CURATORIAL & ORGANIZATION
Hedonistika (2022)
Poster design in collaboration with Thomas Preindl
The Hedonistika, previously held in Montreal, Canada, and Holon, Israel is an international gathering that encourages discourse on technology, art, and hedonism through a joyful interaction with machines. Founded by the art-technology-philosophy group monochrom in 2014, the Hedonistika is staged again in 2022 together with the cultural club DH5 as a part of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.
The initiators of the Hedonistika conceived it as an attempt to bridge the gap between our everyday life and mechatronics usually confined to the highly specialized industrial processes, to foster a playful exploration and hacking of the black-boxed technology. But isn’t it too self-indulgent to opt-in pleasure as the main mode of such interactions? And aren’t there more pressing issues to invest our time and technical ingenuity in?
Scientists agree that seeking satisfaction and avoiding suffering is a general principle wherein our brains operate. It is thus an indubitable aspect of our lives. Yet using art in pursuits of pleasure does not fit well with the new agendas of media arts that seek to justify themselves through, on the one hand, fostering innovation in response to environmental issues, and, on the other hand, making science and governments accountable to society. Against such background, the Hedonistika proposes to start by taking a closer look at our desires and what brings us pleasure. This proposal, however, does not defy those noble agendas. Instead, it points out to the sociocultural construction of technology, that is, various ideologies that determine which technology is valuable, who should benefit from it, and which objectives are worth pursuing. Perhaps, fostering technological innovation and moving towards sustainability can start nearby, in our very lifeworld and following the basic principle of our existence. To this end, Hedonistika presents tangible artistic interfaces promoting the most intuitive way of man-machine interaction–elevating pleasure and assuaging suffering.
Hedonistika 2022 presents 27 projects and expands the range of pleasure-giving machines beyond the cooking and food-serving robots. This move emphasizes that pleasure can be found everywhere, it can be delivered by means as simple as a soothing sound or as convoluted as an old alchemist’s dream of turning bodily secretions into gold. The artistic machines serve comfort foods and booze, prohibit the exercise of self-control, deliver muscular relaxation and stimulate sexually, tease and alter sensual experiences, sustain a conversation, distract, and even provide a little bit of appeasing violence. Everything in pursuit of pleasuring the audience in ways beyond imagination!
Hedonistika is organized by DH5 and monochrom.
Core team: Franky Ablinger, Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Preindl, Walter Stadler, Kat Suryna.
Curators: Walter Stadler, Kat Suryna, and Thomas Preindl.
The initiators of the Hedonistika conceived it as an attempt to bridge the gap between our everyday life and mechatronics usually confined to the highly specialized industrial processes, to foster a playful exploration and hacking of the black-boxed technology. But isn’t it too self-indulgent to opt-in pleasure as the main mode of such interactions? And aren’t there more pressing issues to invest our time and technical ingenuity in?
Scientists agree that seeking satisfaction and avoiding suffering is a general principle wherein our brains operate. It is thus an indubitable aspect of our lives. Yet using art in pursuits of pleasure does not fit well with the new agendas of media arts that seek to justify themselves through, on the one hand, fostering innovation in response to environmental issues, and, on the other hand, making science and governments accountable to society. Against such background, the Hedonistika proposes to start by taking a closer look at our desires and what brings us pleasure. This proposal, however, does not defy those noble agendas. Instead, it points out to the sociocultural construction of technology, that is, various ideologies that determine which technology is valuable, who should benefit from it, and which objectives are worth pursuing. Perhaps, fostering technological innovation and moving towards sustainability can start nearby, in our very lifeworld and following the basic principle of our existence. To this end, Hedonistika presents tangible artistic interfaces promoting the most intuitive way of man-machine interaction–elevating pleasure and assuaging suffering.
Hedonistika 2022 presents 27 projects and expands the range of pleasure-giving machines beyond the cooking and food-serving robots. This move emphasizes that pleasure can be found everywhere, it can be delivered by means as simple as a soothing sound or as convoluted as an old alchemist’s dream of turning bodily secretions into gold. The artistic machines serve comfort foods and booze, prohibit the exercise of self-control, deliver muscular relaxation and stimulate sexually, tease and alter sensual experiences, sustain a conversation, distract, and even provide a little bit of appeasing violence. Everything in pursuit of pleasuring the audience in ways beyond imagination!
Hedonistika is organized by DH5 and monochrom.
Core team: Franky Ablinger, Günther Friesinger, Johannes Grenzfurthner, Thomas Preindl, Walter Stadler, Kat Suryna.
