topic

Aesthetics of Transformation

Discussion Series Spring / Summer 2025

Curated by School for Transformation

TOPIC CONTENT:

Schedule:

1 Apr, 12:00
Auditorium, Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030 Vienna
György Kepes. Interthinking Art & Science (Film screening)
Márton Orosz

11 Apr, 18:00
AIL, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Performing Transformation
McKenzie Wark and Ariadne Randall with Nanna Heidenreich

29 Apr, 18:00
AIL, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
The Influencing Machine: Latent Moods, Emergent Bias and Distributed Ontologies
Sonia Bernac with Monika Halkort

6 May, 16:00
Zirkus des Wissens, JKU Campus, 4040 Linz
Correlation and the ‘breeding’ of better Futures
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

13 May, 12:00
Lecture Room 1, School for Transformation, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Counter-research and the Arts: A Thousand Other Ways of Knowing
Daniela Zyman

27 May, 18:00
AIL, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Synthetic Images | Dynamic Maps
Svitlana Matviyenko with Ramon Reichert

10 Jun, 18:00
AIL, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
The Paradoxes of Positionality: Diaspora Aesthetics and Transdisciplinary Research
Noit Banai with Amanda Holmes

17 Jun, 18:00
AIL, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Plastic Aesthetics
Heather Davis with Monika Halkort

24 Jun, 13:00
Lecture Room 1, School for Transformation, Georg-Coch-Platz 2, 1010 Vienna
Transvaluation: Reclaiming Time
Miya Yoshida

(Not all events take place at AIL, please check location details. Find all info on the AIL dates below)

Artistic strategies, just like transdisciplinary approaches, do not start from fixed onto-epistemic positions, but draw on a multiplicity of registers and perceptions to disrupt hegemonic knowledge regimes. Likewise, both reject disciplinary boundaries in favor of transversal approaches, aiming to undo rigid distinctions between thinking and practice, embodied knowledge and scientific expertise. Based on a heterogenous mix of theoretical and practice-based interventions the lecture series asks:

To what extent can artistic strategies be transferred to other contexts? And is that indeed desirable, given the situated, open-ended, and speculative nature of arts-based research? Where do we need to insist on the autonomy of aesthetic practice to stay clear from the demands of transferability, valorisation and impact?

Together with a distinguished group of guests we explore what artistic strategies and aesthetics bring to the field of transdisciplinary research.

Images via planet.com

Johannes Kepler University Linz and the University of Applied Arts Vienna are jointly creating the 'Art x Science School for Transformation' (pronounced 'Art cross Science School for Transformation’). With the new study programs (BA and PhD), two universities are combining art and science. This discussion series is curated by School for Transformation.

discussion

11 Apr 2025, 18:00

Performing Transformation

McKenzie Wark and Ariadne Randall with Nanna Heidenreich

Part of the lecture series ‘Aesthetics of Transformation’, curated by the School for Transformation

School for Transformation

Find all dates of the series here

What’s it like to be a woman when the world’s on fire? What’s it like to be transgender when people want you dead? Was ‘Nature’ always Trans*? Can its destruction then be understood as transphobia – another mode of transfem erasure?

If technology was always nature, and labor was always feminine, how might their interwoven worlding be shaped by artistic and academic modes of knowledge production?

What do trans* bodies know that art and science must now learn? Drawing on Luce DeLire’s analysis of McKenzie Wark’s ouevre and Ms. Wark’s performance art collaboration with Ariadne Randall, Ms. Wark and Ms. Randall will discuss modes of knowing in performance, media, and trans* life; the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary formal production; and ask if Cybele ever really left us. If World is a cybernetic, transgender goddess from the future – then, honey, who’s an alien now?

The event follows the premiere Reverse Cowgirl II: Ride to the Top, at BRUT, April 10th, on the night before this discussion.

McKenzie Wark (left) and Ariadne Randall (right)

McKenzie Wark

is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. Her most recent, post-transition works of autofiction and autotheory – including Raving, Reverse Cowgirl and Love and Money, Sex and Death – brought her new audiences. She is a professor of media and cultural theory at the New School in New York.

Ariadne Randall

is an American artist, composer and writer based in Vienna. Her work practices worldbuilding through transmedia narrative. Through strategies of material depth and formal juxtaposition, she creates spaces for imagination in sound, language and image. She holds degrees in classical composition and contemporary art from UCLA and Bard MFA. Her work has been heard widely, from Lincoln Center and a recent song cycle for the Volksoper Wien to countless basements. Her Reverse Cowgirl Quartet rides her gender transition towards larger questions of identity and becoming. Her debut record as a transgender woman was released to critical acclaim in 2024 on Oxtail Recordings. She is represented by Galerie Peter Gaugy (Brussels/Vienna).

