In preparation to Sollfrank and Stalder’s visit, we organise a reading session on the 12^th of June, 13h00. We will discuss the following texts:

The first chapter of Aesthetics of the Commons available here in open access from Diaphanes, https://www.diaphanes.com/titel/aesthetics-of-the-commons-6419

And Felix Stalder’s From Commons to NFTs: Digital objects and radical imagination, https://www.makery.info/en/2022/01/31/english-from-commons-to-nfts-digital-objects-and-radical-imagination/

Please let us know if you are interested to join, maleven@cc.au.dk

For the previous reading session, we selected two texts to spark a discussion on the genealogy of image generation software, machinic agency and appropriation as an artistic method and economic strategy:

- Copyright 2004 Cornelia Sollfrank, a text where she discusses the notion of authorship in the context of the net.art generator and in response to an accusation of appropriation.

- The second text is the argument of a recent court filing issued on behalf of three artists (Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz) against software companies Stability AI and Midjourney that have created AI systems to generate images.

Both texts live online[1]:

http://web.archive.org/web/20150109104131/http://artwarez.org/projects/nagBOOK/texte/cs2_eng.html

https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/

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)