Nov, 12, 2024, 18.00–20.00 h
Location: Württenbergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart [Entrance Stauffenbergstr]
Title: (un)learning bodies
Introduction to evening program by Sarah Donderer and Nataša Vukajlović

ACCESS DRAFT | NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION | 

Welcome by Anne Felckstein and Sarah Donderer

Thank you very much, Sarah. A very warm welcome from my side, too  and a big thank you to our workshop facilitators Ren Loren Britton and Sarah Ciston as well as Luiza Prado, Jasmin Schädler and Joanie Baumgärtner whose works and practices you will get to know tonight. 
 
I would like to give you a short insight into my motivation for the thematic outline of the program (un)learning bodies. 
 
The digital tools we use in our day-to-day life become increasingly hard to understand. Not only how to use the device or service itself, but to grasp what development they went through and whose energy it took in order to be shaped.  
 
McLuhan (and others) once pointed out: “We shape our tools, therefore our tools shape us”. But who in this case is “we”? Assumingly Apple’s design department and the few thinkers in Silicon Valley building the algorithms that are responsible for our social media content, news feed and search engine results, thereby consequently shaping our thinking, shifting it towards one direction as well as benefiting corporate goals.  
 
It is widely known that discrimination is embedded in computer code, and increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not1. Accelerating innovations eventually result in literal deserts of neglected and dumped objects as well as worldly devastated landscapes. (Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.) 
 
On the one hand I am interested in exploring how to oppose the “fear and boredom” (Bridle, James. Ways of Being. Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.) when dealing and living with complex and opaque technologies.  

On the other hand, I wanted to invite us to explore what lies between us – as human bodies – and technology – because the impact of digital technologies and physical consequences continue to blur further. 

Furthermore, the lines between our digital selfs and analogue life seemingly merge, I started to wonder what lies in these moments of blurring and merging.  
 
This for me seems to be an in-between space. I’m curious to understand this space and make it understandable for others, too. In order to find out how to reckon with technology’s influence on our society. 
 
The work of Donna Haraway as well as Anne Balsamo provide frameworks for breaking these boundaries between humans and machines, and animals. I will cite Anne Balsamo here to explain how I understand the body within my research for the program:  
    
“the body” is a social, cultural, and historical production: “production” here means both product and process. As a product, it is the material embodiment of ethnic, racial, and gender identities, as well as a staged performance of personal identity, of beauty, of health (among other things). As a process, it is a way of knowing and marking the world, as well as a way of knowing and marking a “self”.” ( Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of Gendered Body. Duke University Press, 1955.)
 
Within this framework, connections and relationships with technology can be questioned and re-formed. The program (un)learning bodies centers and investigates the body’s role as a tool for understanding both existing and emerging technologies, as well as the self. 
 
By putting the focus on (bodily) practices, daily activities, we can unravel their potential for building and strengthening community and connection. 
 
Something that in today’s political climate I think is very important, small gestures that help us to organize, to stay connected across borders and platforms – strenghtening our bonds.  
 
pause 
 
I will give you a short insight from our workshops yesterday and today before the evening program with a screening and lecture performance begins.  

Yesterday, we started the workshop with Ren Loren Britton who is also here tonight. Ren is a trans*disciplinary artist-designer. 

Ren holds values that reverberate with trans*feminism, technosciences, radical pedagogy, and disability justice. With loving accountability, their work practices collaboration, accessibility, trans*gender politics, and critical technical praxis. 

Ren asked us what the technologies are that connect us to our environment, to others and ourselves? 

We stretching what technology can mean in order to dismantle the ableist and exclusive framing in which they come, 

so we experimented with different materials and repurposed them.

We tried to answer what else can technology be?

We talked about and connected over: 
cooking & recipes 
messiness
cleaning together
the practice of nesting: read in bed, eat in bed, communicate in bed 

from that we started to prototype and make tools which resulted in:
a shelf, a cooking dice, cards for taking breaks.
 
This afternoon,
we learned how to crochet to understand the principles of computing with Sarah Ciston. Sarah was guiding us remotly today. As Sarah today said: With all of us gathered, both on zoom and in Stuttgart, our interactions were continually digitally mediated to a degree, but also those digital mediation remained entirely embodied. 

Sarah Ciston builds tools to bring intersectional approaches to machine learning. They are the author of »A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets« and hold a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice from University of Southern California. They were recently named an AI Newcomer by Gesellschaft für Informatik and an AI Anarchies Fellow at Akademie der Künste. 

Ciston is currently working with the Processing Foundation to create a Critical AI Kit for p5.js, supported by Google Season of Docs. 
 
[SHARE FEW INSIGHTS FROM WORKSHOP >> 45 sec]  
 
Tonight we have a program that concentrates on two other themes: the relationship between food and technology as well as the relationship between movement and technology.  

I am happy to introduce you to Luiza Prado’s work first who with “Empty Calories” examines our relationship with food. In the lecture of today, Luiza traces back the history of the ancient plant Silphium - an ancient plant that grew 2000 years ago and had various benefits. And does that in a TikTok style lecture, I am very excited about this tonight.

Luiza Prado (she/they) is an artist and writer. And Luiza was a former web residency fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude. Her work moves between installation, video, and sculpture, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores anticolonial and more-than-human strategies in relations and knowledge between food, fertility, infrastructures and technology, and questions what structures and processes are needed for collective concerns of care.  
 
After the screeining Jasmin Schädler will take us on a journey to explore the relationship between movement and data-driven technologies. 

Jasmin developed the piece together with Joanie Baumgärtner with support by Felix Neumann.
 
Jasmin Schädler is a performance and media artist and co-author for audio description. 2016/17 she was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Her artistic work moves between performance and installation. The overarching theme of her work is the questioning of knowledge hierarchies. She examines the relationship between space, perception and identity in both the analog and the digital and deals with data collection, reporting and the questioning of conventions of knowledge production.  

Joannie Baumgärtner is an artist, writer and cultural worker based in Berlin. Their post genre-approach of an aesthetic practice involves performance, poetry, sculpture and multi-media installations as well as sound, moving image and academic writing.   

They can be found working between center and margins, on and off stage, behind the scenes, on track, film or screen, between front cover and verso, in art schools, institutions, gallery spaces, project rooms and nightclubs.  Earlier this year, their German translation of McKenzie Wark's Raving was published at Merve Verlag. 

I am happy that we are all gathered here and online. After the screening and the performance, we are happy to chat with all of you over a drink. Thanks also to the person at the bar.  
Have a good evening!