Meta.Morf 2022 – Ecophilia / FeLT, OsloMet @ K-U-K – Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst /
Artist conversations May 7 / Curator: Kristin Bergaust & Hege Tapio
Investigating the Futures of Living Technologies with Ecophilia artists
HEGE TAPIO / ANNIE HÄGG / FRANK EKEBERG / MAREN DAGNY JUELL / MARIA CASTELLANOS / MARIUS PRESTERUD
About the event
FeLT in collaboration with a selection of artists participating in the Ecophilia exhibition at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst and TEKS.studio invite you to reflect and debate on topics raised by the artworks in the exhibition: questioning relations and connections that occur between human beings, other living beings and machines in our time of ecological crises. How do we understand ourselves when borders between nature, humans and technology have become blurred, even obsolete?
About FeLT – Futures of Living Technologies
FeLT is an artistic research project funded by NARP based at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design at OsloMet. FeLT is a transdisciplinary environment questioning, speculating and experimenting with how we sense life in the environment, in other beings and ourselves in an existence being constantly enhanced by technology.
We are currently working on the following themes:
Making with-sympoiesis: multispecies communication and co-creation
Practices of communication and co-creation with living organisms – such as microorganisms, plants or animals – might involve working with technologically complex systems as well as agriculture or indigenous knowledges and traditions. To rethink interspecies relations in the framework of a climate emergency moment can form new, entangled multispecies alliances.
Living technologies: living environments, humans, machines, intelligence, life and emotions
By the term living technology we think of the complex structures and functions of living organisms which have entered the hybrid and synthetic technologies. By including critical perspectives on the merging of technology and areas involving emotions, sensing and empathy, we question possible and speculative convergences of machine technology, artificial life, artificial intelligence and human bodies.
Sensorium: how we experience, interpret and develop applied aesthetics today
In order to reconnect with the environment, we are expanding the senses technologically inside and outside of institutions. Technologies continuously provide new ways of filtering our experiences and different means of relating to the living environment. Aesthetics today are also affected by perceptual complexity, relating to experiences that transcend art and include a vast array of both natural and constructed environments. Can the sensorium as an expanded aesthetics provide new modalities for connecting with natural resources? What new opportunities exist for interaction and how do technologies extend and provide explorative possibilities within sensations? And, in what way do institutions understand and relate to this sensory complexity as a sustainable choice?
Participants: a selection of artists participating in the Ecophilia exhibition at Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst and TEKS.studio, FeLT-members and guests.
Moderators: Kristin Bergaust, FeLT project leader; Hege Tapio, Ph.D. fellow at OsloMet; and Maria Castellanos, postdoc at OsloMet, artist exhibiting at Ecophilia exhibition.
Header graphics: “Symbiotic Interaction” by Maria Castellanos.