Zooetics: Sympoiesis and de-centralization of the human

In their presentation Urbonas will talk about Zooetics - an ongoing discursive experiment and a test-site for models, that explore new ways for human knowledge and research to engage with other forms of life. It does so by imagining designs, prototypes and interfaces for future interspecies ecologies. Pedagogical and experimental environments created in several chapters of Zooetics – Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies, Future Fiction Summit or Future Energy Summit – suggest a radical playground of hybridity in art, technology, and non-human forms of life in which participants and publics are invited to imagine future knowledge production. Attuned to the themes of ambient and collective intelligence, and systemic and natural ecologies, the Zooetics investigates how relations between life and non-life, human and non-human, may be on the one hand unknowable, remaining unmapped by existing cartographies of knowledge, and yet at the same time necessary and unavoidable. It thus calls for new forms of aesthetic and new scientific imagination.

*sympoeisis comes from greek language (making together) and suggests a self-organized system that is evolutionary, adaptive and unpredictable.

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas are artists, educators, and co-founders of the Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. In collaboration with experts from different cultural and professional fields, these projects develop practice-based research models, merging a variety of materials and techniques from new media, urbanism, social science and ecology.

Urbonas’s work has been exhibited at the São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Gwangju, Busan biennales, Folkestone Triennial; at the Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions; and in solo shows at the Venice Biennale and the MACBA in Barcelona among others. Urbonas co-edited Public Space? Lost and Found (MIT Press, 2017), an examination of the complex interrelations between the creation and uses of public space and the roles that art plays therein. Recently, Urbonas curated the Swamp pavilion – future learning environment at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. Gediminas is Associate Professor at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (MIT), while Nomeda is a PhD researcher at NTNU in Norway and a research affiliate at MIT. They live and work in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in Vilnius, Lithuania.

http://www.nugu.lt/us/