Artes Mechanicaes, Corner College, Zurich,  2015.

Artes Mechanicaes, Spooky Action at a Distance group show

Corner College, Zurich, 2015. Curators: Dimitrina Sevova and Gabriel Gee.

Artists: Amélie Brisson-Darveau, Andreas Marti, Conor McFeely, Mareike Spalteholz.

With the addition of Machination, or the Invisible Hand Spectrum, a performative conference by Raphaële Bidault-Waddington, assisted by Caroline Palla and with the support of the French Institute in Switzerland.

Corner College website.

Press release

Paris-based artist Raphaële Bidault-Waddington returns to Corner College on 9 May for one of her performative lectures (cf. Semiospace), where she proposes a new digression, both theoretical and poetic around her artistic research laboratories. Each of them feeds on a “machinic imaginary”, drawing on the illusion of a performing organization and a mastered creation process that can elicit a sense of rationality, clarity and understanding. The LIID in particular has the ambition of affirming the power of “aesthetic intelligence” as a mode of addressing the world and an efficacious form of knowledge production, giving rise to numerous collaborations with universities, urban projects and companies around the world.

Nonetheless the “labs” overflow and drift, not allowing to draw borders between the fictitious and the speculative, to such an extent that the story will at times seem incredible, as if all of this were not possible. The machinic arrangement of RBW is on the verge of machination, as if behind this well-articulated ecosystem that is here stripped bare, there was something else, an intrigue, or even a conspiracy.

Behind the appearance of the story of operational transparency, the shadow of doubt lurks, evoking the ghosts that haunt the contemporary era in which the “data-deluge” breaks the benchmarks of truth and in which a new technological empire spoils discernment as the screens suck its lifeblood.

The contact with the economic world elicits different forms of fear that echo the concerns borne by late capitalism, the famous spectre of the invisible hand, or yet Big Data, the new monster generated by the cloud and whose psycho-climatic intoxication PIIMS replays, having become an autonomous world-image ….

All this shall serve as a basis to an exploratory and exhilarating research session around the engineering of these both artistic and cognitive dramatic elements, in complicity with Caroline Palla, a Zurich-based artist and movie-maker, and the public of Corner College.

For further information:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapha%C3%ABle_Bidault-Waddington

Websites: http://www.liid.fr

This performative lecture and workshop is part of the additional program contextualizing and expanding the discourse of the exhibition Spooky Action at a Distance. Artes Mechanicae & Witch’s Cradle, which opens on 23 April and closes on 22 May 2015.

This event is kindly supported by the French Embassy in Switzerland.

Category
Group show