Photo via Nanna Heidenreich

Nanna Heidenreich

is a media & cultural studies scholar and professor for Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. She is also a curator for film/video art and political and theoretical interventions. Her (book) publications include Spectacle and Space of Possibility. Art and the Long Summer of Migration (in German, OA, 2022) and the anthologies fAKE hYBRID sITES pALIMPSEST: Essays on Leakages (edited together with Madhusree Dutta, 2021) and Tidal Thinking. Research beyond the nation-state system (in German, edited together with Rana Dasgupta and Katrin Klingan, 2019). Her current research focuses on the discourse of invasive species and (rage) as a queer-feminist arena.

Preview image via planet.com
Photo1 : Z. Walsh & Francesca Centonze
Photo NH: via Nanna Heidenreich

discussion

29 Apr 2025, 18:00

The Influencing Machine: Latent Moods, Emergent Bias and Distributed Ontologies

Sonia Bernac with Monika Halkort

Part of the lecture series ‘Aesthetics of Transformation’, curated by the School for Transformation

School for Transformation

Find all dates of the series here

This talk examines the problem of synthetic emergence: how AI generators, even when guided by loosely defined objectives, tend to produce commonsensical associations, aesthetic stereotypes, and familiar patterns of meaning. Rather than enabling radical experimentation, these systems often resolve into a ‘canny valley’ – a zone of overfamiliar coherence. Though bias, synthetic ‘moods,’ and aesthetics are not embedded in advance but emerge through systemic operations, their emergence is frequently steered toward a telos of the familiar. Without reducing the issue to flawed datasets or dismissing AI as a merely regurgitative ‘stochastic parrot,’ the talk explores the potential of synthetic intelligence and AI media generators as instruments of poietic praxis – requiring careful attunement to the novel patterns that arise through their experimentation. It emphasises the importance of distinguishing between different forms of the unknown within these systems, particularly the differences between randomness, undecidability, and noncomputability – each implying distinct artistic strategies. The ideas presented are practice-led, discussed through the experimental architecture of Polymorphs – a collaborative series of artworks and a complex generative AI system developed at the Artificial and Distributed Intelligence Lab, Royal College of Art, London.

Sonia Bernac (left) and Monika Halkort (right)

Sonia Bernac

is an artist, writer, and technologist. Her research investigates the ontological tensions of old and new materialisms, synthetic teratologies, intuitions of science-fiction, and pre-Enlightenment systems of knowledge. Framed as a bestiary of distributed intelligence, her work makes sense of hallucinations in generative AI, latent spaces, and emergent moods within synthetic environments. Without equating the non-human with the inhumane, she pays particular attention to the emergence of pathological systemic formations – exclusionary, compulsive, or sadistic imaginaries. Most recently, she was a senior researcher at Antikythera and the Artificial and Distributed Intelligence Lab at the Royal College of Art.

Monika Halkort

is assistant professor and head of the Art x Science School for Transformation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research and teaching focus on the political ecology of transformation processes, emphasising, in particular, the role of bio/geo-chemical substances and materials in mediating historical (in)justice and change.

Preview image via planet.com
Photo SB: by Studio Krasun
Photo MH: Georg Glaser

discussion

27 May 2025, 18:00

Synthetic Images | Dynamic Maps

Svitlana Matviyenko with Ramón Reichert

Part of the lecture series ‘Aesthetics of Transformation’, curated by the School for Transformation

School for Transformation

Find all dates of the series here

Maps of the war in Ukraine – and we know a good number of such tools – are typically not considered synthetic images in a sense of pure computer-generated simulations and visualizations. By focusing on one of them, DeepStateMap that is often regarded as “the most accurate map” of the war in Ukraine, the talk will consider its operational ability amid the war. Based on real-world geographic data, satellite imagery, intelligence reports, it still heavily relies on human analysts and data collectors. In other words, DeepStateMap constitutes a particular type of operational image that is, indeed, synthetic but in the most general sense of the word: it is written by a complex assemblage of human-machine collaboration. By looking at its synthetic nature and grass-roots origin, as well as its use as 1) a cognitive tool for understanding the evolving situation on the ground, including territorial control, troop movements, and the key strategic locations in the present, the talk will also address this map as a speculative tool for envisioning and modeling probable accidents and developments in the future, and 2) as a tool for negotiation between several radically different groups of viewers – not only Ukrainian forces and civilians, but also, the Russian aggressor.

