Renaissance man 2.0

From the node genius to the ingenios hub.

The potential in network based consciousness, a project for investigating interdisciplinary practices within art and science.

Trondheim Academy of Fine Art’s Experts In Team Village, NTNU, Spring 2014.

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Science and art, human’s highest forms of creativity, have through history diverged into two different intellectual forms. This village aim to challenge the notion of science and art as separate entities with the ambition of bringing down the artificial barriers that might be blocking major breakthroughs in human society and culture.

We will investigate the potential in network based consciousness, specifically aimed at interdisciplinary practices in art and science; From the node genius to the ingenios hub, the Renaissance man 2.0.

‘Epiphyte Grove’ / Philip Beesley 2012 (Meta.Morf 2012) / Photo: Andreas Schille
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Our external partner is Meta.Morf, Trondheim’s biennale for art and technology.

Artistic and scientific researches are continuously part of challenging and changing our perspectives on life, often implying new philosophical and existential questions. Biotechnology, nanotechnology, neuroscience and new communications and computer technologies represent fields that expands the boundaries of artistic practices, practices that in turn may reveal unexplored viewpoints for scientifically based research.

The village’s projects shall be developed as potential contributions for the biennale.
Projects can be of administrative, curatorial, artistic or scientific character, based on the subject area ‘art & technology’.

Mapping structure:
– Investigation of existing art and technology structures, domestic and global, and their potentials.
– The notion of common nature in self organizing structures. How does this imply to art and technology research?

Exploring structure:
– Engaging artistic potentials within structural behavior.
– Designing experiments that explore self organizing structures.

Organising structure:
– Mediating between art and technology: Events, Lecturing, Social connections, Communication methods.

Debate structure:
– Establishing a Think Tank with the purpose of discussing the philosophical and practical potential in the field of art and technology.

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Meta.Morf 2014 – Lost in Transition.
May 1- June 1, 2014.
Trondheim.

Meta.Morf 2014 has the ambition of illuminating transformative processes as aesthetic phenomena. Phenomena that in themselves are of great intrinsic value.

The perpetual processes of change that can be observed within all levels of the universe, from micro to macro scale, from stardust to animate entities, are constantly generating new patterns and structures. These are processes that in turn affect further development of physical form, conceptual ideas, social structures and eco-systems of any kind.

Meta.Morf 2014 recognizes the processes of change to be a necessary gateway for questions related to our origin and destination. With the assumption that the only true constant in the universe is change, we may indeed envision ourselves entrancingly lost in transition.

Espen Gangvik / 2014

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Examples of practices in the field of art and technology

‘Making reality really real’

Essay collection.
Eds.: Ascott, Gangvik, Jahrmann. TEKS 2010. Download pdf, 7.1 MB.

In contemporary Western culture, the transformation of our sense of being, of presence, and the nature of time, can be seen as a consequence of accelerated developments in the technologies of mind and of the body (technoetics). Much earlier cultures also developed technologies, often dismissed as “simply” somatic or vegetal, that had the capacity to transform consciousness, reaching it would appear a spiritual significance that has so far, in these early days of digital development, eluded us. There may be political, corporate or cultural reasons for this. But as we move out of the era of techno-primitivism and reductionist fundamentalism, we can hopefully look to the encoding of empathy and emotion in computational systems, and so to an understanding that only when the computer can feel will there be machines that think. This may lead, in turn, to a greater understanding of what constitutes reality, or, as some might see it, a greater capacity to (re)build it, and ourselves, bottom up.

Roy Ascott, 2010.