Desiree Förster is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Arts and Media, University of Potsdam. As a Berlin based curator and researcher she also collaborates within various disciplines such as (synthetic) biology, computer science, philosophy and humanities, and is interested in creating space for assemblies that cross assumed and naturalized relations.  

Her research interests lie in medial, aestethical and epistemological aspects of complex phenomena and how they could be modeled by experimental systems in order to become bodily experienced. In her PhD she investigates the question of mediation in and of crisis in relation to multispecies ecologies.

Desiree Förster and Susanna Hertrich will together present insights in their work – that, though different in method, will meet around the shared interest of investigating the human in relation to the nonhuman other. In her talk "Refiguring the human. A multispecies approach" figurations of the human as a transspecies-identity, Desiree will address the role of “technologies of sensation” (Luciana Parisi) in (re-)connecting with other species and hybrid habitats. In framing the human in connections and intra-actions (Karen Barad) with others, new perspectives on life, the environment and the role of technology within become apparent. Desiree will use philosophical, artistic and historical examples to illustrate her argument while Susanna gives insight in her current artistic research, that speculates about ways of learning from animals with help of mediating technologies.

Susanna Hertrich (D) is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, design and technology. She has collaborated different research institutes such as the Meta-Perception group at the University of Tokyo. She currently holds a position as research fellow at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures at the Academy of Art & Design (FHNW) in Basel, Switzerland in the SNF-funded project „The Sensorium of the Animals“ (collaboration with Shintaro Miyazaki). She is a recipient of numerous grants and her works are exhibited internationally.

Susannas works investigate the liminal space between the visible world and those things that normally remain hidden. Her objects demonstrate an expanded sense of reality. In a seemingly mundane context, they celebrate moments of the »strangely familiar«. In her artistic research, she invents wondrous devices and fantastical wearables that subtly satirise our present reality. These body prostheses articulate social criticism as well as showing an outlook into an alternative future.

Susanna Hertrich will be showing some examples of her artistic research that is concerned with ways to overcome the boundaries between bodies, minds and technology. These projects have been created in close dialogue with technology oriented research facilities in Asia and Europe. All these projects share A) a utilitarian approach, taking into consideration findings in psychology, behavioural biology, neuroscience and computer science, B) an exploration of their poetic qualities and C) an undeniable degree of wild speculation. The artefacts and images resulting from this research have to be understood as vehicles to carry a narration about the cultural imaginaries in which anticipated uses of technology have become reality. These explorations live two separate lives: as artworks, they appear in exhibitions and as conference papers, they have been presented to academic audiences.

Lucia Mendelova, PhD. CV (from Bratislava, Slovakia) finished her PhD. in Philosophy (Comenius University Bratislava, specialization: Epistemology / Science&Technology Studies / Gender Studies) and BA in Design (HfK Bremen & HSLU Luzern) in 2013. She is currently finishing her MA in Digital Media (HfK Bremen) and works in a software company. Since 2014 she is also a fart director at studio D.O.C.H. and works as a designer and lecturer in the field of visual communication for different media (print, web, virtual reality). 

My works are saturated with obviousness, mental inertia, clichés and bad jokes. Usually they touches various overlapping themes and strategies of hybridization of knowledge perception by manipulating the viewer to create confusion and/or irritation. Later on I call it bla bla...

What Is it Like to Be a ... Lobster? Cool 90s & the hidden side of virtual materiality 
80s and 90s not only had an exceptionally weird&great style, but cyberpunk brought some conceptually elaborate ideas about new technologies, bodies, surveillance, wearables and consumerism. This talk is a very brief excursion through some of this ideas, mainly those concerning virtual embodiment and its epistemological consequences. It is based on two theoretical tendencies, which created an interesting tension through their mutual coexistence during early 90s. One is initiated through the “illusion of immateriality” in cyber-culture as John Perry Barlow put in his ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996) and what Katherine Hayles later identified as “disembodied subjectivity” (Hales 1999); the second one is represented through the early experiments within the concepts of “homuncular flexibility”, “absolute physics” and “post-symbolical language” from Jaron Lanier (1988). Welcome on the speculative ride through "Wunderkammer" of early Virtual Reality experiments. 

Nuño de la Serna is a passionate creative technologist, attracted by multiple art disciplines and interested in modern digital culture. With a software development background and experience in diverse sectors, he is currently exploring human interactions and focusing on visual graphics computation.

My artworks are born from innocent curiosity. Exploring inventive ways of using technology, I try to advance the frontier of the coexistence between humans and technology. In my work, I challenge the limits of digital interfaces with an emphasis on removing the barriers to accessibility.

PROTOTYPE01 is a collaborative sculpting system that by interconnecting people's movements via their smarthphones, translates the movement into a visual record. Connected devices on the network become an interface to generate a tridimensional shape using the accelerometer sensor data.

