Activist Neuroaesthetics Conference
July 8-11, 2021 via Zoom, free with registration links below.
All times CET/Berlin.

The ACTIVIST NEUROAESTHETICS Conference will take place online July 8-11 and includes a number of important thinkers to Activist Neuroaesthetics including Elena Agudio, Yann Moulier Boutang, Juli Carson, Yves Citton, Arne de Boever, Jacquelene Drinkall, Agnieszka Kurant, Karen Lofgren, Anna Munster, Reza Negarestani, Warren Neidich, Florencia Portocarrero, Tony David Sampson, and Anuradha Vikram. An introductory panel discussion with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Cécile Malaspina, Warren Neidich, and Charles T. Wolfe will summarize the first ACTIVIST NEUROAESTHETICS Symposium (videos now available) held March 5-6, 2021.

We are on the verge of a paradigm shift as we transition from a knowledge and information economy to a neural-based one. The advent of an immanent assortment of new technologies like brain-computer interfaces, cortical implants and attention enhancing drugs will join sophisticated forms of artificial intelligence and constitute what is already being referred to as neoliberal neural capitalism. Together they will give new meaning to forms of surveillance and digital governance in the coming digital regimes of superintelligence and the singularity. Activist Neuroaesthetics describes an activist approach to understanding not only the importance of neural plasticity in transforming the material brain, but realizing the proactive potential of art and artists in that transformational process.

Activist Neuroaesthetics understands the brain does not simply reside in the skull as living matter, but is entangled in the contested socio-political-cultural and technological milieu with which it coevolves. Instead of minimizing the liminal, unconscious, mystical, and magical conditions of perception and cognition, Activist Neuroaesthetics maximizes it. It refutes the dogma of what is known as Positive Neuroaesthetics which sees the brain as an unchanging, crystallized entity defined by pure and unchanging essences and whose goal is to explain artworks, such as paintings, through its effects upon the brain’s neural processing itself rather than as something happening independently or outside of the material brain’s jurisdiction. In other words, Positive Neuroaesthetics is focused on facts generated by the scientific method, rather than cultural or artistic ones. Activist Neuroaesthetics is a counter-insurgency which uses its own history of art production, spaces, and temporalities to produce ideologies of dissent where events going on inside and outside the brain coevolve together and our cognitive abilities are expanded, rather than normalized. Activist Neuroaesthetics aims to produce a radicalized post-humanist subject; one which displaces the normalized unitary subject and replaces it with a complex global non-binary relational one.

THURSDAY, JULY 8
5pm: Introduction
5:30: Panel with Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Cécile Malaspina, Warren Neidich, and Charles T. Wolfe
7:30: Warren Neidich

FRIDAY, JULY 9
1pm: Yann Moulier Boutang
2:30: Yves Citton
5pm: Tony David Sampson
6:30: Reza Negarestani

SATURDAY, JULY 10
10am: Anna Munster
11:30: Jacquelene Drinkall
1pm: Kundalini Yoga with Nathalie Anglès

SATURDAY, JULY 10
2:30: TBA
5pm: Florencia Portocarrero and Karen Lofgren
6:30: Anuradha Vikram

SUNDAY, JULY 11
1pm: Elena Agudio
2:30: Agnieszka Kurant
5pm: Juli Carson
6:30: Arne De Boever

Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art
The Activist Neuroaesthetics Conference is presented in collaboration with this year’s Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) online program, “Activist Neuroaesthetics in Cognitive Capitalism.” SFSIA is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory that stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. SFSIA originated in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in 2015 and migrated to Berlin, Germany in 2016 where it most recently has been hosted by Spike. Additional programs have been hosted by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and Performance Space New York. In 2021, SFSIA is collaborating with sonsbeek20→24 on a program in Arnhem, The Netherlands. The institute was founded by artist and theorist Warren Neidich and co-directed by art critic and poet Barry Schwabsky. Sarrita Hunn is the artistic coordinator.

SPEAKER BIOS and more info https://activistneuroaesthetics.art/conference/
 

This project is made possible with support from Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Stiftung Kunstfonds, Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Kultur am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz e.V., and private donors.