Technocultural Futurisms: Vision for the Future of Complexity and Design at UIUC
Preface: trying hard to find a Complex Systems class at UIUC and Alfred Hubler
Ever since I learned about complex systems, it’s a subject I’ve been trying to find. I’ve had some success, but I found now that there was a class called PHYS 194 Behavior of Complex Systems in Fall 2015 taught by Alfred Hubler.
Technocultural Futurisms Abstracts:
Title: Deep Carbon
Abstract:
Our so-called networked society has failed so far to transpose the logic of interconnectedness into our lives. Citizens are becoming increasingly machine-like and dependent on data, threatening the connection between humans and their natural habitats. Although most of our daily transactions are carried out through electronic devices, we know very little of the apparatus that facilitates such interactions, or in other words, about the factory that lies beyond the interface. The Internet is the biggest “thing” that humanity has ever built. Its massive infrastructure is composed of billions of computers and thousands of kilometers of submarine and inland cables. This immense infrastructure rests on the shoulders of invaluable supporting technologies, largely unnoticed by its audiences; namely human labour, intangible legions of algorithms, and a vast consumption of natural resources. In 2008, the Internet was already responsible for the 2% of CO2 global emissions, exceeding those of the entire aviation Industry. The amount of users and network connections has increased at a whopping pace ever since. Yet despite the growing number of Internet users and information flows, the material representation of the Internet remains blurred in the social imagination.
Bio:
Joana Moll / http://janavirgin.com
She is a Barcelona/Berlin based artist and researcher. Her work critically explores the way post-capitalist narratives affect the alphabetization of machines, humans and ecosystems. Her main research topics include Internet materiality, surveillance, social profiling and interfaces. She has lectured, performed and exhibited her work in different museums, art centers, universities, festivals and publications around the world. Furthermore she is the co-founder of the Critical Interface Politics Research Group at HANGAR [Barcelona] and the co-founder of The Institute for the Advancement of Popular Automatisms. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Universität Potsdam and Escola Superior d’Art de Vic [Barcelona]
Alexander Galloway
Title: “From One to Two”
Abstract:
In the year 1948 a sliver of memory was a bit and a bit was a pixel and a pixel was a dot and a dot was a keystroke. Like the old techniques of ancient textile weavers, memory had become an image just as images were deployed as memory devices. In this presentation I focus on the development of digital technology and culture from the mid twentieth century to today. With reference to important experiments and new technologies by Frederic Williams, John von Neumann, and Nils Aall Barricelli, we explore the importance of discretization in society and culture, that is, the way in which “the one” becomes “the two.”
