Scaling Connections I - Pyrite Cluster
Installation, spoken-word performance & discussion, 7-9 PM, 23 January, 2019
For the official cooperation program of transmediale 2019,
Import Projects presents four evenings of lecture-performance, installation, spoken-word performance, discussion, voice & instrumental improvisation, film screening and participatory intervention in dialogue with the festival key question ‘What Moves You?’—referring not only to an emotional response but also to the infrastructures and aesthetics that govern how affect becomes mobilised as a political force today. Foregrounding the continuum which links rare-earth elements, raw materials, hardware, software, and even cognition, the event series Scaling Connections turns around the blurred boundaries between organic and inorganic, intelligence, artifice, art, and resistance.
SCALING CONNECTIONS draws from Deep History reminding us to constantly observe reasoning commonly internalised and conducted according to strict principles of validity, an appeal not only for viewing natural history and that of human culture but also for seeing our cognitive and psychological history. A critical debate over the last decades has stimulated sensitisation for interdisciplinary research and further historical interpretations, for instance focusing on trends and processes, drawing attention to connections and traditions and a shared substance, like deep kinship, able to reveal striking transformations in human behaviour. Reaching back to the beginning of life itself, to the primordial sandwich as proposed by the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser in 1988, fostering surprising connections. Deep History advocates to revive the foundation of humanity by scaling up from the molecular to the molar without the bias and in the process decentres humankind’s position. The central question of the event series is how the future of our brains—in the role of a constitutive element of freedom of choice—could look against the backdrop of a deeper understanding of our history in relation to today's ever-closer wiring with technologies. Curated by Anja Henckel
DENISA LEHOCKA
artist/ relates found objects to serial notes, modular studies, textile objects, lengthy artistic working process, develops a “poetics of the succinct”, appears both light and ephemeral- deals with the multifaceted obscure relationships between real and imaginary
BORIS ONDREICKA
artist, musician, curator TBA21, Class of Interpretation COI/ focus a cooperative educational project, interdisciplinarity, linguistical-political unfolding, poetics relation of word and image
MOHAMMAD SALEMY
artist, critic, curator The New Centre for Research & Practice/ focus online schools bridging the gap between legacy institutions and new knowledge production, transdisciplinary research
GÜNTER WÄCHTERSHÄUSER
Günter Wächtershäuser (born 1938), a German chemist turned patent lawyer, is widely known for his work on the origin of life, and in particular his iron-sulfur world theory, a theory that life on Earth had hydrothermal origins. The theory is consistent with the hypothesis that life originated near seafloor hydrothermal vents.
The iron–sulfur world hypothesis (1988) is a set of proposals for the origin of life and the early evolution of life advanced in a series of articles between 1988 and 1992 by Günter Wächtershäuser, a Munich patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry, who had been encouraged and supported by philosopher Karl R. Popper to publish his ideas. The hypothesis proposes that early life may have formed on the surface of iron sulfide minerals, hence the name. It was developed by retrodiction from extant biochemistry in conjunction with chemical experiments.
The artists’ agenda is expressed thus:
Interpreting human super-structures as a poetic extension of (Whitmanian) shareable atoms—let us, for a moment, deorganicize our onto-/cosmological perspectives. Let us climb (or, better, dive) into our deepest mines (like Verneian inversed mountaineerers)—Down, to autochtonic, biosemiotic, pyrite abiogenetic, chemosynthetic tissues (primordial hydrothermal volcanic oikoses). Let us follow pioneering bodies and speak (or just exhale, archaeopsychically, hypnotically) against organic-inorganic-living-nonliving-undead-dead econo-communicative dogmas, beyond the realms of that divinized slayer, the Sun. So doing, we might (anaerobically) reach that strata where our discursive emanations meet the murmurs of materials (flesh, bone marrow, cells) and machines—in productive interjections (≈ oscillation).
We will need to understand/speak this language very soon.
