Date：2025/6/6 15:00-16:10
Location：R101, CSIE
Speakers：Prof. Hajoe Moderegger
Host：洪一平教授
Abstract:
Our Non-Understanding of Everything is the daily practice of observation, questioning and switching perspectives in order to understand our relationship to our tech-devices and their existence in the world. Motivated by finding ways to imagine how smart devices and their interconnected technologies can communicate with and learn from diverse natural environments, not by just managing more and more complex algorithms and data heaps, but through sensory experiences like touch, smell and miniscule energy transmissions from wind, frogs, pollen, etc., we are instigating physical encounters and chance exchanges between the two realms. What happens when the artificial tech intelligences meet the intelligence of trees, fungi, insects and water streams?
Scale is of essential value for the existence of our tech devices within our world. The transistors, which give electronic chips their functionality, are very small often smaller than a virus. The smaller the transistors are, the more fit into a chip, which will offer more computing power, which eventually turns into financial power and political power. When biological or technological microscopic entities, like viruses and microchips - invisible to the naked eye – control big data, global pandemics and climate change, but interact violently with our bodies, social structures and our environments, we experience not only the limitations of our senses, but also of our powers. To understand these relationships, we have to get physically “closer” while at the same time allow a different kind of closeness with other species and ourselves, an intimacy that senses, feels, touches, tastes and cares. We accept that certain parts of this intimate engagement will fall outside of that, which can be described in verbal language, but are very curious how the images that come out of the closeup view, inform our understanding.
Biography:
Since 2001, Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger (senior Fulbright scholar, Professor for emerging media and Director of the Digital & Interdisciplinary Art Practice MFA Program at the City College of New York) have collaborated as eteam, an interdisciplinary artist duo recognized for their conceptual approach to digital media, installation art, and community-driven projects. eteam's works have been shown internationally at the International Film Festival Rotterdam or the legendary NY Video Festival and institutions such as MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum of American Art, Sculpture Center NY, Centre Pompidou Paris, MuMOK Vienna. They received commissions to create new works for: Artport, the Whitney Museum’s collection of digital art; Art in General; Culver Center of the Arts Riverside CA; EYEBEAM NY and FACT Liverpool, Britain. They could not have done this without the generous support of Creative Capital and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, NYSCA, NYFA, Rhizome, CLUI, Taipei Artist Village, Eyebeam, Smack Mellon, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, the City College of New York, Hong Kong Baptist University and the Fulbright Program, among many others. Their novel “Grabeland” was published with Nightboat Books in February 2020.