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20191014

My report Mitä jää käteen kun saa aivan liikaa ja vielä enemmän? [What do you get when you are offered too much and more] on the Ural Industrial Biennial 2019 is out on Mustekala.info. It starts with a short description of the organization and an overview of the biennial’s this years theme “Immortality”. I’ve based my examination on texts offered in the catalogue and a very light reading of philosopher Yuk Hui’s work (he’s cited in the texts, as mentioned and felt very influential for the show). I had a lot of time to study material on the train! I recap a funny Rostec representative who tried to appropriate the theme during a panel by calling their corporation immortal and ponder if the seminar talk about contemporary art conservation was a way to deal with Lenin’s corpse.

The text continues as an easygoing account of my session with a biennial “mediator” Dennis. We browsed artworks which he deemed important for the exhibition. This suited me well as the focus of the tour turned out to be on post-colonial thought (largely dealing with China and specifically Hong Kong). I try to assess how (or if) the presentation of works refers to contemporary Russia. I celebrate the biennials pedagogical program and ponder if the gigantic amount of art on display is an attempt to make the biennial more accessible for the diverse Russian art audiences (something for everybody) or to silence everybody with the volume of works. Depictions of my chats with Dennis exposes the various technical hassles shadowing the exhibition.. But I’m not judgemental of the hassle. I enjoy them and the affordances they offers.

I conclude my review by summarizing our visit to the Uralsbest mine and factory, which was organized by the biennial. (There is a photo by Elina!) I try to think what it means that media surfaces used for contemporary art exhibitions, are made from minerals hauled from similar mines and try to frame of the mine visit as an opportunity to radically question how toxicities should be addressed. The text ends with me regretting that I couldn’t take the people we met in Asbestos city “seriously”. I regret not having a register to hear what they said about asbestos, because they must have very specialized knowledge on how we (in the global west) could learn to cope with toxins in the future.

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20190928

Cybernetics for the Twenty-First Century: An Interview with Philosopher Yuk Hui (2019) Geert Lovink. Hui sees the technological dominance of the Global West coming to an end and turns to models found in Chinese philosophy that aren’t rooted on a binary division between nature/culture.

We live in an age of neo-mechanism, in which technical objects are becoming organic. […] Being mechanistic doesn’t necessarily mean being related to machines; rather, it refers to machines that are built on linear causality, for example clocks, or thermodynamic machines like the steam engine.

[…] evolution is creative, since it is fundamentally organological in the sense that evolution is also a process in which human beings are obliged to constantly create new organs (e.g., figures), while not being blinded by them, i.e., by not regarding them as the totality of reality. Mechanism wants to explain life, without realizing that it is only a
phase of life, e.g., a figure.

On the surface, transhumanism seems to want to get rid of the concept of the human. However, this gesture is only camouflage. Transhumanism is a quintessentially humanist approach to the world, since all is captured within a metaphysical gaze

Huis talk What Begins After the End of Enlightenment? (2018) for e-flux is great. He argues that accelerationism is an direct continuation of enlightenment philosophy and identifies recent AI hype as a desire for a sublime man-made intelligence, trough which (western) men hope to transcendent themselves. He looks at technology as philosophy, referencing Heidegger and wants to find an alternatives to the prevailing (western) ethno- and technofuturism from “cosmotechics”. To achieve this he asks us to identify the locality of our technological thought. I think he’s talking about crafts.

I’ve been reading The Question Concerning Technology in China (2019) Yuk Hui. It builds thoroughly articulated links between Chinese and Western philosophy. Almost like an anthology. Tim Ingold is mentioned frequently. Hui is the philosopher cited in Ural Industrial Biennial catalogue by curator Xiaoyu Weng. Works in the exhibition feel almost like illustrations to this book.

In Chinese cosmology, one finds a sense other than vision, hearing, and touch. It is called Ganying, literally meaning ‘feeling’ and ‘response’, and is often […] understood as ‘correlative thinking’. I prefer to call it resonance […] It yields a ‘moral sentiment’ and further, a ‘moral obligation’ (in social and political terms) which is not solely the product of subjective contemplation, but rather emerges from the resonance between the Heaven and the human, since the Heaven is the ground of the moral.