Heat Work: Performance against Extractivism

We explore whether performance could offer us novel methodologies to address extractivism. While extractive thermodynamics remains de-linked from intelligent technologies, computation is productively abstracted apart from its energetic infrastructures and environmental damage. Mineral-rich landscapes and indigenous populations of the Global South are as such casualties in the battle with knowledge and resources-for-technology extractivism. We believe cultural techniques of resource collection, i.e. an extractivist vocabulary, is inscribed in body movements along with thermodynamic affect in computational machines themselves. Especially, dances and performances from the extractive Global South, as non-western cultural sources, offer insights into the socio-cultural framing and trajectory of extractivism. Simultaneously, we think the extractive landscape performs itself as a spatial (and visual) recorder of performative movement. Our goal is to bring together these aspects: thermal cultures of AI with indigenous movements (as cultural techniques) and corresponding extractive landscapes. By this, we get to investigate whether (re)generative choreography between bodies, landscape and AI could offer methods to engage with computational, algorithmic and extractive discourses. Our goal is to foreground heterogeneity and non-western epistemic ideas that may affect the dominant governance, literature and ethics of AI.

The event is co-organised with the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) and the Environmental Media and Aesthetics research program.

• Æstetisk Seminar E-2023 Program
• Æstetisk Seminar E-2023 Plakat 

Æstetisk Seminar efteråret 2023 er tilrettelagt af Nicolas Malevé og Jacob Lund, med hjælp fra Annelis Kuhlmann og Jussi Parikka på vegne af 
Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.