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Conversations

As part of his contribution to Nordic/Nanaio Artistic Exchange Mårten Spångberg has over conducted a series of conversations with artists, scholars, activists and others regarding their thoughts, fears, ambiguities and excitements about contemporary technologies, social media, AI, machine learning and how tech and innovation play into social, racial, class, gender, colonial etc. dynamics in society.

The conversations avoid focusing on the Internet as expression and are instead interested in how the Internet today works and how its seemingly innocent surface hides ethically dubious interests. A crucial concern has been how tech-intensive and internet related art rather than posing forms of critique actually supports hidden interests, perhaps even functions as a form of non-profit research for tech giants etc. to harvest. How can art and artistic practice engage with tech and the internet through strategies travelling beyond display, representation and effect?

Samuel Cardoso initially set out on a technical path, studying information technology engineering. Once this was completed, he joined the HEAD – Genève in a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts and developed a research project on data which he is currently pursuing through a Master’s degree, still at the HEAD. Founder of the critical studio Medium Sans. and co-founder of Medium Sans Serif, he is driven by a desire to transform the experience of contemporary art.

Clara Amaral is an artist working with text and performance. Her artistic practice is situated in an interdisciplinary perspective, questioning what it means to be a reader, to be a writer, aiming to expand existing modes of reading and writing. Central to her practice is the investigation of innovative publishing modalities and the performative aspect of writing and language through an intersectional feminist approach. In January 2020 Clara initiated misted.cc. Misted.cc is an online platform: A book of sorts. Every month an artist, writer, graphic designer or curator, who uses writing in their artistic practice, contributes a text. Throughout the month the contribution vanishes in direct relation to the number of visitors, leaving, eventually, an empty website until the next contribution is published. Clara’s work She gave it to me I got it from her was published by Kunstverein Amsterdam in 2021. This volume is part of a broader research on publishing modalities and their relation to performative practices. Driven by explorations of “hand choreography”, the volume reveals personal narratives that expand into a political dimension while also focusing on the legal expression of identity and how we exist in the world.
Christos Varvantakis has a background in social anthropology and sociology (PhD FU Berlin) and his research focuses on the intersections of public culture, media and archives as well as youth, political activism and qualitative, visual and digital research methodologies. He has taught at sociology, anthropology, psychology and education departments (ie. Goldsmiths, FU Berlin, Sussex, JNU). He co-edit ‘entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography’ and acts as curator at various ethnographic film festivals. He is since 2022 Partner Manager at Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE), responsible for connecting with global institutions and onboarding them to Wikidata and Wikibase. He also acts as a point of contact and information exchange for Partners, WMDE’s software department, and Wiki Communities.
Julian Reid is political theorist, philosopher, and professor of International Relations. He is known for his advance of the theory of biopolitics, contributions to cultural theory, postcolonial and post-structural thought, critique of liberalism, and seminal deconstruction of resilience. Educated in London (B.A., First Class Honours, 1996), Amsterdam (M.Phil. 1998) and Lancaster (Ph.D., 2004), he has taught International Politics and International Relations at the Universities of London (SOAS and King’s College), Sussex, and Lapland, where he has occupied the Chair in International Relations since 2010. In 2012 Reid established the very first Master’s program in Global Biopolitics in the world, at Lapland. He was Research Fellow at Virginia Tech in 2017 and Visiting Professor in Politics at the University of Bristol in 2014. In 2006 Reid published Biopolitics of the War on Terror, and in 2009 The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (coauthored with Michael Dillon). Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (coauthored with Brad Evans) was published in 2014 to wide critical acclaim. In 2016 and 2019 he published two monographs with David Chandler, The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability, and Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene. He has edited collections on The Biopolitics of Development (with Sandro Mezzadra and Ranabir Samaddar, 2013) and Deleuze & Fascism (with Brad Evans, 2013). He has co-edited the journal Resilience: Policies, Practices and Discourses (with David Chandler, Melinda Cooper and Bruce Braun).
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of technology teaching in Gothenburg and London. An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. This concern spans his writing on the mutual constitution of cybernetics and the human sciences, ethnicity and AI, and the role of mid-twentieth century military vigilance in the development of multimedia interactivity. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Since 2023 he has been senior lecturer at Univ. of Gothenburg dept for applied IT.

Alessandro Gerosa is a researcher in cultural sociology at the University of Milan. He is the author of The Hipster Economy and other publications.

Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. Her work proposes a new realist politics of the artwork and its possibilities in the context of contingency and neo-rationalist conceptions of power. Recent solo shows include: Covenant Transport, Move or Die, Baltic Museum, UK, 2016; All Obstructing Walls Have Been Broken Down, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, N Ireland, 2014; and Everything Has Led to this Moment, Xero, Kline, Coma, London, UK 2014. Her video installation, Final Machine, was presented at Lanchester Gallery Projects, UK, HaGamle Prestagard, Norway, and featured in Agitationism, the 2014 Irish Biennial curated by Bassam El Barnoi and L’Avenir, and the Montreal Biennale, curated by Peggy Gale and Gregory Burke, 2014, where Beech has also contributed catalogue essays for each catalogue. Other solo exhibits have included Sanity Assassin 2010 (a video exploring LA modernism), exhibited at Spike Island, Bristol, Tate Britain, London and Beaconsfield Gallery, London, and Statecraft an Arts Council commission exploring Fredrick Gibberd’s architectural master-plan for Harlow New Town, exhibited in Harlow, UK and DNA Gallery, Berlin. 2008. Recent group exhibits include Propositions for A Stage: 24 Frames of a Beautiful Heaven, Lasalle Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore, curated by Bridget Crone and What Hope Looks Like After Hope, Beruit City Forum, curated by Bassam El Baroni, 2015.

Her artist’s books include First Machine, Final Machine, 2015 (Urbanomic Press) Sanity Assassin 2010 (Urbanomic Press), and Final Machine (Urbanomic Press) 2013. Other critical writing on art, critique and realism includes, ‘Culture Without Mirrors’, Glass Bead, Castilia: The Game of Ends and Means, 2016, ‘Space is No Object’ in Re-Inventing Horizons, 2016; ‘Concept Without Difference, the Promise of the Generic’ in Realism, Materialism, Art, 2014; ‘Last Rights, The Non Tragic Image and the Law’ in The Flood of Rights, Sternberg, 2014; and, ‘Curatorial Futures with the image: Overcoming Scepticism and Unbinding the Relational’ Journal of Visual Arts Practice, Volume 9.2: pp. 139-151, Intellect, 2011. She is contributing co-editor to the anthologies Cold War Cold World, 2017, (Urbanomic Press) and Episode, Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens Based Media, 2008 (Artwords). Beech regularly speaks at conferences, and her work can be accessed on you-tube broadcasts. These include Art and Reason: How Art Thinks Parts I and II, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and Baltic Museum, 2015-16; and her keynote for Generative Constraints, ‘Art Habit and Rule’, Royal Holloway and Kingston University, UK, Nov, 2013. A podcast dialogue can be found at Robin Mackay’s Yarncast Project, www.urbanomic.com, and a live radio interview can be found at Talk At Ten, Amanda Beech in conversation with Kate Yolande, Marfa Public Radio. A roundtable discussion on ‘Speculative Materialism’ with Armen Avanessian, Suhail Malik and Robin Mackay can be found in Spike Quarterly, June 2013.

Julian Reid is political theorist, philosopher, and professor of International Relations. He is known for his advance of the theory of biopolitics, contributions to cultural theory, postcolonial and post-structural thought, critique of liberalism, and seminal deconstruction of resilience. Educated in London (B.A., First Class Honours, 1996), Amsterdam (M.Phil. 1998) and Lancaster (Ph.D., 2004), he has taught International Politics and International Relations at the Universities of London (SOAS and King’s College), Sussex, and Lapland, where he has occupied the Chair in International Relations since 2010. In 2012 Reid established the very first Master’s program in Global Biopolitics in the world, at Lapland. He was Research Fellow at Virginia Tech in 2017 and Visiting Professor in Politics at the University of Bristol in 2014. In 2006 Reid published Biopolitics of the War on Terror, and in 2009 The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (coauthored with Michael Dillon). Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (coauthored with Brad Evans) was published in 2014 to wide critical acclaim. In 2016 and 2019 he published two monographs with David Chandler, The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability, and Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene. He has edited collections on The Biopolitics of Development (with Sandro Mezzadra and Ranabir Samaddar, 2013) and Deleuze & Fascism (with Brad Evans, 2013). He has co-edited the journal Resilience: Policies, Practices and Discourses (with David Chandler, Melinda Cooper and Bruce Braun).

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