News

Our academic committee member Bernard Stigler will participate in the 90th anniversary of the founding of the China Academy of Art in April. He will participate in the forum “Crisis and Potential – Forum of Deans of the International Academy of Fine Arts”. For details, please refer to the official WeChat post (Chinese only) : http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/92MU-eez4X7FkKH1PVa90g

危机与潜能——国际美术学院院长论坛

时间：2018年4月9日，9：00

地点：杭州，中国美术学院象山校区

校庆期间，中国美术学院将主办「危机与潜能——国际美术学院院长论坛」，并邀请英国皇家艺术学院、美国罗德岛设计学院等60位来自世界17个国家的国际著名美术学院院长以及研究型大学艺术联盟( a2ru )、国际美术学院院长理事会（International Council of Fine Arts Deans） 、艺术与设计独立学院协会（AICAD）等3家国际艺术院校联盟主席前来参加。

论坛上午将分别由法国著名哲学家Bernard Stiegler、新加坡南洋理工大学国家研究中心主管Ute Meta Bauer、中国美术学院副院长高世名和著名建筑师Rem Koolhaas进行主旨演讲。下午分四组进行主题讨论，四个主题分别为：自动化社会的艺术与教育、艺术院校的实践与担当、人的危机与艺术教育的责任、潜能。

In transmediale 2018 face value‘s conference program, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Lawrence Lek and Yuk Hui will come together for the panel “Biased Futures.” Here is the information of the event:

Time: 4th Feb, 4:30-6pm.
Venue: Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

More information of Transmediale 2018 can be found at here.

Yuk Hui will present his talk “On Posthuman as Pharmakon-A Dialogue with Günther Anders and Gilbert Simondon” in SungKyunKwan University, Seoul, Korea on 30th October. Please find the following for more information (in Korean):

*어머 이건 꼭 가야해 2탄*
문화연구와 디지털기술철학, 포스트휴먼의 가교를 잇는 연구자 Yuk Hui 초청강연

“인간은 언제나 인공물과 자연물로 둘러싸인 혼성의 환경에서 살아왔습니다. 인공과 자연은 두 개의 별개의 영역이 아니며 인공물은 단순히 자연물을 정복하는 도구가 아닙니다. 오히려 인공물은 인간의 경험과 존재를 조건 짓는 역동적인 시스템을 구성하고 있습니다. 인공이 훨씬 더 구체화되고 끊임없이 발전하고 있다는 바로 그 이유로, 단일의 역사적 조건에 대한 지속적인 반영이 필요합니다. 우리가 살고 있는 환경 또한 바뀌고 있습니다. 비디오테입은 유투브가, 식사 초대장은, 전화와 이메일, 또는 페이스북 초대장으로 바뀌었죠. 이러한 ‘대상들’은 기본적으로 공유하기 쉽고 제어도 쉬운 데이터들입니다. 이 데이터들은 ‘설정’을 통해 보이거나 안보이게 만들 수 있는 것들이죠. 이 책은 이러한 ‘디지털 대상들’에 대한 조사를 수행하고자 합니다.”
*Yuk Hui,『디지털 대상들의 존재에 대해 On the Existence of Digital Objects』(2016) 서문의 일부를 번역한 것임.*

Yuk Hui will speak at the event “The Ethics of Coding and the Human Algorithmic Condition” at Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. More information can be found at here.

Men are conditioned beings because everything they come into contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. – Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958)

In this discursive event, writer and researcher Yuk Hui and philosopher Peg Birmingham explore the intersections between the practice of ethics and the technology of algorithms. The ‘algorithmic condition’ marks a contemporary moment when the global economy and governmental control function through an algorithmic networked environment.

Coding and the production of algorithms have become a part of new artistic practices and social inventions, including art hacktivism, generative artworks, legal alibis, self-help bots and even cybernetic companions. Researchers, philosophers and artists venturing into the world of coding and algorithmic programming will quickly run in to the potential violence of these methods, ranging from racial profiling and online abuse to social exclusion and algorithmic warfare.

Revisiting Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979) and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) and questioning the relevance of their philosophical theories for the contemporary moment, Peg Birmingham and Yuk Hui will touch on notions of ethics, the inhuman, citizenship and rights.

Addressing the extent to which the coding of the social, ethical, and pedagogic is always already invested in the maintenance of power relations that control the economic conditions for knowledge, the speakers question how a shared and common responsibility can be generated through the actions of a community in the digital age.

