12-13 OCTOBER 2013

Laznia CCA,  Jaskółcza 1 Str.

Gdańsk – LOWER TOWN

 

In the autumn edition we will meet five researchers. The duo dr Martha Blassnigg and prof. Michael Punt will present the topic “Darwin, Gosse and Bergson: Biology, Art and the Creative Imagination”. The lecture “Evolution Haute Couture: Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age” by Dmitrij Bułatow – artist, curator and theorist focusing on the relation between art and science for many years – will be based on his latest publication. The main subject of the following meeting “Curating Brains: the Mind as Matter at Wellcome Collection, London” will be the brain, which became the central topic of Marius Kwint’s exhibition. The series will end withprof. Ryszard W. Kluszczyński’s lecture “Towards the post-human creation. From kinetic to bio-robotic art.”

 

 

Day 1 – 12th October 2013, 6 p.m. – 7.15 p.m.

 

 

Darwin, Gosse and Bergson: Biology, Art and the Creative Imagination

dr Martha Blassnigg i prof. Michael Punt

 

 

The authors will highlight the function of the Arts and Humanities in challenging materialist and determinist tendencies in the mediation of science in the public domain - in particular they will focus on biology. Using the exchange between science and nineteenth century visual culture they will highlight the critical and discursive contribution the arts, with its investment in imagination and perception, made to the production of knowledge by offering alternative world views in response to a discourse of materialist determinism. 

They will ask if the Arts (and indeed Humanities) in the twentieth century have lost sight of their critical function as champions of radical constructivism in their collaboration with scientists. Revisiting Darwin, Gosse and Bergson from the 21st century vantage point of a history, art and philosophy, they will suggest that the work of the Humanities in collaboration with the Arts might still be able to recover the creative drive in art practice to celebrate the difference between how we know the world, how we imagine the world and how the world - in all its possible dimensions - might be.

 

Michael Punt - is a Professor of Art and Technology at the University of Plymouth where he is the convenor of Transtechnology Research and the Editor-in-Chief of Leonardo Reviews. He gained his PhD at the University of Amsterdam (Early Cinema and the Technological Imaginary) and has jointly produced two books on audio visual media and consciousness. He has published over 80 articles on cinema history and digital technology in key journals. From April 2010 he has been leading a large joint research project funded through HERA on the creative exchanges between experimental and commercial film makers. 

www.trans-techresearch.net 

 

Martha Blassnigg - is a Cultural and Media Anthropologist and Film and Cinema Theorist with a background in documentary filmmaking and film restoration. She is Research Fellow with Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth, and Associate Editor for Leonardo Reviews. She is undertaking historical research in order to situate the metaphysical dimensions of technology and art within discourses of the philosophy of mind with a focus on the perceptual experience of audio-visual media. She is currently co-investigating the EU HERA project “Technology, Exchange and Flow: Artistic Media Practices and Commercial Application”. 

www.trans-techresearch.net 

 

 

Day 1 – 12th October 2013, 7.30 p.m. – 9.30 p.m.

 

 

Evolution Haute Couture: Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age

Dmitrij Bułatow

 

 

 

The speech will be based on Dmitrij Bułatows - artist, curator and theorist focusing on the relation between art and science for many years - latest publication, which is on the strength of the art collection of the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow. The collection presents documentary movies about modern art, which uses technologies of the XXI century – IT, robotics and biomedicine.

 

Dmitrij Bułatow - artist, theorist, researcher. His work focuses on various aspects of interdisciplinary actions within art and science (robotics, bioengineering, genetics, nanotechnology etc.). He is the author of over 30 articles about modern art. His works were presented at over 100 exhibitions, among them “Bunker Poetico” (49. Biennale in Venice, 2001), “Davaj! Russian Art Now” (Berlin, Vienna, 2002), “Brain Academy Apartment” (50. Biennale in Venice, 2003), “3durch3”(Kassel, 2004), “Art of Tortures and Executions” (Kaliningrad, 2005), “Eastern Neighbours” (Utrecht, 2006), “Victory over the Sun”(Moscow, 2007) and others.

 

 

Day II – 13th October 2013, 3 p.m. – 4.15. p.m.

 

 

Curating Brains: the Mind as Matter at Wellcome Collection, London

Marius Kwint

 

 

Main field of the lecture will be the brain, which became the central topic of curators Marius Kwint’s exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London (co-created by the GV Art Gallery). Over 100,000 visited the exhibition, which features more than 150 objects including brain specimens, specially commissioned artworks, videos and photography. "Brains" follows the long quest of science and culture to collect, classify, manipulate and decipher the most unique and mysterious of human organs.

 

Marius Kwint - cultural historian, curator and lecturer at The University of Portsmouth. His main realm of interest lies in the relation between art, science and visual culture. He researches how attitudes towards the world change, in particular how culture changes in time and in different places. Together with Lucy Shanahan, Kwint curated the “Brains: the mind as matter” exhibition presented at Wellcome Collection in London, seen by over one hundred thousand people. He is also the author of the book that complemented the exhibition, “The Mind As Matter”.

 

 

Day II – 13th October 2013, 4.30p.m. – 6 p.m.

 

 

Towards the post-human creation. From kinetic to bio-robotic art.

Prof. Ryszard W. Kluszczyński

In the 50s of the last century, Nicolas Schöffer contributed to the beginning of an artistic trend conceptually set in the ideas of cybernetics. Schöffers cybernetic and space responding sculptures are characterized by a degree of autonomy, allowing them, within the limits set by their design, to respond to public behavior or, to put it more broadly, to the changes in their environment. The autonomy of artifacts developed further, through such artists as Edward Ihnatowicz and Jean Tinguely, layed the groundwork for the development of robotic art. The lecture will focus on one of the strands of the described here trend. Discussing selected works of Akira Kanaya, Jean Tinguely, Patrick Tresseta and flu SymbioticA and Guy Ben-Ary, the lecturer will show how this trend has evolved, what were its contexts and what consequences it brought.

 

Prof. dr Ryszard W. Kluszczyński - Professor at the University of Łódź and the Łódź Academy of Fine Arts, lecturer at the National Film School in Łódź. His field of interest includes first and foremost: video art, multimedia and avant-garde cinema, but he also explores the problems of cyber culture. In 1990-2001 he was the curator at Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, he was the curator at the Modern Art Biennale in Poznań in 2010. He is the artistic director of the Art+Science Meeting project.