[spectre] Fwd: Activist Neuroaesthetics in Cognitive Capitalism: call for applications
This email newsletter was sent to you in graphical HTML format. If you're seeing this version, your email program prefers plain text emails. You can read the original version online: https://ymlpcl2.com/ztoeVe Art & Education ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/kg704nlaym789/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/8111cfa178ade77d13196bda10c7e64a2ad0e9b1 ) April 05, 2021 ACTIVIST NEUROAESTHETICS IN COGNITIVE CAPITALISM Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art Warren Neidich. The Statisticon Neon, 2017. Courtesy of the artist. Online July 1–16, 2021 Priority application deadline: May 2 sfsia.art ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/kg704nlaym789/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/2b71b1f83463575eb5e62282b3950f960cd6f836 ) Instagram ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/kg704nlaym789/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/3d6e4942b5ed84686641e1769d3079d338327c28 ) / Facebook ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/kg704nlaym789/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/ed1b14bed6e620af59bb277e7a222d36ee5f1a36 ) / Twitter ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/kg704nlaym789/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/70a686dd61fc3e0518fdb887b69dd6339b6a7514 ) / Vimeo ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/kg704nlaym789/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/f506ea360d8def56892a42f9266873b63c5c2686 ) This year’s Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art program will take place online in collaboration with Activist Neuroaesthetics ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/kg704nlaym789/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/6b76e415255a72083fb7525247a0c21b506187b8 ), a celebration of the 25th anniversary of artbrain.org ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/kg704nlaym789/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/f69577fcdb5c8d6df8e756618294e890cbc1b9f4 ). Activist Neuroaesthetics is a year-long festival of events curated by Warren Neidich, Susanne Prinz and Sarrita Hunn including a three-part exhibition (Brain Without Organs, Sleep and Altered States of Consciousness, and Telepathy and New Labor), conference, screenings, lectures and publications, developed by lead institution Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V. with various local partners that will take place online and in Berlin over the course of 2021. In July, an Activist Neuroaesthetics conference will be held in collaboration with Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art as this year’s free public lecture series to invite conversation, debate, and inquiry across communities. Activist Neuroaesthetics The brain and mind are the new factories of the twenty-first century in what is referred to as cognitive capitalism, where workers have transitioned from proletariats to cognitariats. Here, the brain not only refers to the intracranial brain consisting of neurologic matter, but also the situated body and the extracranial brain composed of gestalts, affordances, linguistic atmospheres and socially-engaged interactions. Just as the pioneers of cognitive capitalism (such as Tony Negri, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Mario Tronti among others) realized the coming digital economy would have serious consequences for labor and the production of subjectivity, the transition from the information economy to the neural-based economy (or neural capitalism) is a new moment of crisis with even greater challenges. Activist Neuroaesthetics questions what neuro-enhancing drugs, new technologies (like brain-computer interfaces that link the brain to the internet currently explored by companies like Facebook and Neuralink), and the transition from artificial neural networks to artificial intelligence will do to our sense of self and freedom. Activist Neuroaesthetics understands that our capacity to consciously and directly affect our complex environment of evolving relations through artistic interventions is key to an emancipatory ethics. By consciously refunctioning and estranginging the environment, we are estranging and refunctioning our material brain’s neural plastic potential—literally enhancing its capacity to "think outside the box." This cognitive activism forms the basis of Activist Neuroaesthetics which resists new forms of subjugation at work in neural capitalism. Activist Neuroaesthetics is more than simply an aesthetic response, but is also a way of reengineering what aesthetics as a philosophical concept means. As such, Activist Neuroaesthetics pro-actively forms a counter-insurgency against the tactics of the neural economy which attempts to privatize and normalize the suppression of free thought and produces a regime which further weakens the cognitariat and makes obvious neural capitalism’s totalitarian tendencies. Faculty Elena Agudio, Ramon Amaro, Kathryn Andrews, Marie-Luise Angerer, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Yann Moulier Boutang, Juli Carson, Shu Lea Cheang, Yves Citton, Arne de Boever, Matthew Fuller, Katie Grinnan, Agnieszka Kurant, Cecile Malaspina, Anna
