Stedelijk X Rietveld: Studium Generale

Events — 20, Mar 21, 2024

Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents, in collaboration with the Gerrit Rietveld Academie: Technodiversity - Beyond Datafication and Digital Colonialism. This is a large-scale, multi-day event with conferences, an exhibition and a festive Friday Night. There will be lectures, presentations, screenings and performances by international artists, theorists and Rietveld students.

Price: Museumticket + € 3,- (per day)
Rietveld students and employees free of charge on presentation of Rietveld card
Location: Teijin Auditorium
Time: Mar 20, 10.30 am until 5 pm
Mar 21, 10.30 am until 5 pm
Main language: English
Admission: Tickets

The annual collaboration between the Stedelijk Museum and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie consists of two parts: a conference and an exhibition with performance program. Studium Generale presents a two-day conference in which two curators each fill a day with diverse artistic perspectives on the theme Technodiversity – Beyond Datafication and Digital Colonialism. Following this theme, students create new work for the exhibition Rietveld Uncut. This presentation culminates in a festive Friday Night on 22 March with performances, talks and music.

The full program with times can be found on the Rietveld website.

PROGRAM

MARCH 20

Karen Archey, Soft Machines: Technology and Material Impact

With Ramon Amaro, Kate Cooper, Lila Lee-Morrison, Natasha Tontey

While the mechanics of advanced technology are often understood by the general public as an abstraction, so too are their impacts felt keenly within lived experience. Such machines are far from neutral, but rather instilled with the belief systems and biases of the humans who made them. Borrowed from writer William S. Burroughs, the notion of the Soft Machine refers to the human body and its relation to control mechanisms.

The conference will begin with a screening of Eye/Machine (2000) by the influential theorist, critic, and filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014). This work investigates how, with the live broadcasting of the 1991 Gulf War, military vision and electronic surveillance has infiltrated civilian life through so-called “operational images.” As Farocki demonstrates, the human eye as a tool to witness history has been replaced by computer vision, which disables our capacity to distinguish between “real” and fictional images.

Examining advanced technology from a material perspective, a mixture of artists and theorists will additionally speak about the personal and political implications of artificial intelligence, machine learning, eugenics, and data mining alongside notions of class, gender, race, modernism and colonialism. Invited speakers include Ramon Amaro, Lila Lee-Morrison, Natasha Tontey, and Kate Cooper. Through a critical discussion and performance program, these speakers will underline how existing power structures from the past – often exploitative in nature – complicate the experience of today’s technologies and digital cultures. The program will introduce critical concepts from the field of visual culture and automated facial recognition technology, as well as introduce a performative work by Kate Cooper and new videos by Natasha Tontey. Together, these theorists and artists present a multifaceted image of the intersections between digital art, the social sciences, and the felt impacts of data colonialism.

Karen Archey is Curator of Contemporary Art at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where she cares for the collections of contemporary art and time-based media. She has organized major exhibitions of artists Hito Steyerl, Rineke Dijkstra, and Metahaven, as well as the group exhibition Freedom of Movement: the 2018 Municipal Art Acquisitions. She is currently organizing a major retrospective of the work of Marina Abramović. Formerly based in Berlin and New York, Archey worked as an independent curator, editor, and art critic, writing for publications such as Artforum and frieze. In 2014, she organized with Robin Peckham the exhibition “Art Post-Internet” at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. In 2015, Archey was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing. Her book After Institutions (2022) examines museums as a troubled, rapidly evolving public space and renews discussions around Institutional Critique.

MARCH 21

Zach Blas, That Which Protects the Diverse

With Shu Lea Cheang, Ricardo Dominguez, Isadora Neves Marques, Shaka McGlotten and Nelly Y. Pinkrah

Thus, that which protects the Diverse we call opacity.

— Édouard Glissant

In 1985, feminist science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway theorized the informatics of domination as a networked, computational reconfiguration of what Black feminist theorist bell hooks termed imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Now, almost forty years later, most of us live and die in the throes of this episteme, surrounded by informatic modes of control and injustice. But is there an outside? Are there informatics otherwise? What technologies might enable and nurture diversities of existence that exceed the informatics of domination? In response to these questions, this day of the conference-festival shares glimmers, desires, imaginaries, propositions, practices, theories, and lived experiences of an intergenerational, transnational gathering of artists and scholars committed to surviving in and beyond the informatics of domination.

The programme engages philosopher Yuk Hui’s concept of technodiversity by staging an encounter with Caribbean philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant’s notion of the Diverse, that is, minoritarian existences on Earth relating through alterities that are unknowable and unpredictable to standardized, dominant orders. Throughout the day, we will experience the Diverse’s technodiversity, a range of critiques and constitutions, protections and celebrations, that are anticolonial, antiracist, feminist, and queer, including presentations on indigenous futurism, computational hexes, viral love, opacity in cybernetics, and gendered robots and vampires. The program will also reckon with the institutionalization of diversity under the informatics of domination, questioning the very diversity of diversity today. Relating and resonating through Glissant’s opaque Diverse, the artists and scholars gathered here demonstrate how to create, use, dream, and think with technodiversity, in code and text, image and sound, performance and protest, seeking protection and liberation from the informatics of domination, but also alliance and pleasure along the way.

Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker and writer whose practice draws out the philosophies and imaginaries residing in computational technologies and their industries. Working across moving image, computation, installation, theory, performance, and science fiction, Blas has exhibited, lectured, and held screenings at venues including the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, 12th Gwangju Biennale, and e-flux. His current exhibition CULTUS addresses a burgeoning AI religiosity in the tech industry and is presented at arebyte Gallery, London and Secession, Vienna. Blas’s book Unknown Ideals was published by Sternberg Press in 2021. With Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, he is co-editor of Informatics of Domination, forthcoming from Duke University Press. Blas is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.