Curators: Walter Stadler, Kat Suryna, and Thomas Preindl.
Art IN Academia (2018)
photo by Adrian Zoltan
The relationship between art and academic research can take different shapes and meanings. Recent decades have seen an increase in artists engaging in traditional academic research settings, such as laboratories, collaborating with scientists, philosophers, engineers, and the like. The different interactions between art and academia seem to offer new perspectives to known and complex issues across different fields, allowing artists and researchers to blur the lines between artistic practice and academic research. Although collaboration between artists and researchers has become the main format in these transdisciplinary practices, this interaction can also take place within individuals in the form of artist-researchers and researcher-artists. Art IN Academia explores a range of possible ways in which academic endeavors, other than art history and art theory, can inform, inspire or become complemented by the art created by scholars and researchers within institutional academic walls.
Aleksandar Pantic, a historian and graduate of the Cultural Heritage Studies, conducts a piece of artistic research into archetypical models of visual composition by means of an extensive analysis of traditional artworks, handcrafted items, and iconographies. Post-Modern Graphemes offers a series of simple and memorable graphical forms that stand somewhere in between artistic image and graphic design.
In the projects created by cognitive scientist Thomas Wolf and anthropologist Egor Novikov, art figures as part and extension of academic research. Das Tanztheremin by Thomas Wolf invites visitors to create sounds together as he tests scientific hypotheses about how people coordinate their actions in time, in space and in other domains such as musical pitch and harmony. In Dirty Body Sacred, Egor Novikov visually maps the theoretical conceptualization of the central charity object—the homeless destitute people—and carries an interdisciplinary investigation on social exclusion and structures of dirt/purity, in which art figures as a source of models and factual material.
Kat Suryna, a philosopher, and Sara Maksimović, a gender studies specialist, take art as a form of meta-discourse within their research fields. Landscapes of Mind by Kat Suryna challenges the discourse-dependent art and reflects on distinctive features of two different territories in philosophical thinking—continental and analytical philosophy— by making them speak about the meaning of the artwork. The Issue of Memory by Sara Maksimović questions her positionality as a researcher in the study of an inherited memory of historical trauma and disrupts the subject/object dichotomy often found in ethnographic research.
Inspired by the metaphysics of consciousness, Untitled (YOU) by philosopher Marta Santuccio, explores the nature and boundaries of consciousness through perception and introspection and pushes the boundaries of thinking outside the often too narrow box of academic philosophy.
Curator: Kat Suryna
Partners: Center for Arts and Culture (CEU); The Vera & Donald Blinken Open Society Archives
Translators: Karolin Benko, Dorottya Urai, and Lilla Foldy-Molnar
Photography: Adrian Zoltan
Aleksandar Pantic, a historian and graduate of the Cultural Heritage Studies, conducts a piece of artistic research into archetypical models of visual composition by means of an extensive analysis of traditional artworks, handcrafted items, and iconographies. Post-Modern Graphemes offers a series of simple and memorable graphical forms that stand somewhere in between artistic image and graphic design.
In the projects created by cognitive scientist Thomas Wolf and anthropologist Egor Novikov, art figures as part and extension of academic research. Das Tanztheremin by Thomas Wolf invites visitors to create sounds together as he tests scientific hypotheses about how people coordinate their actions in time, in space and in other domains such as musical pitch and harmony. In Dirty Body Sacred, Egor Novikov visually maps the theoretical conceptualization of the central charity object—the homeless destitute people—and carries an interdisciplinary investigation on social exclusion and structures of dirt/purity, in which art figures as a source of models and factual material.
Kat Suryna, a philosopher, and Sara Maksimović, a gender studies specialist, take art as a form of meta-discourse within their research fields. Landscapes of Mind by Kat Suryna challenges the discourse-dependent art and reflects on distinctive features of two different territories in philosophical thinking—continental and analytical philosophy— by making them speak about the meaning of the artwork. The Issue of Memory by Sara Maksimović questions her positionality as a researcher in the study of an inherited memory of historical trauma and disrupts the subject/object dichotomy often found in ethnographic research.
Inspired by the metaphysics of consciousness, Untitled (YOU) by philosopher Marta Santuccio, explores the nature and boundaries of consciousness through perception and introspection and pushes the boundaries of thinking outside the often too narrow box of academic philosophy.
Curator: Kat Suryna
Partners: Center for Arts and Culture (CEU); The Vera & Donald Blinken Open Society Archives
Translators: Karolin Benko, Dorottya Urai, and Lilla Foldy-Molnar
Photography: Adrian Zoltan
more information on Art IN Academia here
