In the Trouble: Tactics for technoscientific art practice and curation

Abstract

Recent currents in contemporary art practice that span science, art and technology, reconfigure the limits of the human and nonhuman. This research probes into and questions the tactics that can be engaged to reveal and attend to these complex posthuman ecologies. How can artists and curators expose and explore the volatile relations that are meshing in unprecedented ways between technology, biological matter, artificial and human intelligence? This particular field of experimental arts practice builds on a collaborative ethos in order to stimulate the emergence of new modes of discourse and a new aesthetics at the interface between the disciplines of science, technology, art and curating. The emergent practice of labile-technics offers an alternative logic that engages with feminist, posthumanist and new materialist theories. Writings by Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Lucy Suchman, support transversal technological experimentation. Creative art practice, science, technology and theory combine to create the conditions for encounters with the uncanny, the unpredictable and the unseen. The research generated three practical outcomes: Alter: Between Human and Non-human, an evolving exhibition model; Leah, a self-simulated avatar; and Witness, an intra-active version of Leah. The research stages the implications of the techno-sci engagement in a trans-art context. Alter featured artists Nina Sellars, Stelarc, Jane Prophet, Agatha Haines and Elena Knox. In these research projects, entanglements arise within intra-acting zones of neuroscience, computational and robotics engineering and creative arts practice. Installed at the Gus Fisher Gallery, Witness reveals the curator and artist as present. Witness invites the participant to entangle, in the moment, in liveliness and embodied sensibility. Through these three projects labile-technics offered a condition for negotiating movement between the laboratorium, the gallery and virtual reality environment. Labile-technics, emerges through this creative practice research, as a speculative method that foregrounds non-linear, unstable and dynamic relationality. Labile-technics is an ethical challenge towards the development of kinship and intimate relations between embodied and embedded engagements within the advanced technological systems we inhabit.