Fabric of Dreams. Towards a Technodiversity

Today, the prospects of digital technologies are both auspicious and frightening: With digital assistance and whole new virtual environments, as well as promising advances in AI and machine learning on the one hand, and surveillance capitalism, discriminating datasets and life-threatening cyberwars on the other. How did this conflicting situation come about? To answer this question, we have to acknowledge that technologies are temporally and spatially produced, affected by different epistemes, ideologies, political interests, economic forces and cultural practices.

Accordingly, technological development is always fragmented.

The starting point for the exhibition ‘Fabric of Dreams: Towards a Technodiversity’ – which is the culmination of a semester-long lecture series – is the assumption that weal and woe of digital media technologies have always been two sides of the same coin. Rethinking today’s techno-scientific model with its extractivist and increasingly violent logic calls for concepts capable of moving beyond the flawed idea that universal technological solutions are the answers to our social problems; and, conversely, the assumption that our political distortions are merely induced by technological developments. Instead, we need to lay bare the complex – and often contested – relations we entertain with our machines.

In order to weave the fabric of our future dreams in a multilayered way, the exhibition presents artworks that investigate the in-between spaces of our socio-technical relations.

The exhibition raises the question of how we can escape this singular vision of technology and its rather definitive configuration as a fully automated machine intelligence. It therefore investigates new openings, narratives, and potentials by pursuing a two-fold goal: it seeks to address the challenges current technological transformations pose to art and artistic practices, and, at the same time, it also asks how those practices can in turn challenge the technological status quo.

In addition, the exhibition serves as a platform for discursive and performative interventions in technological discoveries and inventions. For this purpose, it will be structured around three key issues:

(i) the (prosthetic) body and disembodied experiences in the digital realm;

(ii) multiple ways of being in the world that challenge the human condition of intelligence and sentience; and

(iii) techno-ecologies and the synthetic foundation of organic matter.

The selected artists argue for different narratives and epistemes in relation to technology in order to build critical and promising dreams and potentials of a multifaceted future – towards a Technodiversity.

Program:

Save the Date!

4 May 2023

Loose Threads
Additional Discourse

Please note:

The exhibition is closed on 30 Mar and from 6–11 Apr

Artists:
Christina Gruber
Cyrus Kabiru
kennedy+swan
Mary Maggic
Kumbirai Makumbe
Christiane Peschek
Luiza Prado de O. Martins
Anna Vasof
Christian Freude/Christina Jauernik/Johann Lurf/Fabian Puttinger/Rüdiger Suppin*