Joanna Zylinkska: Life, Death and Extinction скачать в хорошем качестве

Joanna Zylinkska: Life, Death and Extinction

MFA FINE ART AND MFA CURATING LECTURES 2015-2016 TERM ONE, SERIES ONE. Conditions are Now Planetary: The Anthropocene The expansion of the Biennial circuit, the proliferation of art fairs, and the composition of the leading MFA programmes clearly indicate how contemporary art is now a global phenomenon. Even if contemporary art does not permeate every place on the planet, it’s now widely recognised that it has efficiently contributed to the construction of economic and social globalisation since the mid-1990s. But even as contemporary art attains this global condition, the very notion of ‘the global’ is itself under pressure. On the one hand, the dream of a ‘flat Earth’ of open and unhindered movement of trade, capital, people, culture and information has run into the obstacles of historical power blocs, regional interests, and the construction of new barriers. On the other hand, responses to climate change and long-term transformations to the planet’s ecology - what is called ‘The Anthropocene’ - require the integration of planetary-scale systems surpassing any historical construction of the totality of the world. Both from below and from above, then, the global no longer works as a conceptual or practical horizon of systemic integration. The problem elaborated by these talks is the following: if contemporary art is a feature of globalisation, yet globalisation is an increasingly inadequate term and discourse for the current and future conditions of the planet, what is art now in fact doing? How can it meet the new conditions? 12 Oct - Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths): Life, Death and Extinction (or can we devise a minimal ethics for the whole universe, while there’s still time?) Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, we humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being made to confront the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be it human or nonhuman ones. Even though my talk is first and foremost about life – comprehended as both a biological and social phenomenon – it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population, i.e., about the extinction of the human species, that provides a context for its argument. The talk mobilises a more speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s method; it also includes presentation of several accompanying art projects. Bio: Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of five books - most recently, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (2014), Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (with Sarah Kember, 2012) and Bioethics in the Age of New Media (2009). She is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, a collection of essays on the work of performance artists Stelarc and Orlan (2002), co-editor of Culture Machine, an international open-access journal of culture and theory, and curator of its sister project, Photomediations Machine. Zylinska was Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 'Biomediations', the Festival of New Media Art and Video in Mexico City, 2013. Her current projects involve photographing media entanglements and writing a book on nonhuman photography.