ANSELM FRANKE: MAPPING AND BEING MAPPED. NAVIGATION SYSTEMS, CONTROL ENVIRONMENTS AND COGNITIVE MAPS
Alex Anikina, Anselm Franke, Jan Peter Hammer, Brian Holmes, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Filipa Ramos

What does it mean to be led astray by a map, taken “offroad”, for instance by your GPS? Is art perhaps offering ways of leaving a scripted space or a cognitive scheme, reflexively inducing a cognitive crisis, an experience of ontological groundlessness? How can art explore and respond to the cognitive crisis of capitalist technologies? Last year Google demonstrated what their neural networks, after having been fed with millions of images, learned to see in a cloudy sky: a strange landscape of fantastic animals, an LSD-like map of monsters and orientalist ornamentations. What is the nature of our cognitive crisis if it is not merely the triumph of instrumental reason in a “totally administered world” that has thoroughly extirpated mimetic becomings and the vestiges of animism, but if it is now machines that mimetically engage with clouds and see shapes in them? Will the clouds be submerged to the pattern recognition machines? And what will then be the next refuge for complexity and resilience?

SLOT 1 11.00 – 12.30
Alex Anikina, On (de)anthropocentric camera: notes for a future film
(30min break)
SLOT 2 13.00 – 14.30
Anselm Franke, Mapping and Being Mapped. Navigation Systems, Control Environments and Cognitive Maps
Ana Teixeira Pinto, Feed-Back Forms: Behaviourism, Cybernetics, Autopoiesis
(15min break)
SLOT 3 14.45 – 16.15
Brian Holmes, Driving the Golden Spike: The Aesthetics of Anthropocene Public Space
Filipa Ramos, The Tiger and the Threshold
(15min break)
SLOT 4 16.30 – 18.00
Jan Peter Hammer, Gamification and the Cognitive Turn; screening Tilikum
Questions for previous lectures/round table, moderated by Anselm Franke