The symposium was held on February 12, 2022 as a part of a public educational program of the exhibition «New Elements» and aimed to bring to the forefront the current issues of new artistic practices that redefines the relationship between digital and analogue computational processes and systems. 

Participants

Symposium program

SESSION 1. Science-art today: transformation of interdisciplinary communities

Presentation: «Strategies of art and science collaborations»

Researchers, curators, museum and festival directors in the field of science-art discussed the boundaries of the concept of science-art, the role of institutions in the development of interdisciplinary connections, and the current state of cooperation between science, art and society as well as progressive methods and tactics of community interaction.  

• How would you describe the professional field of technological art and science-art today? How are the roles of artist, curator, producer and technological expert being transformed?

• Do technological and science-art have the potential to influence the development of the local communities?

• What new formats appear as a result of collaborations at the intersection of art, science and technology? How can they transform in future?

• How do science-art collaboration influence the development of society? 

SESSION 2. The autographic world

This  session of the symposium included artists, scientists, and philosophers who work with environmental traces and material information. The panel examined the nature of material traces, how they can help us make sense of global changes, and their relevance in a digitally-dominated world.

• What is the relevance of an autographic perspective — the idea that every process inscribes itself into the world as traces — in today’s society? 

• What can we learn from material traces about the nature of digital information?

• Has digital culture made it more difficult to perceive changes in our physical environment?

SESSION 3. Material Computation

The third session of the symposium examined unconventional perspectives on computation beyond the digital. Artists and technologists looked at the strange world of emergent computation, cybernetic experiments with chemical and biological phenomena and the counterintuitive behavior of neural networks.

• What can we learn from the history of analog computing, what is its relevance today and in the future?

• How could a different paradigm of computation look like?

Performance by Ralf Baecker ‘A Natural History of Networks (Soft Machine)’

It is an electrochemical algorithmic performance of the artist and the machine – a custom-built electrochemical experimental apparatus SoftMachine. The central element of the performance is galinstan, a liquid metal alloy, which is manipulated by the artist through a set of electrodes and creates constantly evolving shapes and sounds in the real time. A radical technology that bridges traditionally discreet machine thinking and soft/fluid materials that enable self-organizing behavior through their specific material agencies. The performance aims to provoke new imaginaries of the machinic, the artificial and matter.

Photosensitivity warning: video at the beginning of the performance and performance  itself contain fast flashing images and strobe lighting