My GEONTOLOGICAL hyperbola (and/or widely associative metaphor) should kindle some flames (kinetic energy, polemos) of a resensitization of this beamy, horrible world. One that we all (minerals-vegetables-animals-machines) live on, at, and in.
Click here for more information about Scaling Connections
A cooperation between transmediale and Import Projects. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Stay informed
SCALING CONNECTIONS draws from Deep History reminding us to constantly observe reasoning commonly internalised and conducted according to strict principles of validity, an appeal not only for viewing natural history and that of human culture but also for seeing our cognitive and psychological history. A critical debate over the last decades has stimulated sensitisation for interdisciplinary research and further historical interpretations, for instance focusing on trends and processes, drawing attention to connections and traditions and a shared substance, like deep kinship, able to reveal striking transformations in human behaviour. Reaching back to the beginning of life itself, to the primordial sandwich as proposed by the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser in 1988, fostering surprising connections. Deep History advocates to revive the foundation of humanity by scaling up from the molecular to the molar without the bias and in the process decentres humankind’s position. The central question of the event series is how the future of our brains—in the role of a constitutive element of freedom of choice—could look against the backdrop of a deeper understanding of our history in relation to today's ever-closer wiring with technologies. Curated by Anja Henckel
DENISA LEHOCKA
artist/ relates found objects to serial notes, modular studies, textile objects, lengthy artistic working process, develops a “poetics of the succinct”, appears both light and ephemeral- deals with the multifaceted obscure relationships between real and imaginary
BORIS ONDREICKA
artist, musician, curator TBA21, Class of Interpretation COI/ focus a cooperative educational project, interdisciplinarity, linguistical-political unfolding, poetics relation of word and image
MOHAMMAD SALEMY
artist, critic, curator The New Centre for Research & Practice/ focus online schools bridging the gap between legacy institutions and new knowledge production, transdisciplinary research
GÜNTER WÄCHTERSHÄUSER
Günter Wächtershäuser (born 1938), a German chemist turned patent lawyer, is widely known for his work on the origin of life, and in particular his iron-sulfur world theory, a theory that life on Earth had hydrothermal origins. The theory is consistent with the hypothesis that life originated near seafloor hydrothermal vents.
The iron–sulfur world hypothesis (1988) is a set of proposals for the origin of life and the early evolution of life advanced in a series of articles between 1988 and 1992 by Günter Wächtershäuser, a Munich patent lawyer with a degree in chemistry, who had been encouraged and supported by philosopher Karl R. Popper to publish his ideas. The hypothesis proposes that early life may have formed on the surface of iron sulfide minerals, hence the name. It was developed by retrodiction from extant biochemistry in conjunction with chemical experiments.
The artists’ agenda is expressed thus:
Interpreting human super-structures as a poetic extension of (Whitmanian) shareable atoms—let us, for a moment, deorganicize our onto-/cosmological perspectives. Let us climb (or, better, dive) into our deepest mines (like Verneian inversed mountaineerers)—Down, to autochtonic, biosemiotic, pyrite abiogenetic, chemosynthetic tissues (primordial hydrothermal volcanic oikoses). Let us follow pioneering bodies and speak (or just exhale, archaeopsychically, hypnotically) against organic-inorganic-living-nonliving-undead-dead econo-communicative dogmas, beyond the realms of that divinized slayer, the Sun. So doing, we might (anaerobically) reach that strata where our discursive emanations meet the murmurs of materials (flesh, bone marrow, cells) and machines—in productive interjections (≈ oscillation).
We will need to understand/speak this language very soon.
My GEONTOLOGICAL hyperbola (and/or widely associative metaphor) should kindle some flames (kinetic energy, polemos) of a resensitization of this beamy, horrible world. One that we all (minerals-vegetables-animals-machines) live on, at, and in.
Click here for more information about Scaling Connections
A cooperation between transmediale and Import Projects. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Stay informed
