentally a techno-social, hybrid system of the mental, the biological, the machinic and the inert. New understandings allow for new technosciences which produce new social conditions that lead to new understandings, all the while this dance means the creation of new artistic practices (artivism, maktivism, prefiguration, performing cyborg citizenship, sousveillance, hypernatural) and theoretical claims (cyborg art, hybrid art, bioart, eco art, infoart, inhuman art, symbiotic art, digital art, inorganic agency). What are we to make of this proliferation? Do we know what we like and does that make a difference? What can we know when we are the flawed instruments of knowing? Should (can?) art be part of helping the world through its current crisis or can it only be an escape from it?
Biography
Chris Hables Gray is currently a visiting professor in the Digital Arts and Humanities program at University College Cork, Ireland. Based at the University of California at Santa Cruz (where he earned his doctorate from the History of Consciousness board of studies), he has been studying the social, political, and artistic implications of cyborgization and other hybrid systems for the last 30 years: The Cyborg Handbook (ed.), Postmodern War, Cyborg Citizen, and Peace, War and Computers. Currently he is researching the political economy of Big Data (case study: Irish and global genealogical data); social media and social change (especially in Egypt, Spain and the U.S.); information theory (for Infoisms–Aphorisms on Information); and evolution (for a book, Taking Evolution Seriously). He recently co-edited a special issue of Teknokultura on Cyborgs, art, power and identity and has been involved in many exhibitions on cyborgs and art. His artistic practice is focused on information intensive art works where data and aesthetics meet.