[spectre] Fwd: Apply Now | Deep Ecology in the Cognitive Capitalocene | Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2022 NYC
This email newsletter was sent to you in graphical HTML format. If you're seeing this version, your email program prefers plain text emails. You can read the original version online: https://ymlps2.com/zpyHCM Art & Education ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/sy5500swqm321/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/939a09c5bd8efe5200087896661c8d8500fe29e1 ) April 19, 2022 DEEP ECOLOGY IN THE COGNITIVE CAPITALOCENE Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0. Priority deadline: May 15 Programme dates: June 23–July 1 The Brooklyn Rail Industry City 220 36th Street Brooklyn, New York 11232 sfsia.art ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/sy5500swqm321/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/4a5ec5ca761caef553edb0cd402e2cacc4752b32 ) Instagram ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/sy5500swqm321/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/4e542e90c6a43964665b549335d65261667619a0 ) / Facebook ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/sy5500swqm321/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/f8fcee00edab96230c7f0669f875db244b5126cd ) / Twitter ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/sy5500swqm321/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/e59e4bf53bb8499b172dc6c372b4a008582dbe2a ) / Vimeo ( https://email.e-flux-systems.com/campaigns/sy5500swqm321/track-url/hj538fpzsd9c2/03dcf1e3e70e19103657a89003e331ee831c4e56 ) For 2022, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art has partnered with The Brooklyn Rail to present “Deep Ecology in the Cognitive Capitalocene,” an in-person program in Brooklyn, New York, alongside a free public lecture series held online. The theme “Deep Ecology in the Cognitive Capitalocene” builds on Gregory Bateson’s book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) to produce a deep ecology of the expanded brain in the twenty-first century. In the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene human activity becomes the dominant influence on global climate and the environment. During this time, cosmotechnics, “the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making,” (Yuk Hui) is based upon conspicuous consumption and resultant destruction. Following Arne Næss’s model of a multidisciplinary deep ecology, the well-being and importance of all (non-human) life is inextricably bound to our own in a facile network of mutual respect and shared dignity. As such, we need to adapt to ecocentrism rather than anthropocentrism and give precedence to the ecosphere rather than the biosphere. In this respect, the program will aim towards developing a means to decolonize ecology by recognizing the importance of the Anthropocene’s relationship to capitalism, racism and sexism to constitute a new ecological ethics. As Jedediah Purdy has suggested, we need to produce a new environmental imagination. We have now entered the century of the brain in which precarity, immaterial labor, the financialization of capital, and valorization from early cognitive capitalism have transitioned to late-stage cognitive capitalism in which the brain's neural plasticity, its capacity to be modified, is the new focus of power and forms of cognitive laboring. For instance, brain-computer interfaces linked to the internet may produce a new opportunity for surfing the web using brainwaves but also produce new means to extract data emanating from thought itself. The expanded brain model is not restricted by the bony carapace we call the skull, and is not a crystalized, determined entity made up of neurons and their glial counterparts but rather is a becoming brain entangled with the environment of which accelerating technology, sociology and culture play important roles. By focusing on this expanded brain model, this situated intra-extracranial brain complex, “Deep Ecology in the Cognitive Capitalocene” aims to create a renewed ecocentric vision Timothy Morton calls ecognosis. This gnosis, a result of an unfinished evolutionary process of the becoming brain, gives us hope. Is the refusal to tackle climate change a process of endocolinization of the brain’s neural architecture sculpted by anthropocentric technologies and their associated media conglomerates (Fake News) that enfeeble the brain and its critical capacities, creating a kind of neglect? With the sixth mass extinction at hand, we propose the need to sculpt a new neural architecture based on an assortment of ecocentric technical devices. Technologies for caring for the brain also means caring for our ecosystem as the two are entangled in a dependent coevolutionary process that has ramifications for the future. To find such a model, “Deep Ecology in the Cognitive Capitalocene” will consider the work of Bernard Stiegler, especially his concept of exosomatic organogenesis in which technical evolution of exterior artificial organs, like the handheld calculator, becomes internalized through a process of