Andrea Liu is a New York/Berlin-based art critic, performer, and curator whose research often deals with geneaology, or the epistemic context within which bodies of knowledge become intelligible and authoritative, as a point of departure. She was curator/director of Counterhegemony: Art in a Social Context Program, a theoretical fellowship program for visual/performing artists at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, and is researcher at Goldsmiths Womens’ Art Library. She has performed at Dixon Place, Queens Museum of Art, Artists Space (Movement Research Dance Improvisation Festival), Chez Bushwick, Movement Research Studies Project, Bruce High Quality Foundation Univ., S.A.L.E. Docks, Berliner Festspiele (with Chto Delat), Flutgraben 3AM, NGBK (upcoming), and the 56th Venice Biennale (Jump into the Unknown). She recently completed a residency at Centrale Fies Liveworks, a residency that explores performance within a visual art context.

Crowd Dream (performance by Andrea Liu)
“The dream of police technologies is to harness the tactility of crowds and place it at the disposal of the new information economy. This necessitates not just control of visible space, but parametric control using tactile feedback.” (William Bogard) The affects that create the internal organizations of crowds are haptic, tactile and immersive. Police technologies for controlling crowd affects have evolved, no longer confined to unilateral surveillance (cameras, listening devices). New police technologies seek to control crowd affect directly, by informating tactile qualities of crowds -- texture, concentration, pressure, attraction/ repulsion. As Deleuze perspicaciously noted, we have left the disciplinary panopticon model of surveillance and entered “the society of control”. Spatial/architectural mechanisms of enclosure have given way to immaterial code-based ones that have lost none of their power to constrict the body. Crowd Dream is a performance lecture that uses various modes by which police control or practice surveillance over crowds through haptic technology, creating a fictional crowd, or “crowd dream.”

Jaime del Val is a meta-media artist, philosopher, performer, director of Reverso Institute and coordinator of the METABODY Project. He develops transdisciplinary projects in the convergence of arts, technologies, critical theory and activism, that have been presented all over Europe, North and South America. His projects propose redefinitions of embodiment, perception and affects that challenge the ontological foundations of contemporary control society.

The METABODY project proposes an ontological critique of perceptual regimes, such as perspective and rationalised vision, which eventually underlie contemporary control society and imperial colonization projects, thus being an ontological substrate of contemporary environmental problems. Embracing a broad account of ecology, METABODY goes beyond the Three Ecologies principle of Guattari (environmental, social and mental) to undertake an embodied reinvention of perception and relational ecologies across the human-non-human, by proposing relational and perceptual modes which may exceed the ontological splits (subject-object divide) which account for colonisation processes as well as quantification based and predictive models of control in the Big Data Era. These proposals become enacted in a novel architectural paradigm of dynamic selfconstruction techniques across the digital and physical for an indeterminate and emergent space, called METATOPIA.

Post-intimacy, alien couplings and emergent tactilities.
How to reinvent tactile interface and touch itself creatively, not merely trying to measure or map a given tactile activity but radically reinventing how touch can happen or be experienced. How does this approach to touch challenge intimacy, gender and sex, race and class but also the western tradition of visual rationalisation, and the culture of hypercontrol? How far is reinventing touch crucial for a sustainable culture especially in a moment in which tactility is being captured in predictive big data Networks through billions of sensors that are part of a planetary metabody, a hypercyborg? In an era where according to Mark Zuckerberg privacy doesn't exist, how to regain the indeterminate as movement not subjected to control, a haptic body of close encounters in the frontier of the legible?

Jonathan Reus-Brodsky is an American composer-performer working at the intersections of applied science, electronic music and digital cultures. His work explores alternative formations of instruments and instrumentations and their capacities to challenge and reshape traditional and contemporary experiences of performed sound.

Sissel Marie Tonn is a Danish artist living in The Hague. She works with multi-media installation, drawing and writing, and her processual approach is driven by a great deal of curiosity and the possibilities of building relationships across fields. Her work builds upon an interest in ‘presence’ within ecologies undergoing subtle or profound changes. Within this discourse the work explores these environmental (often humanly induced) changes, extending the public debates towards epistemological issues connecting these events to the body and its sensing of presence.

The project Sensory Cartographies is an ongoing collaboration between artists Sissel Marie Tonn and Jonathan Reus. In this project we explore the relationships between consciousness, body and environment, as mediated by the filtration mechanisms of the senses. At the center of the project is a process-driven approach to creating worn instrumentations which rethink modes of collecting, categorizing and mapping from the perspective of lived experience. The talk will present the workshop they will be doing on the 30th of July in Berlin and their previous one in Madeira.

Marcello Lussana is a composer, a software engineer and free thinker specialized in interactive systems. Focal point of his work is the interaction between sound and human movement. He is director of the project Motioncomposer and he is based in Berlin where is actively involved in the improvised scene. He is a Phd canditate at the Humboldt University.

'Touch as an inner experience' is an ongoing research about how we perceive the world and ourselves through the sense of touch. Touch is the most basic sense living beings have, it is common to all animals, including the less evolved ones. It can help awareness and proprioperception. It is reversible, it can be understood both as active and passive, touching and being touched, a blurry experience. The talk will present the outcome of a phenological research of the Metabody workshops and the “Last-minute Failure” performance.