#1 Digital Earth Talks x Lukáš Likavčan
The first Digital Earth Talks featured philosopher Lukáš Likavčan, thinking about cosmologies as the main drivers of change in our societies. You can watch the video below! More updates about the upcoming talks & discussions, moderated by Nora N. Khan are coming soon.
About the Talk
"Our societies change through cosmologies"
In the 17th century, British philosopher Robert Boyle invented a metaphor of the universe as a mechanism consisting of individual parts smoothly operating according to the general laws of physics. This metaphor was inspired by a real mechanism, the astronomical clock in the cathedral Notre Dame in Strasbourg.
Three centuries later, the emerging field of cybernetics shifted the view of our world from a cosmology of pre-defined mechanisms to that of self-regulating systems. Metaphorically, the mechanism of clockwork was substituted for the computer. In the third decade of the 21st century, we now stand on the edge of another cosmological shift, redefining the way we see our planet and our place on it. What current technologies will inform our cosmological templates for the next era? What will be the political consequences of this shift?
Participants
Speaker • Maya Indira Ganesh is a technology researcher whose work investigates the social, cultural, metaphoric, and political implications of the 'becoming-human' of machines, and vice versa. She is completing a PhD about the material-discursive shaping of “AI” and autonomous systems in terms of “ethics” and “intelligence”. She has worked at the intersection of gender justice, technology, and digital (un)freedom of expression with NGOs in India and Europe. She lives in Berlin.
Moderator • Nora N. Khan is a writer of criticism on digital visual culture and philosophy of emerging technology. Her research specifically focuses on experimental art and music practices that make arguments through software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Khan is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media; she teaches graduate students critical theory and artistic research, critical writing both for artists and designers, and history of digital media.
Fellow • Alexandra Anikina is a researcher, media artist, filmmaker, and curator working with the themes of algorithmic culture and critical posthumanities. Anikina uses the history of Soviet media technologies to probe the pervasive Western cosmologies of technological progress and to critique the temporalities of data governance and control.
Fellow • Antonio Macotela is a multidisciplinary artist, exploring the idea of economy as a mediatory device through which social relations are established. Macotela draws a parallel between the Q’aqchas - a group of pirate ore miners in the eighteenth century - and a group of contemporary hackers in Spain. Utilising the figure of the hacker, they explore narratives of resistance and strategies of subversion.
Fellow • Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist. They engage with the planet from a position of estrangement, where access to the planet as a spiritual-material object has been denied, and proposes reengineering tools and methods of measuring, monitoring, modelling, and otherwise remotely accessing the world for a project of alternative planetary imagination linking black and indigenous techno-cultures in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Fellow • Sahej Rahal is primarily a storyteller. His performances, installations, and AI programs narrate a mythology that interrogates narratives shaping our present. Rahal will create a mythology that remixes folklore, urban legends, and science fiction to interrogate the mythic narratives that construct our digital reality.
Fellow • Sheila Chukwulozie defines herself as an Igbo Cyborg contending with the state of being simultaneously fixed and fluid, object and subject, matter and spirit, digital and analog, able and unable, native and migrant. They are working with Uzoma Chidumaga Orji. They will explore a paradigm of verbal technology rooted in Igbo cosmology, and specifically in the concept of time. Through storytelling, linguistic excavations, and investigations of perceptual apparatuses, the duo advances the notion of Igbo proverbs as a technology.
Fellow • Uzoma Chidumaga Orji creates visual metaphors, scenography, and interactive digital experiences that interrogate post-colonial identity crises. They are working with Sheila Chukwulozie. They will explore a paradigm of verbal technology rooted in Igbo cosmology, and specifically in the concept of time. Through storytelling, linguistic excavations, and investigations of perceptual apparatuses, the duo advances the notion of Igbo proverbs as a technology.
Fellow • Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist who works with video, computer-based media, and performance. She explores themes of race, identity, family history, and technology. Perry will unpack the relationship between industrial metal minerals and geological time, slavery, and industrialised labour in the United States and beyond. Recently, in response to the Black Lives Matter movement and racial violence, their project questions the role of art and its capacity for causing change.
Fellow • Temitayo Ogunbiyi explores environment, line, and representation. Moving between mediums such as drawing, painting, and installation, her work links current events, anthropological histories, and botanical cultures. Ogunbiyi confronts systems of surveillance and behaviour in digital space through notions of play. By considering the Planetary Sensorium as a monitoring structure birthed from Western constructs, she investigates how play can subvert and highlight its pervasive surveillance systems.
About Digital Earth Talks
How do we imagine a humane Digital Earth to come? Join the discussion and explore the visions of leading voices in art, tech, and philosophy from around the world.
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