Organized by Equitable Vitrines’ Scholar-In-Residence Joseph Lemelin.
As automation and data-fueled technologies reconfigure lived experience, what new forms of sensing emerge? What kinds of relationships between human and machine sense arise? And what does it mean for artists and theorists to intervene within these aesthetic transformations? This lecture series gathers five contemporary thinkers from different theoretical orientations to investigate the capacities of art and technology to shape alternative worlds of sense and sense-making. Organized by Joseph Lemelin and featuring Roy Ben-Shai, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Amy Ireland, Robin Mackay, and Gabriel Rockhill, the series is presented by Equitable Vitrines on the occasion of Florian Hecker’s exhibition Resynthesizers. Addressing Hecker’s work directly and obliquely, speakers in this series reflect on themes that Hecker’s work evokes at the meeting point of theory and artistic practice.
JOSEph lemelin
Joseph Lemelin is a philosopher based in New York City. His work combines critical theory and the philosophy of mind to examine emerging technologies. He has taught in the Philosophy Department at The New School for Social Research and currently teaches philosophy of technology in the graduate program in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
roy ben-shai
Roy Ben-Shai teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. His book, A Critique of Critique, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Intervening in the fraught landscape of contemporary critical theory, in which competing theoretical standpoints attempt to delegitimize each other, Roy’s work argues for the need to recognize fundamentally different orientations of critical thinking, which are incompatible and irreconcilable, yet equally valid and necessary.
gabriel rockhill
Gabriel Rockhill is a philosopher, cultural critic and activist. He is the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. His recent books include Contre-histoire du temps present (2017; available in English as Counter-History of the Present), Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016), Radical History & the Politics of Art (2014) and Logique de l’histoire: Pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques (2010). In addition to his scholarly work, he is actively engaged in extra-academic activities in the art and activist worlds, and his writings have appeared in venues like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Truthout, CounterPunch, Liberation School, Libération and Mediapart.
wendy hui kyong chun
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media, Professor of Communication and Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016), and Discriminating Data (2021, MIT Press), and co-author of Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota + Meson Press 2019). She has been Professor and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she worked for almost two decades and where she’s currently a Visiting Professor.
This series is made possible by lead funding from the Wilhelm Family Foundation. Generous support is provided by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the Michael Asher Foundation, the Kebok Foundation, the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles, and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
Related
Exhibition
Florian Hecker: Resynthesizers
December 1, 2021 – March 13, 2022
Related
Events
Sun, Mar 6, 2022
6-8pm
Tue, Mar 8, 2022
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