Spring Symposium 2024

The Theory and Practice module consists of a series of seminars, in which theoretical lectures and artistic exercises complement each other in the teaching process, as well as the biannual symposia organized at the IAGN each semester. In addition, there are the symposiums offered through the Master of Fine Arts Platform Switzerland (master-platform.ch), a network in which the seven participating universities offer specialized courses in theory, technique, and context.

Animal Dancing as a Technology of Co-Evolving Bodies “When dance will come to robots naturally, they will free themselves from being just tools at the service of humans,” an MIT researcher once said. In 1998 E.O Wilson, an American biologist and world’s leading authority on ants, published Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, in which he advocated for the interrelatedness and evolutionary origins of all human thought. He used a notion, consilience, to name the magical “jumping together” of all knowledges—what we might call today, all existing forms of intelligence. This symposium is dedicated to dance and animal movement, understanding it as an ancient technology oriented towards understanding the co-evolution of bodies. That is, animal bodies, human bodies, machine bodies, and organisms (and organs) without a body. Why so? Because our vision of the world is often reduced to envisioning rigid and independent units that interact with one another, but this is a simplification. The more complex reality is that the relationships between subjects and objects is fluid and constructed at the moment of mutual encounter. This view also affects the way we understand intelligence interpreted as the result of a unitary already-developed consciousness located somewhere inside the brain. To be able to imagine decentralized forms of intelligence greatly impacts how we view the technologies we build, but it also offers a new way of understanding the agency of citizenship in our impoverished systems of democracy. Can a new political thinking and a new view of seeing forms of organization beyond the power-centered ones emerge from dance? We think, paraphrasing the words of Laura Tripaldi, that our technologies do not belong to us and we therefore cannot use them to change what seems wrong and unjust in nature. Instead, we simply borrow these technologies—like divine forces—and therefore we must handle them with sacred rever.

Registration deadline:

15th April 24