Peg Birmingham is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago, editor of Philosophy Today, author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights (2006), and currently completing a manuscript titled Deception, Violence, and Law: Renewing the Political.

She is the co-editor (with Anna Yeatman) of Aporia of Rights: Explorations in Citizenship in the Era of Human Rights (Bloomsbury, 2014), and co-editor (with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (Koros 1995).She has published in journals such as Research In Phenomenology, Hypatia, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Law, Culture, and the Humanities, and New Centurion Review on topics that include radical evil, human rights, violence, deception, and the temporality of the political.

Yuk Hui studied computer engineering, cultural theory and philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Goldsmiths College in London, with a focus on the philosophy of technology. He is currently a researcher at the ICAM of Leuphana University Lüneburg where he also teaches at the Institute of Philosophy. He has published on philosophy and technology in periodicals such as Metaphilosophy, Research in Phenomenology, Angelaki, Parrhesia, Cahiers Simondon, Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Implications Philosophiques and Intellectica.

He is the author of On the Existence of Digital Objects and The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (both 2016), and co-editor of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015) which explored the legacy of Lyotard’s exhibition Les Immatériaux.

Panel discussion moderated by Felicity Colman, Professor of Film & Media Arts, Kingston University.

Audience members are encouraged to visit Seth Price’s exhibition across the ICA’s gallery spaces, and in particular his most recent video, presented in the ICA Cinemas. Social Synth is an abstraction enabled by technological development: a computer-controlled robot camera was employed to gather thousands of close-up images of the skin of a squid, which were then stitched together algorithmically and imported into a 3D cinema programme to add motion and light effects.

This event is part of the Ethics of Coding and the Human Algorithmic Condition research project led by Kingston University. The interdisciplinary think tank is working toward a report for the EU Commission asking how knowledge and ethics can be defined in societies that are governed by algorithmic systems and objects. The project is funded by the European Commission: H2020 – EU.2.1.1. – Industrial Leadership – Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies – Information and Communication Technologies, project number 732407.

Our committee members, Erich Hörl and Yuk Hui will give their talk at the symposium “Between the Digital and the Political: New Ecologies of Mind” on 17th October. The symposium hosted by Berkeley Center for New Media. complete information can be found at here.

Between the Digital and the Political: New Ecologies of Mind
A Symposium: History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series

When Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and visionary cyberneticist, introduced his concept of an “ecology of mind” he was encouraging us to pay attention to the ways in which human thinking took place in and across complex networks of activity – biological, technical, social, and political. The individual was an active but ephemeral node in a striated eco-system of ideas and cognition that had to be understood and managed at the high levels of order.

And yet, within the intertwined disciplines of cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, master disciplines that dominate the study of human thought in the twenty-first century, most research is still relentlessly focused on the individual mind-brain nexus. This despite the steady recognition in the parallel universe of Science and Technology Studies, Continental Philosophy, and Sociology that cognition is something that is shared between minds, between minds and machines, and between people and institutional matrices.

The intensity and rapidity of the digital revolution has unraveled the individual mind-brain paradigm. It is now impossible to deny the ways in which human cognition is enmeshed with its technical prostheses, since those technical systems are now so persistent and so automated, the human mind is no longer always capable of defending its own autonomy. The political and social (not to mention economic) stakes of this revolution are clear, even if new resolutions are uncertain.

This symposium will explore the “new ecology” of mind that challenges us today as we seek to reconfigure our cognitive worlds between the political and the digital – as old institutions of power and knowledge are deformed and new relationships (visible and invisible) are forming. The key issue will be automation, automaticity, and autonomy: how does our new new media ecology work to automate moods, preference, perceptions – subjectivity itself – with and through the increasing automatization and neutralization of the political?

