In july and August the Russian digital artist Dasha Ilina was in residency in the Stadtwerkstatt, during which she worked on her new project “Center for Networked Intimacy”. In her stay Dasha developed and offered a Workshop in FLUT and a final presentation in the servus clubraum.
Center for Networked Intimacy invites you to a workshop on the strategies and topics of conversation around the development of relationships in the digital era. The artificial nature of relationships formed with the help of technology has been becoming increasingly apparent since the invention of social networks, and the feelings of alienation and loneliness only escalated during the Covid-19 pandemic which forced upon us an environment of constant online connection.
During the workshop the participants will be introduced to the the idea of being ‘ambiently aware’ of another’s actions, thoughts and experiences without having to be near them physically, and without specifically requesting such information (source: http://cyborganthropology.com/Ambient_Awareness). Following a discussion on the notion of ‘ambient awareness’, the participants will be invited to reflect on how such relationships have affected them and dedicate a personalized audio valentine to someone they feel close with only through social media.
The Silicon Friend Camp was a 5-day retreat for 17 cultural workers to examine „Artificial Intelligence“ (and non-sense) in the mountain valleys of the Salzkammergut. The project was organized by servus.at with funding from LINZimPULS and conceived by curator Davide Bevilacqua and media artist Matthias Pitscher. The artist Rosi Grillmair joined as facilitator and program supervisor. For our culinary delights Hess Jeon created an amazing menu and Giacomo Piazzi helped with technical support.
The 12 selected artists came from a broad variety of fields and cultural backgrounds. One of them even joined us remotely from the Andes in Columbia. Their planned projects ranged from remote-controlled robots, to philosophical essays, music pieces with artificial neural networks, or anthropomorphized vaccuum cleaners.
We gathered online first on our self-hosted forum, where we organized our days, envisioned workshops and collaborative artworks. During our days in our vacation hottage we spent a lot of time together with our laptops through our networked home. To get deeper into the topic, we created reading circles and Caroline Sinders also joined us telematically to talk about the politics of AI. Every day we came together for group validations and celebrated our dinners with computer generated table prayers. We spent our nights at the digital campfire (a projector in the attic), where we shared stories of the end of philosophy or knowledge of esoteric coding languages.
Throughout our time we made new friends (both machines and humans), created many experiments and even finished some artworks. In November, the resulting works will be made accessible to the public at the WHA Gallery in Linz. In addition, a symposium on the topic of “Conversations with Computers” will take place at the same time at the Kunstuniversität Linz. Thanks to all the amazing carbon based friends: Błażej Kotowski, Dasha Ilina, EKHEO (Aude Langlois & Belinda Sykora), Erica Jewell, Lina Schwarzenberg, Maks Valenčič, Mariana Marangoni, Naoto Hieda, Sebastian Mira, So Kanno, Yuxi Liu
Eating is a sacred, human right But food is getting scarce There are humans who are hungry And there are humans who are fat We must ask ourselves, Who are the humans? I am the human You are the human We are the human Because I am the human, You are the human We are the human Because you are the human, I am the human Because we are the human, You are the human Because I am the human
Conversations with Computers is a 2-day Symposium organized by the net culture initiative servus.at in cooperation with the Department of Time-based Media of the University of Art and Design Linz. The symposium addresses contemporary artistic research in the field of AI, focusing on new languages that emerge between humans and machines, but also how work and communication are facilitated through technological means. The discursive event is accompanied by two workshops and an exhibition of artistic works produced during the Silicon Friends Camp, a 5-days retreat with 15 artists in the austrian alps that took place last summer.
Symposium: Conversations with Computers
17th and 18th November 2021m 6-9PM Kunstuniversität Linz, Domgasse 1, Audimax 1.OG
Conversations with Computers // Day 1
Conrad Weise: <– human-driven condition // On the Relationship Between Shiny Interfaces and Precarious Work
Exhibition Opening 10th November 2021, 6PM Opening time: Monday-Friday 10:00-18:30
Workshop: Building the Zombie Cloud
12th-13th November 2021, 2-6:30PM Hardware Hacking Workshop with Chipp Jansen Kunstuniversität Linz, Domgasse 1, ExPostMusik 4.OG
In this “hardware hacking” workshop, we will look at a typical IoT internet security camera and discover how to talk to it and re-program it for our own customised uses. The spirit of this workshop is to also to generate ideas for an eventual system for combining discarded electronics into a re-usable general purpose computational system. No previous hardware or software “hacking” experience is necessary for this step-by-step workshop, and all the necessary supplies will be provided.
Workshop: Serving Sounds
19th November 2021, 2-6:30 PM Sound and AI voice workshop with EKHEO Kunstuniversität Linz, Domgasse 1, ZBM 4.OG
The server room is a place carrying other seemingly endless digital spaces. We can experience it as a trace of online files and data it stores. How does this mysteriously layered space sound? Is there a way to give it a sonic materiality through the way we listen to it? This is what we would like to attempt with you in this workshop. Divided in two parts, we will do a guided listening session and produce a collective sonic composition.
Toxic Stories Header Glass Factory in Graz, Foto by Andreas Zingerle
Hyperaccumulators are plants that grow on soils with a high heavy metal content and are able to store minerals such as copper, nickel, zinc or cadmium in their biomass. They have found an evolutionary niche in volcanic soil, industrial heaps or former mining and open-cast mining areas, in which they do not simply ignore or bypass the problematic substances, but instead absorb a large proportion of them. The stored heavy metals can be extracted and reused, which turns the plants into biological ore mines and soils can be rehabilitated over the years. This is also the case in industrial areas and landfills, which are located in the Austrian Altlastenatlas, an index for contaminated sites in Austria.
In their artistic work “Toxic Stories”, servus.at community members Raphael Perret and Andreas Zingerle immerse themselves in the topic and present stories, events and encounters that they document during the process-based research trip, e.g. in the form of an audio guide.
