THE TECHNOLOGICAL BODY
What does contemporary digital culture do to our notions of identity, representation and selfhood? Where do our bodies exist on the network and where does their absence or misappropriation become a problem?
OPENING FILM: She Who Sees the Unknown: Ya’jooj Ma’jooj (2017) 10 min, Morehshin Allahyari (IR)
MODERATOR Natalie Kane (GB)
PANEL Legacy Russell (US), Simone Niquille (CH) and Sarah Kember (GB)
LEGACY RUSSELL
― SpeakerLegacy Russell is a writer, artist, and cultural producer. Born and raised in New York City’s East Village she is the UK Gallery Relations Lead and Gallery Partner Programs Lead for the online platform Artsy. Her work can be found in a variety of publications worldwide: BOMB, The White Review, Rhizome, DIS, The Society Pages, Guernica, Berfrois and beyond. Holding an MRes of Visual Culture with Distinction from Goldsmiths College at University of London, her academic and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, idolatry, and new media ritual. Her first book Glitch Feminism is forthcoming and will be published by Verso. www.legacyrussell.com.
SARAH KEMBER
― SpeakerSarah Kember is Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent publications include: a feminist critique of smart media iMedia. The gendering of objects, environments and smart materials (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and a co-authored monograph Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (The MIT Press, 2012). Previous publications include: Virtual Anxiety. Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester University Press, 1998); Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life (Routledge, 2003); the co-edited volume Inventive Life. Towards the New Vitalism (Sage, 2006); an edited open access ebook Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars (Open Humanities Press, 2011) and a novel The Optical Effects of Lightning (Wild Wolf Publishing, 2011). Sarah co-edits the journal Feminist Theory, is co-PI of an RCUK funded project on digital publishing (CREATe) and Director of Goldsmiths Press. Currently working on a book on future media, Sarah is also in the process of writing her second novel.
MOREHSHIN ALLAHYARI
― ArtistMorehshin Allahyari (b. 1985 in Tehran, Iran) is a media artist, activist, educator, and curator. Her work deals with political, social, and cultural contradictions, documenting personal and collective struggles humans face in this century. Allahyari’s Dark Matter is a series of 3D printed sculptures that form humorous, merged juxtapositions. Underlying the humor, however, is the reality of authoritarianism: the objects chosen (dog, dildo, gun, neck tie, satellite dish, etc.) are representations of things censured by the Iranian government – possession of which puts one at risk of harassment, incurring fines or incarceration. Her Material Speculation: ISIS series uses digital fabrication technology to reconstruct artifacts destroyed by ISIS in 2015. The project has achieved wide acclaim for proposing 3D printing technology as a tool both for resistance and documentation. Allahyari’s work has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops including Centre Pompidou in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, Pori Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, and Material Mexico City. She has been an artist in residence at CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry (2015), Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco (2015), and BANFF Centre (2013), among others. The many publications featuring her work include The New York Times, Huffington Post, Wired, NPR, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Dazed Digital, VICE, Neural Magazine and Al Jazeera. Allahyari is the Co-Founder of the Experimental Research Lab at Pier9/Autodesk. She is currently a Research Resident at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, New York.
NATALIE KANE
― ModeratorNatalie Kane is Curator of Digital Design at the V&A and one half of the curatorial research project Haunted Machines. She was curator of the British pavilion for the 2019 Milan Triennale and curated Amnesty International's exhibition 'War in Raqqa: Rhetoric versus Reality' at the Architectural Association. She is a Visiting Practitioner at the London College of Communication, and an Advisory Board Member for the Society of Computers and Law. In 2019, she received an Art Fund New Collecting Award to collect digital design for the V&A.
SIMONE NIQUILLE
― SpeakerSimone C. Niquille is a Swiss graphic designer and researcher. Her practice investigates the representation of identity without a body, the digitisation of biomass and the increasingly omnipresent optic gaze of everyday objects. She has written a column on technology, body modification and privacy for Sang Bleu, is part of design research collective Space Caviar in Genova Italy and is Tutor at the Architectural Association London.