(Gallery on the bottom of the post)

9th Futurological Congress, Bratislava Chapter

TALK TO ME! (The Future of Language)

Slovak Radio Building

Mýtna 1,  Bratislava

22-23 September 2018,  15:00 – 20:00

TICKET SALE: https://tootoot.fm/sk/events/5b9e703a0a8f650a78225236

An upcoming iteration of The 9th Futurological Congress will take place in Bratislava on 22-23 September of this year, 2018. The congress has been invited to Bratislava by Apart, and it will be hosted at the auditorium of the Slovak Radio Building.

The main interest of the 9th Futurological Congress is to look at the future from several discrete perspectives, avoiding totalizing gestures or predictions – we are curious about the future, and we want to work on it… yet we don’t want to dictate what the future should be.

For the Bratislava iteration of the Futurological Congress, we are concerning ourselves with The Future of Language. Looking at it from the broadest perspective, language is many things: There is voice, there is text, there are musical notation systems… Language is communication. A way of communication is through words, but there is also the silence that helps give shape to those words. There is singing, there are stories passed around from voice to voice, there are misunderstandings, shibboleths, strange accents and mistranslations. There is the language of the body, and the means of communication used by those who are not able to speak. There are musical instruments, animal interactions in frequencies that are inaudible to the human ear, there is the cadence and lilt of poetry when it is being performed, and the difference from when it is only read on paper. There are bird mating calls, there is the low rumble of the earth, there are lexicons and idioms that belong to particular generations, and there are also lexicons and idioms that belong to specific political positions. There is the language of universalism, and there is also the terrible language that is spoken by the sound of war.

Julieta Aranda is one of the chairpeople of the 9th Futurological Congress. She is also an artist and editor of e-flux journal.

Peter Sit is a artist, curator, organizer and co-founder of APART

Participants :

Daniel Grúň

Body-Transmitters. Slovak Conceptual Art as Paranormal and Parainstitutional Activity.

Július Koller and Stano Filko are considered to be the founders of action and conceptual art in Czechoslovakia. However, a significant part of their lifelong work is difficult to grasp in the categories of Western art canon terminology. The relationship of both artists to non-artistic spheres, especially parapsychology, must be re-examined in order to understand the political dimension of their complex artistic worlds. Because there is an important synopsis of their engagement and effort to change thinking in relation to the world, society, and ultimately to ourselves and our own body. The lecture will focus on the futurological link of both artists in the wider context of Central and Eastern Europe. Based on a comparison of works and archives, I will try to indicate the relationship between paranormal and parainasational in their creation and the work of other artists generations.

Daniel Grúň is an art historian, curator, writer and art critic. Currently he works as an teacher in the Department of Theory and History of Art, Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, and as a researcher of the Július Koller Society (since 2009). In 2010 he won the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory.

Nicoline van Harskamp

PDGN

PDGN is a fiction video that portrays a future in which the world is no longer run by national governments or global corporations, and that is neither utopian nor dystopian. A new link language is developing between people across this world through voluntary self-instruction.

The script for PDGN was constructed from actually spoken, non-native English in a series of workshops. Some aspects of language and narrative were borrowed from feminist fiction that proposes systems of language-change, such as Marge Piercy’s Women on the Edge of Time (1976) and Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue (1984). The language of the script was further developed by applying common and expected factors of language evolution in the areas of syntax, lexicon, and phonetics. These ‘distorting factors’ were conceptualized with the help of academics in fields such as creole studies, computational linguistics and language acquisition as well as Esperantists, recreational language inventors, and the lead actresses Ariane Barnes, Mouna Albakry and Paula So Man Siu.

Nicoline van Harskamp  is an artist whose recent works use and explore the English language that is created among non-native speakers worldwide, and imagine the (aesthetic) properties of a future spoken global language. She studied at the Royal Academy of Visual Arts (KABK), The Hague and the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Van Harskamp currently teaches as a head tutor in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.

