A Forum Act

Date: 21 Jan 2019 (Monday)

Time: 10.00 - 17.00 *Registration starts at 9.50

Venue: McAulay Studio, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong

Language: English

Remarks: For RSVP or enquiry, please contact belleleung@oaf.cc

To discuss and address the interdependencies between arts, sciences and technologies, and the challenges between ideas of the expanded field of interactive arts

Speakers

Siegfried Zielinski is the Michel Foucault Chair at The European Graduate School / EGS, where he teaches as a professor of mediology and technoculture. He is also the chair of media theory, with a focus on archaeology and variantology of media at the Berlin University of Arts, honorary professor for art and media at the Budapest University of Arts, and is curator at the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media (ZKM). From 1993-2000 he was the founding rector of the Cologne Academy of Media Arts. Most recently he was rector of the Karlsruhe University of Arts & Design. Zielinski published numerous books and essays, mainly on archaeology and variantology of the arts and media.

egs.edu/faculty/siegfried-zielinski

Towards an Expanded Hermeneutics

The humanistic discipline which helps us to understand and to interpret thoughts and ideas articulated in language is called hermeneutics. To deal poetically and critically with articulations, which have been co-generated or even completely produced by machines we need an expanded hermeneutics. It is not enough anymore to think with images, diagrams, sound, text as epistemic instruments. Instead we have to learn and teach the new alphabet of complex forms of articulation and understanding. Within this new field of acting and thinking for artists, philosophers and other intellectuals DIALOGUE is becoming a decisive paradigm - dialogue between men and machines, between the objects both are generating, between programmes and machines themselves.

Masaki Fujihata is one of the pioneers of Japanese new media art, beginning his career working in video and digital imaging in the 80’s. Fujihata’s Beyond Pages (1995-1997), Field-Work@Alsace (2003), Voices of Aliveness (2013), Mandala 1983 (1983) along with many other works are regarded classic works in the history of interactive art, some of which were collected by Media Museum, ZKM (Centre for Art and Media Technology), Karlsruhe, Germany. Voices of Aliveness (2013) won the Award of distinction, Prix Ars, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria. In 2016, a remarkable book titled: Anarchive N°6 Masaki Fujihata was published in Paris, where archived videos and 3D models were brought out of their pages through AR technology.

www.fujihata.jp

Media such as paper and pencil or, photographs and prints have been contributing to externalize human memory. In this way, humans have come to deal with a large quantity of information beyond the limits of our body. Up until now, the handling information centered on letters but, with the rapid advancement of digital technology, we are beginning to be able to handle images at the same speed as characters.

As the creation and distribution of images used require a large investment, image media, such as television, has been centralized by huge capital investment. However, the advent of digital technology has reversed this and individuals have gained opportunities to handle images and to be distributors now.

Unfortunately, this new literacy to deal with image has not yet been born. As you can see from the history of film, the development of media technology and the invention of the language used, progressed in parallel. And yet, the speed of the user could not yet catch up with the speed of technological changes.

Here is the role of the artist. Through my own art works and with my artistic experiences, I'd like to think about the new language and new ways to handle images in new media.

Yuk Hui teaches philosophy at the institute of philosophy and art of the Leuphana University Lüneburg and at the China Academy of Art, he is a visiting associate professor at the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong for the spring semester 2019. Hui is the initiator of the international Research Network for Philosophy and Technology (www.philochina.org). He has published on philosophy of media and technology in various international journals such as Research in Phenomenology, Theory Culture and Society; he is author of three monographs, On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China. An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2017) and Recursivity and Contingency (2019).

www.digitalmilieu.net/yuk/

Space and Place remarks on a digitalchrono-topology

AR and VR concern primarily space. But what is the space in AR and VR? In VR, the space is nothing but vectors indicated by numbers: the objects appear in front of us are synthesis of multiple images taken from different angles, and it is through the opticals that they appear to us as 3D objects; in AR, there is space, however, it is also devoid of space, since the same space, could appear differently to million different people according to the schemes of personalization. There seems to be a multiplication of space but in fact there is no space. How then is the question of space possible? This talk will depart here to explore the question of space and place in digital technologies and in artistic creations.

Scott Lash is a visiting professor at the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong. From 1998 - 2017, he was Director and Research Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. From 2015 - 2018, he was visiting professor of Department Journalism and Communications at Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was Senior Research Associate of Centre on Migration Policy and Society and Institute of Social and Cultural anthropology at Oxford University, and has been editor of the journal Theory, Culture and Society since 1987.

What is the Technological Imaginary?

Gödel’s algorithmic thinking and its incompleteness are at the heart of Turing’s translation into an engineering vein as the lynchpin of our technological culture. Gödel breaks with Hilbert’s syntax for a semantics of content, of indeed the idea. This is at the same time a break with logical positivism. What here is at stake? Gödel’s desertion of Frege’s tradition for Husserl’s suggests that logic’s predication are displaced by consciousness, experience, intentionality, meaning. This is at the same time an evasion of Kant’s objectivist understanding, its categories and predication and its positivist héritiers for the imagination. You perceive the now and the this, but you imagine the past, future and the that. You perceive the here. You imagine the three. If we are talking instead of a machine consciousness, a machinic intentionality, then what can be this machinic imagination? What kind of reduction can it perform? What is its temporality? Its, if any, finitude? If the imagination is decoupled from the thought object and enters the world of the mimetic faculty, then are talking at the same time about what has been seen as China’s 'analogical' paradigm? Is the technological imaginary somehow also Chinese?

Forum

Organized by

Osage Art Foundation