SYNAPSE Conference 2013. Photo: Dante Busquets, 2013
The SYNAPSE 2013 conference got off to a start today. Present at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt were this year’s round of eleven curators – Nabil Ahmed, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Xiaoyu Weng, Natasha Ginwala, Alice Carey, Manuela Moscoso, Etienne Turpin, Margarida Mendes, Vincent Normand, Laura Cassidy Rogers, Anna Sophie Springer – as well as SYNAPSE jury members and invited speakers.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt director Bernd Scherer opened the day with an introduction to The Anthropocene Project, a two-year program that opened in January and that sets the stage for many of the discussions of relevance to SYNAPSE participants: the conditions of knowledge production, say, and links (and possible conflicts) between artistic research and scientific research. Heike Mertens of the Ernst Schering Foundation alluded to a common tug-of-war between artists practicing in the domain of artistic research and members of the scientific community who appear skeptical about artistic work constituting research in itself.
SYNAPSE Curators 2013. Photo: Dante Busquets, 2013
After this introduction, Jens Hauser got the ball rolling with an informal lecture titled “Art in the age of Microperformativity, Biofacticity, Co-Corpo-Reality and the Epistemological Turn”, which set up a lexicon of several key concepts alluded to during the remainder of this day of the conference: biohacking, biosemiotics. Hauser pointed to the interesting case of Jack Burnham, who authored the book The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (1968), where Burnham asks: “is it possible… that art is a form of biological signal?” Also helpful in visualizing some anthropocene-related concepts was Hauser’s list of artists he has curated: Art Orienté Object (Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin), Tour Van Balen and Paul Vanouse, for example. Anselm Franke followed up with a discussion of his recent curatorial projects, including The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside, which Franke co-curated with Diedrich Diedrichsen and which opens this Thursday, 25 April at the HKW. The exhibition posits, among other ideas, how the counter-cultural mentality that emerged in 1960’s California (and a product of which was The Whole Earth Catalogue) might be seen as the historical completion of the feedback loops (or “circular causalities”) analyzed and described by the field of cybernetics.
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eThis was followed up by SYNAPSE Keynote speaker Jill Bennett. Her impromptu talk summed up many of the central concerns of the SYNAPSE conference as well as the Anthropocene when taken as a curatorial enterprise: How does interdisciplinarity fall apart within institutional frameworks? What are the issues of scale associated with the Anthropocene as a historical event and th[oretical model? What implications does this have in terms of what constitutes human agency? Chus Martinez, Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio in New York and the head of dOCUMENTA(13)’s department for artistic direction, gave an excellent talk on her intense involvement with dOCUMENTA(13) – an exhibition whose impulses often aligned with many of the science-art relations that SYNAPSE seeks to investigate.
Chus Martinez speaks about dOCUMENTA(13). Photo: Dante Busquets, 2013
Finally, we heard presentations from four of this year’s curatorial selectees: Vincent Normand spoke on Latour and Foucault in a talk titled “Frankenstein in the role of nature”, while Manuela Moscoso of RIVET took a point of departure in the Spanish phrase “se hizo” which means “it happens” but which literally translates to “it made itself” – might we find in this phrase a curatorial or artistic approach to (non)-agency? Arsenic – originally a byproduct of the copper industry – was the focus of Nabil Ahmed’s talk “Earthly Poison” – while Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran wrapped up this leg of the conference with a talk on “Unconditional Belief.”