Karl Holmqvist

UNDERSTANDING IS OVERRATED

An artist’s presentation by Karl Holmqvist briefly outlining a visual arts practice that favours language over images. How rhythms and patterns in language and voice can access areas of hidden meanings and shared memory. The future lies in the powers of a collective imagination.

Karl Holmqvist is a poet and visual artist. In his publications, readings, collages, wall texts and installations he problematizes the text and the mutable potential of language as the bearer of meaning-content. He studied Literature and Linguistics at Stockholm University, Stockholm.

Boris Ondreička

Against Ontological Future

(in two chapters)

Through metaphores of Lurianic phenomenons of Tzimtzum and Shevirat ha-Kelim Ondreička tries to pseudo-speculate around the conflict between metaphysics of and ontology of time, biosemiotic sense of birth, life and processual death (decay as a source of unlimited creativity, in terms of Zalamean Transmodernismo) as means of possible political effect.

Boris Ondreička is a curator, artist, author and singer based in Bratislava, SK and Vienna, AT. He has been working as project coordinator at Soros centre for contemporary arts, Bratislava, SK, director of art–initiative tranzit.sk, Bratislava, SK, and since 2012 curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.

Ayumi Paul

WHY I BLUSHED

a lecture-performance

On thoughts about language, sound and ecology.

With music composed for a mountain drawing by Sophie Madeleine Jaillet, a 360 degree videoclip by Richard Reed Parry, a xylophon song for hermaphrodites, music from the 18th century for solo violin, a work by Yoko Ono, SEA WALKING composed by Elliott Sharp for Ayumi Paul and other findings.

Ayumi Paul is a Berlin-based violinist and composer. Her work combines site specific concert, composition, performance, and installation. The intrinsic sound of body, material, and the surroundings is essential to her conceptual approach to creating highly sensitive and often durational performances which expand the possibilities of listening. She trained as a classical violinist at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin and Indiana University and gave her solo debut at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall in 2003 from where she continued to perform at the world´s most sought after concert halls while at the same time developing her own distinct approach to music. In recent years she became more widely known in the visual and performative art context.

RADIO Espacio Estacion (RadioEE.net)
The Gezi Park Language

How is slang transmitted and sustained through codes and contradictions? What can fluid word formations tell us about how ideas immigrate? How does learning transform when it shifts from the grammars of schools to words of wisdom from the streets?

RADIO Espacio Estacion (RadioEE.net) is a mobile, multilingual, online radio channel broadcasting conversations about mobility and movement while on the move. It is led by a collective of artists, graphic designers, writers, and curators including Sebastian Bellver, Stephanie Sherman, Agustina Woodgate, and Hernan Woodgate.

Chaosdroid & Boris Vitázek

Language exercises for sonic spaces

(LESS) merges sound, visual and virtual reality in a playful exploration of spoken and unspoken language(s). The Futurological Congress iteration focuses on the distant future of human language, speculating on its practice solely as art. Language slams, A.I. opera and library index fugues are but a few of the possible manifestations into which our augmented and unfathomable descendants may indulge. Listen to your third ear.

Chaosdroid & Boris Vitázek

Amalia Roxana Filip (Chaosdroid) plays mostly with sound, live visuals and still images. She has been a member of various cultural initiatives, she participated as visual artist in festivals and exhibitions, and she played sounds in various clubs and cultural spaces – as herself or as part of multimedia projects. Few highlights: coordinator of a.live festival of live visuals, graphic designer for Kloaka literary magazine, co-author of the new media performance Skúmanie javov (Phenomena Research) and the transmedial project “liminal/lucent” (with Zuzana Husárová), erratic member of The Blackwood Incident sound project, VR researcher and mentor.

Boris Vitázek is an artist and designer, characterized by a combination of media and technology. His works include, for example, a theater combining elements of virtual reality with dance, or oversized projections based on sound and image generation in the form of mapping.

