CATASTROPHE, CATACLYSM AND THE SINGULAR ACCIDENT
Keynotes
The Disruptive Cloud and the Chaos of Uncertainty
Paul Thomas
Within Western art history, the atmospheric formation of the molecular cloud became a metaphor for chaos and has long defied perspectivalism and, by extension, the rationalization of the spatial plane. In the digital age, the cloud has re-merged as a subversive and impossible structure which defies conventional pathways of data-flow and data-stasis. The virtual data-cloud has forced us to rethink power and data as a global stratum, whereby information retrieval is so immediate, available and ubiquitous that our experience of interaction with and through it is akin to breathing in and breathing out.
Uncertainty will be explored via a survey of historical and contemporary moments of synergistic interaction between science and art, focusing on the development of new abstract and creatively fertile languages on the speculative front of quantum physics.
This paper is an attempt to conceptualize creatively quantum mechanics and its premise that the world comes into existence only once we observe it. The recognition of the quantum phenomenon is not an isolated view, but one that is linked to an art lineage and causal networks that situate how the contemporary world is experienced. The paper explores how quantum thinking works with uncertainty, creating a rupture in the way humans understand where consciousness exists.
Catastrophe Practice
David Rokeby
I have never experienced a Catastrophe (with a capital “C”). But Catastrophe Theory spoke to me when I read about it in the early 80s. And I fell hard for British novelist Nicholas Mosley’s five-novel Catastrophe Practice series, inspired in part by catastrophe theory, which explored in depth how one might, as the title suggests, practice for catastrophe.
While catastrophe theory provides mathematical models to explain how radical change can erupt from within apparent stability, my interest has focused on another sort of catastrophe, where the human craving for stability and our ability to solidify things in linguistic, cognitive and scientific models, habits of interpretation and technologies can result in fragile, self-referential structures prone to catastrophic collapse.
While the word catastrophe implies disaster on a massive scale, in the sense of the word in which I am most interested, catastrophes can just as easily be small, domestic, momentary situations where our personal, internal version of things suddenly fails to account for what is happening around us.
In my art practice, I have often focused on this question: “How do we live and act and, more importantly, act responsibly (and responsively) in situations that are no longer in our control … in which the results of our actions are not entirely predictable?
What might it mean to practice for catastrophe? I will explore this question using examples of my artworks.
Shivering: Objects, Art, Human-like Things
Catherine Richards
My artwork has been tracing the fluctuations of where we feel we begin and end in the contemporary technoscape. My current work, which is undertaken with a heart transplant team, follows this investigation into the flesh, where human hearts can be both living objects – “gifts of life” – and technological ones. This talk is based on my multi-disciplinary SSHRC-funded research work into the social role of objects: how art objects on take on person-like qualities. In particular, it will focus on the “token objects” that successful heart-transplant patients give to their cardiologists, who then find it difficult to part with them. It was one of these “gift” objects that began to take on an agency of its own, hitchhiking on its portrait and forcing a powerful encounter that was decidedly outside the modernist framework of the hospital – or indeed the modernist concept of the artwork itself. The shivering border between person and object destabilizes our sense of self and radically alters the ways in which we envision our relations with objects, persons, and person-like objects. This suggests a paradigm shift, altering our view of what constitutes being human, what characterizes an object and what the role of art can be in object-making. It anticipates a more mindful and aware relationship between humans and objects and hints at a way to re-configure (post)modernity in artistic practice.
Speakers
“Each day is dangerous”: Accident, Technology and Virginia Woolf
Jonah Corne
This paper reads Virginia Woolf as a key early thinker of the modern technological accident. In what is – fittingly – her most formally daring and experimental novel, The Waves (1930), the six main characters (represented as a series of alternating and intermingling consciousnesses) continually find themselves experiencing what Bernard, one of the characters, describes as “moments of emergency” while caught up amid the world’s increasingly sophisticated networks of communication, transportation, exchange and so forth. A hyper-sensitivity to fragility, paralysis and collapse in the face of vast infrastructures of circulation permeates the novel. Reading Woolf alongside Ernst Bloch and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, I show how Woolf presents a vision of daily danger in which technical sophistication and accident severity go hand in hand; in which the smallest malfunctions can lead to the most gigantic catastrophes; and in which these new logics and ratios penetrate to the most intimate recesses of psychic and inter-psychic life.
