Pool 3: Art & Investigative Aesthetics (gLV)

Many contemporary artistic practices are engaged in investigative practices. They probe environmental violations, technological domination and degradations of human life. Using open-source videos and satellite imagery they do visual explorations and thus mobilise sensibilities in order to speak “truth”. Investigative Aesthetics draws on theories of knowledge, ecology, and technology. It engages in methods of citizen forensic, micro-history and art. Such practices take place in the studio, in the laboratory, the courtroom and in the white cube, online and in the streets, as they strive towards the construction of a different common sense. Investigative aesthetics tend to transform the often too linear individual cogito into a multi-scale sensor of complex processes of becoming.

The seminar tries to blow of some dust of aesthetics, as dust itself has senses alongside our in-built capacity to sense, perceive and decode information. It will present different artistic practices (Forensic Architecture, Otolith Group, YOHA, Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Kate Crawford/Anatomy of AI, Trevor Paglen and others), will invite artists to online exchanges with the students. Visits are planned to exhibitions and to a molecular biology- (new frontiers between life and non-life) and a software lab (Risk Management for hurricane prediction).


About the lecturer:

Christian Hübler / knowbotiq has been experimenting with forms and medialities of knowledge, political representations and epistemic disobedience. In recent projects knowbotiq is investigating and enacting inhuman geographies with the focus on algorithmic governmentalities, libidinous and affective economies and postcolonial violence.