Sponsored by Berkeley Center for New Media, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Dean of Arts and Humanities

Schedule
1.00 PM Welcome
1:15 PM Erich Hörl (Leuphana University)
2:15 PM Break
2:30 PM Yuk Hui (Leuphana University)
3:30 PM Coffee
4:00 PM Panel discussion with Erich Hörl, Yuk Hui, Luciana Parisi (Goldsmith College), Warren Sack (UC Santa Cruz), David Bates (UC Berkeley)

Erich Hörl
This talk outlines several modes of becoming-environmental that characterize the development thanks to which environmentality [Umweltlichkeit] has become our condition today: the becoming-environmental of media, of power, of subjectivity, of world, of capital and of thinking. The process of cybernetization initiated around 1900—and the process of computerization since 1950 in particular––culminating in the becoming-environmental of computation, is to be understood as a time of environmentalization, that forces us into the new power/knowledge complex of Environmentality [Environmentalität] and that obliges us – as a line of flight – to rethink environmentality as such beyond its restricted actual forms. Accordingly, the key challenge for a general ecology of media and technology is to advance the critique of Environmentalization by developing an analysis of its restricted forms, first of all of the environmentalitarian capital-form, and to break through towards a speculative thinking of the environment and a new environmental image of thought.

***

Erich Hörl is the Professor of Media Culture at the Institute of Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media (ICAM), Leuphana University of Lüneburg. He is also a member of Leuphana Digital Culture Research Lab (DCRL). Between 2007 and 2014 he was head of the Bochum Colloquium Mediastudies (bkm). His current research interests concern the development of a general ecology of media and technologies as well as a critique of the process of cyberneticization of all life forms and modes of existence since around 1950. He writes widely on the theoretical challenges and the historical becoming of todays technological condition and has a special expertise in Simondon Studies, Heidegger Studies as well as Guattari Studies. Among his publications are General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (Bloomsbury 2017, as contributing editor); Die technologische Bedingung: Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt (Suhrkamp 2011, as contributing editor); Die Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik (Suhrkamp 2008, as contributing editor); Die Heiligen Kanäle. Über die archaische Illusion der Kommunikation (Diaphanes 2005; English translation forthcoming with Amsterdam UP 2018); »A Thousand Ecologies« in The Whole Earth. California and the Disappearance of the Outside, ed. by D. Diedrichsen and A. Franke (Sternberg Press 2013), 121-131; »The technological condition“, in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 22/2015, S. 1-15; »The artificial intelligence of sense: the history of sense and technology after Jean-Luc Nancy« in Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 17 / 2013, 11-24; »Luhmann, the Non-trivial Machine and the Neocybernetic Regime of Truth“ in Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 29/3, 2012, 94-121.

Yuk Hui
Archives of the Future – Remarks on the concept of Tertiary Protention

In this talk, I will revisit the relation between protention and retension in the work of Husserl, Derrida to Stiegler, with special attention to Husserl’s later Bernau manuscripts, which shed new light on this question. Through this historical trajectory, this talk hopes to elaborate on what I developed in On the Existence of Digital Objects the concept of tertiary protention, by which we can understand as technologies of anticipation ranging from debt to prediction. I will suggest that tertiary protention, which cannot be reduced to any form of retention, becomes the central question of the current stage of digital automation and constitutes a new regime of politics. In order to inquire into the “new ecologies of mind”, we will have to systematically examine and integrate the question of tertiary protention.

***

Yuk Hui studied Computer Engineering, Cultural Theory and Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Goldsmiths College in London, with a focus on philosophy of technology. He is currently a research associate of the project “techno-ecologies of participation” at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, where he also teaches at the institute of philosophy; previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a visiting scientist at the T-Labs Berlin. He has published on philosophy of media and technology in periodicals such as Metaphilosophy, Research in Phenomenology, Parrhesia, Angelaki, Cahiers Simondon, Intellectica, Implications Philosophiques, Jahrbuch Technikphilosophie, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, New Formations,Parallax, etc. He is an editor (with Andreas Broeckmann) of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), and author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, March 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, December 2016).

Luciana Parisi
Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research draws on continental philosophy to investigate ontological and epistemological transformations driven by the function of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. Her writing aims to develop a naturalistic approach to thinking and technology. She is interested in cybernetics, information theory and computation, complexity and evolutionary theories. Her writing addresses the technocapitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology. She has written extensively within the field of Media Philosophy and Computational Design. In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum Press). In 2013, she published Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press). She is currently researching the history of automation and the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.

Warren Sack
Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Chair and Professor of Film + Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he teaches digital arts and digital studies. He has been a visiting professor in France at Sciences Po, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, and Télécom ParisTech. His artwork has been exhibited by SFMOMA (San Francisco), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). His scholarship and research has been supported by the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Sunlight Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Warren received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab and was an undergraduate at Yale College. The subject of his talk will be The Software Arts, a book manuscript for the MIT Press “Software Studies” series.