Talk and workshop by Felix Stalder og Cornelia Sollfrank: “Datafication and Embodiment: An open-ended talk”

Free entry
Language: English

You are invited to a talk and workshop by Felix Stalder and Cornelia Sollfrank organized by the Centre for Research in Artistic Practice under Contemporary Conditions at Aarhus University, in collaboration with Kunsthal Aarhus.

Participation is free, but we recommend securing a seat by taking out a free ticket on Billetto.
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ABOUT THE EVENT
Recently, with machine learning, it seems like anything - images, sounds, literary texts - can be turned into data. A corollary this "everything can be data" approach is an implicit or explicit assumption that everything that is not data, does not exist. In this open-ended talk, Felix Stalder and Cornelia Sollfrank will make room for the diversity of data - not all of it computable. Starting from two ongoing research projects, they will look at the relationship between datafication and embodiment: once in the context of an auto-ethnography of breathing and self-quantification, and once in the context of rewilding a bird into an anthropogenic environment.

The two artist researchers who currently work together at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) will explore digital abstractions and material embodiments as two mutually constitutive dimensions of reality that frame each other in incomplete and non-deterministic ways.
Instead of presenting answers, they will share observations and reflections and develop a series of questions from them. The audience is invited to contribute their own experiences with datafication and embodiment to explore them further together.

BIOGRAPHY
Cornelia Sollfrank, PhD, (b. 1960, Feilershammer, Germany) is an artist, researcher and writer, living in Berlin (Germany). Recurring subjects in her artistic and academic work in and about digital cultures are artistic infrastructures, new forms of (political) self-organization, critical authorship, aesthetics of the commons, and techno-feminist practice and theory. As a pioneer of Internet art, Cornelia built up a reputation with two central projects: the net.art generator – a web-based art-producing ‘machine,’ and Female Extension – her famous hack of the first competition for Internet art. She is currently working at Zurich University of the arts in the research project “Latent Spaces - Performing Ambiguous Data.
Recent publications include The beautiful Warriors. Technofeminist Practice in the 21st Century (2020, Minor Compositions, London), Aesthetics of the Commons (2021, Diaphanes AG, Zürich) and Fix My Code (sammen med Winnie Soon) (2021, EECLECTIC, Berlin) – all open access.

See more here.

Felix Stalder (b. 1968, Basel, Switzerland) is a professor for Digital Culture at the Zurich University of the Arts and is project lead for the "Latent Spaces" research project. His work focuses on the intersection of cultural, political, technological and ecological dynamics, in particular on new modes of commons-based production, copyright, datafication, surveillance, and transformation of subjectivity and nature. He not only works as an academic, but also as a cultural producer, being a moderator of the mailing list , a crucial nexus of critical net culture, a member of the World Information Institute and the Technopolitics Working Group, both based in Vienna.
He is the author/editor of numerous books, Digital Solidarity (2014, PML & Mute), The Digital Condition / Kultur der Digitalität (2016, Suhrkamp, Berlin), Aesthetics of the Commons (2021, Diaphanes, Berlin) og Digital Unconscious (2021, Autonomedia, New York) and From Commons to NFT (2022, Aksioma, Ljubljana).

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Supported by

Image: Portrait of Cornelia Sollfrank. Courtesy of the artist.
Image: Portrait of Cornelia Sollfrank. Courtesy of the artist.
Image: Portrait of Felix Stalder. Photo: Dominik Landwehr.
Image: Portrait of Felix Stalder. Photo: Dominik Landwehr.