The Time(s) of Catastrophe
Tom Kohut
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud speculated that there was an originary trauma that signified the emergence of the organic from the inorganic. This ur-Trauma creates tensions within all organic life on the planet, and these tensions are, as per Reza Negarestani’s papers on Freud, of two kinds: exogenic, referring to the amputation of an interior from an exorbitant exterior, and endogenic, which refers to a complex topography of the exterior transplanted within the interior. These tensions characterize a catastrophic terrain which, following the work of René Thom, expresses itself synchronically and, importantly, diachronically as well. Going back to Freud, it is essential that these tensions be bound or synthesized in some way, lest their destructive potential be unleashed whether in the neurosis of the individual or planetary extinction. The binding of exogenic tensions enables structural stability, whereas the binding endogenic tensions generate the multiple temporalities that characterize the catastrophic situation. It is art’s ability to symbolize both the structure and temporality of catastrophe that allows this binding synthesis to take place.
Action and Nostalgia (Surviving Simulation)
Andrew John Milne
By considering allegories of technoscientific knowledge and drawing upon experiences accumulated though an artistic practice constructing analog simulations of digital technologies, this paper will expand upon traditional definitions of digital space, discussing inherent limits and liabilities and possible avenues of response.
Larval Rock Stars: Segmented Paramythology
Praba Pilar
LARVAL ROCK STARS is a horizon event. Our segmented paramythology counters the misunderstandings and mistranslations of world traditions which reify human exceptionalism. We shatter the unitary self-recruitment of the failed human project.
As intranspecies transignifiers, LARVAL ROCK STARS presences our multi-dimensional, multi-species paraselves by transmitting the coalescence of our distributed entangled organisms. An emergent becoming, we inhabit zones of abandonment. Observe the power of the paranature of the segment to evolve beyond a false consciousness of fragments. After a lengthy pelagic larval drift, LARVAL ROCK STARS has re-emerged into a world designed for the benefit of others, to offer passage from necrotic egocentricism to biotic ecocentricism.
Age of Catastrophe
Melentie Pandilovski
Catastrophes, as novel and unpredictable events, require new modes of thinking. Bergson’s understanding of intuition, which leads us, through sympathy, into the interior of the object, provides the sensory and affective constituents by which catastrophe might be figured in the imagination and the understanding. As natural and technological catastrophes become increasingly indistinguishable – e.g., the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown following the earthquake off of the east coast of Japan – aesthetics becomes increasingly significant in exploring the technological attitude (Heidegger) and its biopolitical implications. Thus, as Virilio suggests, the price paid for technoscientific progress is an ever-increasingly possibility of increasingly serious catastrophe: and this situation requires a recalibration of current social and economic ideologies, a task that will always be met with resistance. However, perhaps what Heidegger refers to as the saving power of art (harboured with-in technology) allows for the recapturing of the original essence of science and can provide the location for reflection into the circumstances that bring tsunamis and technological disasters, radiation and fiery ashes, blue skies and barren land, scorching ash and napalm.
From Mortgaged Lives to the Social Work Campaign: Some Notes About the Right-To-Housing-Movement in Spain
Michelle Teran
Within my presentation, I will introduce some approaches currently being used by the PAF, a right-to-housing movement currently active in post-2011 Spain. Participatory politics and the redesigning of systems-strategies for responding to contemporary crises are two characteristics of modern activism. These activities take place on the Internet, using social media, and on the street, within assemblies. Within an assembly, individual stories and personal experiences of crisis contribute to a conversation from which different theories and models for action develop: campaigns which can be easily repeated and implemented by other groups operating within other locations throughout the country. I will briefly discuss some of these strategies, including La Obra Social campaign, in which the architectural remains (empty, brand-new apartment buildings) left over from the real-estate bubble and financial crash on 2008 are taken over by housing activists and used to relocate families and individuals who have been evicted from their homes.