Tony Yanick

STO.RE, cultural practices of mnemonic immediacy

Sto.re (/stôrē/ pronounced ​story​) is the ongoing research project into the problems of making sense of the complexity we face in the so-called hyperconnected era, specifically in terms of knowledge (and information) practices, attention, and general intellect. In terms of the future of language, I am interested in how sociotechnical systems condition new ways of reading and writing. Conveying knowledge through the audio-visual medium is becoming more and more the preferred method, yet we still lack the interfaces that enable us to acquire intimacy. The following will scrub the history of audio-visual technical memory and witness a new archival economy of memory emerging: the re:search and re:mixing of the the media archive. The future I explore is not the temporal indication of a future out there, rather to think of the future as an operator or a cut in the present. This spatial understanding of future (as a point, putting into relationship the fragments of information) poses not a speculative design, but rather reorients the question towards creating the spaces (virtual and actual) for these practices to emerge. What types of interfaces exist or could exist to access this future space? What sorts of collective intimacy emerges when practices of reading and writing, consuming and producing blur (where reading is writing)? To approach these questions, Sto.re explores transtextuality, the filmic-essay, hypermedia and distributed anarchives, and finally, machine learning and vision.

What can a (hyper)image do?

Tony Yanick is a philosopher, computer engineer, & multimedia artist from the United States. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study department.

The organizers reserves the right to make changes to the event program.

Organized by APART in cooperation with tranzit.sk

for more info contact us info@apart.sk

www.apart.sk

sk.tranzit.org

APART is a Slovak artist cooperative. Today, its members include Denis Kozerawski (* 1990), Peter Sit (* 1991), Magda Schery (* 1990), and Andrej Žabkay (* 1987). APART was formed at the turn of 2011 and 2012. APART performs research, creative-artistic, project- and exhibition- creative / curatorial, publishing, and archiving activities. The artists initiate, create, organize, and exhibit group manifestations (often giving space to other artists and theorists, as well), or work on their own. APART is a meta-participatory platform. It works on a proto-institutional basis, putting its polysubjectivity into directly related or desired contexts according to the principle of sharing economy.

tranzit.sk is a contemporary art initiative active in Bratislava since 2002. It is part of the international network tranzit.org, made up of similar organisations set up in Hungary, The Czech Republic, Romania and Austria which main partner is ERSTE Foundation.  In the last five years tranzit.sk has focused on the relationship between art and society as well as on multidisciplinary approach. Its research-based exhibitions, lectures, discussions and workshops address a broad thematic spectrum, among others the heritage and culture of minorities, community and collective practices, the urban space, neighbourhood, the art system and the conditions of artistic production.

Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council, Erste Foundation, Július Koller Society and grant program of capital city of Bratislava – ARS Bratislavensis

Media partner: Kapitál

PROGRAM

Day 1: Saturday September 22nd  15:00 – 20:00

Doors open at 14:30 pm

3:00 – 3:15   Peter Sit – Introduction

3:15 – 3:30 Julieta Aranda. Introductory remarks

The 9th Futurological Congress : As a manner of speaking, Language beyond the spoken word.

3:30 – 4:00 radioee.net  (remote conversation)

4:00 – 5:00     Radioee.net

The Language of Gezi Park

Live Broadcast

5:00 – 5:40    Daniel Grúň

Body-Transmitters. Slovak Conceptual Art as Paranormal and Parainstitutional Activity

5:40 – 6:00   20 MINUTE BREAK

6:00 – 6:30 Boris Ondreička

Against Ontological Future

6:30 – 7:30 Ayumi Paul

Why I Blushed

Lecture-performance

7:30 – 8:00 Q+A with all participants

Day 2: Sunday September 23rd  15:00 – 20:00

Doors open at 14:30 pm

3:00 – 3:15   Julieta Aranda

Introductory remarks to day 2

3:30 – 4:00   Tony Yanick

STO.RE, cultural practices of mnemonic immediacy

performative lecture

4:00 – 4:30 Nicoline van Harskamp

PDGN

screening and  discussion

4:30 – 5:00 Karl Holmqvist

Understanding is Overrated

Performance

5:00 – 5:40 Chaosdroid & Boris Vitázek

Language Exercises for Sonic Spaces (LESS)

Audio-visual performance

6:00 Final remarks