Recently, with machine learning, it seems like anything -- images, sounds, literary texts -- can be turned into data. A corollary this "everything can be data" approach is an implicit or explicit assumption that everything that is not data, does not exist. In this open-ended talk, Felix Stalder and Cornelia Sollfrank will make room for the diversity of data -- not all of it computable. Starting from two ongoing research projects, they will look at the relationship between datafication and embodiment: once in the context of an auto-ethnography of breathing and self-quantification, and once in the context of rewilding a bird into an anthropogenic environment.

The two artist researchers who currently work together at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) will explore digital abstractions and material embodiments as two mutually constitutive dimensions of reality that frame each other in incomplete and non-deterministic ways. Instead of presenting answers, they will share observations and reflections and develop a series of questions from them. The audience is invited to contribute their own experiences with datafication and embodiment to explore them further together.

This event is a part of:

Relations, collective agency and aesthetics under the networked condition

During two days, we will work with artist researchers Felix Stalder and Cornelia Sollfrank. They have developed (individually and in collaboration) a large body of work on the crucial questions that traverse a world increasingly open to computation and structured through networks. Their varied practice covers an impressive repertoire. From community building and networking, mailing list management to hacks, pranks, diagramming, they both move (together and separately) from theory to practice and back. Their work offers ways to reflect on the current digital condition and provides means to speculate and act in order to inhabit it and change it. This programme is an invitation to think about the  condition we are in, across the different registers of economy, aesthetics, politics and law. The first day will concentrate on issues such as the means of sensing data and making sense of a world increasingly quantified. The second will move to questions of organisation, collective agency and relations with machines. And reflect about the role of aesthetics in shifting social, technical and legal alignments.

The programme offers two activities with different modes of engagement and interaction: a public presentation and a workshop. The talk at Kunsthal Aarhus is open free and open to everyone, see https://kunsthalaarhus.dk/en for more info. To participate in the workshop, please write postdoc Nicolas Malevé maleven@cc.au.dk For those interested in familiarizing themselves with the discussion, we also organise a reading session ahead of their visit.

This programme is made possible by an Investigator Grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (NNF21OC0068539)