Svitlana Matviyenko (left) and Ramón Reicher (right)

Svitlana Matviyenko

is an Associate Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication and Associate Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. Her research and teaching, informed by science & technology studies and history of science, are focused on information and cyberwar, media and environment, critical infrastructure studies and postcolonial theory. Matviyenko’s current work on nuclear cultures & heritage investigates the practices of nuclear terror, weaponization of pollution and technogenic catastrophes during the Russian war in Ukraine. Matviyenko is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019), a winner of the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and of the Canadian Communication Association 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize.

Ramón Reichert

(Dr. phil. habil.) teaches and researches at the Department of Cultural Studies at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. Previously, he taught and researched in Basel, Berlin, Canberra, Fribourg, Helsinki, Johannesburg, Sankt Gallen, Stockholm and Zurich and was EU project coordinator for many years. His recent research project »Visual Politics and Protest. Artistic Research Project on the visual framing of the Russia-Ukraine War on internet portals and social media« (2022-2024) was dealing with the visual politics of violence, conflict and resistance. Recent publications:Warfeed on Telegram: The Russian Full Scale Invasion against Ukraine as Crowdsourced War, in: Special Issue, Comparative Southeast European Studies 2025/02; Austrian Postwar Cinema between "Restoration" and "Modernism" 1945-1955, in: Elana Shapira, Austria and Modernism, Bloomsbury: London 2025; Digital War: Media Strategies and Visual Politics during the Full-Scale Attack of Russia on Ukraine, Digital Culture & Society2024/1, (co-editor, together with Anna Näslund, Stockholm); Digital Warfare. The Russian Full Scale Invasion against Ukraine as Enacted on Telegram, in: Harun Farocki Institut (ed. by Tom Holert, 12/10/2023), https://www.harun-farocki-institut.org/; Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism, Digital Culture & Society 2021/2 (co-editor, together with Olga Moskatova and Anna Polze).

Preview image via planet.com
Photo SM: Olga Zakrevska
Photo RR: Corn

discussion

10 Jun 2025, 18:00

The Paradoxes of Positionality

Diaspora Aesthetics and Transdisciplinary Research. With Noit Banai and Amanda Holmes

Part of the lecture series ‘Aesthetics of Transformation’, curated by the School for Transformation

School for Transformation

Find all dates of the series here

Since the 1980s, ‘positionality’ has become a critical methodology through which to deconstruct (western European) universal epistemologies and make visible ‘situated knowledges’ that have been rendered illegitimate, marginalized, repressed, or altogether silenced; at the same time, in more recent years, ‘positionality’ has become an opening towards increasingly rigid and reified models of particularized identity that have narrowed the bandwidth of the social imaginary by creating new orthodoxies, prohibitions, and techniques of disciplining. Starting from the premise that both diaspora aesthetics and transdisciplinary research materialize from the current paradoxes of positionality, I explore the potentials and limits of bringing these two fields into conversation within academic-aesthetic contexts and the mandates of the nation-state.

Noit Banai (left) and Amanda Holmes (right)

Noit Banai

(Columbia University, PhD) is Professor of Diaspora Aesthetics at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. An historian and critic, she specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on conditions of migration, exile, diaspora, border-regimes and statelessness in a transcultural and trans-disciplinary perspective. Her current book project is titled Stateless: Artistic Practices by Refugees in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, 1933-1953. She is also the author of Yves Klein (Reaktion Books, 2014), Being a Border (Paper Visual Arts, 2021) and many articles appearing in international journals.

Amanda Holmes

is a university assistant in the Philosophy Department at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Her research is situated at the intersection of theoretical psychoanalysis and 20th century continental philosophy. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, which is under contract with SUNY Press and is tentatively titled “No Real Word for It: The Invention Lacan’s objet a.”

Preview image via planet.com
Photo NB: Niko Havranek
Photo AH: via Amanda Holmes

discussion

17 Jun 2025, 18:00

Plastic Aesthetics

Heather Davies with Monika Halkort

Part of the lecture series ‘Aesthetics of Transformation’, curated by the School for Transformation

School for Transformation

Find all dates of the series here

This talk will address the question of transdisciplinary research between art, science, and the humanities through the work of the Synthetic Collective. Synthetic Collective works together to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complexities of plastics and micro-plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region. Crucial to this research methodology is the driving principle that artists and scientists conduct research together, from the outset of the inquiry.

Additionally, Heather Davis will also present some questions drawing from the ongoing collaboration with a person who works in a plastic cup factory, and Heather Davis‘ theorization of plastic, to think through what these collective practices might effect, and how knowledge is made differently when it is produced together.

Heather Davis (left) and Monika Halkort (right)

Heather Davis

is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at the New School. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies and editor of the award-winning collection Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Monika Halkort

Preview image via planet.com
Photo HD: Heather Davis
Photo MH: Georg Glaser