Tag: Charlie Tweed

Fiction Machines: Part III (online)

You can now book tickets for Fiction Machines: Part III (online) an evening of screenings, talks and performances from artists, filmmakers and theorists, and a belated launch event for the Fiction Machines special issue of the International Journal of Creative Media Research. The event is free but booking is essential:

BOOK TICKETS HERE

Fiction Machines – Part III

Ami Clarke, Tony D. Sampson, Maud Craigie, John Cussans, Andy Weir, Anna Engelhardt, Richard Carter, Mikey Georgeson, Harry Meadows, Ada Hao and Charlie Tweed

Fiction Probes in Art, Philosophy and Science – Tony D Sampson

The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University presents Fiction Machines – Part III, an evening of new screenings, talks and performances from artists, filmmakers and theorists. The work presented will highlight a diverse range of critical approaches that make use of particular fictional strategies in their conception and deployment.

This event will be the third part of the Fiction Machines project, which began as a symposium at Bath Spa University in July 2019, featuring keynotes from Professor Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths and Plastique Fantastique) and Dr. Tony D. Sampson (UEL). The project evolved into a special issue of the International Journal of Creative Media Research, edited by Andy Weir (AUB), Tony D. Sampson (UEL) and Charlie Tweed (BSU) which launched in late 2020.The event will bring together all of the contributors to the IJCMR: Fiction Machines special issue, acting as both a launch event and a showcase of new works and research projects that build on its themes.

Contributors include

Ami Clarke who will present new work Pandemonium (working title), commissioned by Radar for Risk Related, and subject to further development through Clarke’s residency at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe in May 2021. It forms part of an ongoing body of work by Clarke exploring probability and risk within surveillance/disaster capitalism from a trans-feminist post-human position. Tony D. Sampson will present a talk on his recent research into neuroaesthetics. Maud Craigie will show an excerpt from her film Indications of Guilt, pt.1, along with some photographs from her current exhibition at Mirror, Plymouth.

John Cussans will present his new work PKD-AI: A proposal which outlines a plan to apply a GPT3-like AI to Philip K. Dick’s entire corpus of writing in order to produce a posthumous AI generated PKD novel. Richard Carter will showcase two new projects Orbital Reveries and Landform, which centre on the processing of satellite and drone imagery into multi-dimensional ‘textscapes’. Anna Engelhardt will present the project “Intra-structures” which treats infrastructures as intra-active processes, placing the user within Russian propaganda infrastructures via the fictioning machine of the telegram bot. Mikey Georgeson will present Professor Kimey Peckpo who will attempt a live stream of an auto fictional account of a real life walk emerging from the past beyond the perimeter of the CCNI.

Harry Meadows discusses Sasha Engelmann’s book Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices, exploring the atmosphere as a metaphor for thinking, free from earthly constraints. Andy Weir shows a short video extract as part of new (theory and practice) work in progress on grounding and ungrounding, navigating planetary sites of nuclear toxicity through a mythic/materialist ontology (geo-fiction) of dust. Charlie Tweed presents an excerpt from a new sound project which uses fictional writing to respond to images generated by AI applications.

Link to Event

Digital Ecologies II: Fiction Machines (one day symposium)

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Professor Simon O’Sullivan, Professor of art, theory and practice,
Goldsmiths College, London

Dr Tony David-Sampson, Reader in Digital Media Culture and Communication, University of East London

Other Confirmed Participants include:

Ami Clarke, Jennet Thomas, Rod Dickinson, Charlie Tweed, Andy Weir, Harry Meadows, Ada Hao, Ramon Bloomberg, Bjørn erik Haugen, Hugh Frost, Annabelle Craven-Jones, Monika Oechsler, Garfield Benjamin, John Wild, Alberto Micali, Maud Craigie, Michelle Atherton, Rebecca Smith, Stephanie Moran and Alex Hogan and Teodora Fartan.

The Centre for Media Research at Bath Spa University is proud to host the second Digital Ecologies symposium: Fiction Machines and it will take place on Tuesday July 16th 2019.

In the introduction to his book Fiction as Method (2017) Jon K Shaw identifies a fictional place called ‘Null Island’, a fiction that is located at a point in the centre of the earth, amongst the lava that no one can travel to.

‘From this unreal centre the machines can tag our photos to map our memories and images onto the material world, can align our satellites to coordinate and connect us across the planet. Whenever we perform one of these actions, we pass through this fiction. We are transported home via the fictional island.’ (Shaw, 2017: 7)

Our vision of the earth and of each other is increasingly filtered through the operations of a complex assemblage of networked computational writing machines and as Shaw implies, these exist at the centre of our world and our daily experience. As a result the planet itself is increasingly becoming computational, Nigel Thrift describes how the ‘real’ as we know it is the result of multiple simultaneous ‘writing machines’ using a continuous looping process of algorithms. (2005, loc.2879)

As a result, humans now exist within complex informational spaces that produce affects, simulate, analyse and respond to user and environmental data. Within these conditions, fiction and reality become increasingly blurred, machine and human voice, difficult to distinguish.

These machines allow for the generation of complex webs of fabulation which exist in a plethora of contexts from corporate identities to labyrinthine brand stories, to political propaganda and the operations of the derivatives market.

Furthermore our understanding of the ecological is itself increasingly filtered through multiple layers of networked technologies, sensors, algorithms and data visualisations. Jennifer Gabrys discusses the notion of ‘planetary scale computerisation’ and how this leads to the generation of ‘new living conditions, subjectivities, and imaginaries’. (Gabrys, 2016)

Within this context new fictional strategies within creative practice emerge as important weapons for critique, intervention, speculation and change. As Simon O’Sullivan notes: fiction can be used not as a matter of ‘make believe but rather in a Ranciere sense of forging the real to better approximate historical and contemporary experience’. (O’Sullivan, 2016: 6)

In the symposium we ask how fictional methods are being employed to rethink and renegotiate our relationship with current and future technologies; how such methods can be used from activist and political perspectives; how they can address and critique post-truth conditions; how they can reveal forgotten histories and non-human perspectives; and how they can be used to speculate on, and design, new futures.

As Benjamin Bratton notes: ‘Our shared design project will require both different relationships to machines (carbon based machines and otherwise) and a more promiscuous figurative imagination.’ (Bratton, 2016, loc.283)

Symposium Strands:

• Activist fictions

• Speculative design fictions

• Non-human fictions

• Post-truth fictions

• Machinic fictions

The event will culminate with a series of performances by artists including: Ami Clarke, Harry Meadows & Andy Weir, and Annabelle Craven-Jones.

Throughout the event artist Rod Dickinson’s project Fear Filter will feed images to our Media Wall.

TICKETS:

Tickets are now available from the link below and include lunch, coffee and wine reception, with a special discount for students.

https://www.bathspalive.com/Online/default.asp?doWork::WScontent::loadArticle=Load&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::article_id=C7EA82EC-2FD7-4C2F-BF0B-CC1AE4A4584D&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=D70272D5-9DE8-48B8-A750-A8AB1D88536E

I am Algorithm: Charlie Tweed invites Tony D. Sampson

I am Algorithm: Charlie Tweed invites Tony D. Sampson

19 Jun 2013

6:00 pm – 8:00 pmAspex

The Vulcan Building
Gunwharf Quays
Portsmouth
PO1 3BF
(Behind Loch Fyne on Canalside)

The talk will expand upon some of the themes and ideas within the exhibition I am Algorithm and look at connections between Charlie’s practice and the writing and research of Tony D. Sampson who is a London-based theorist, writer and Reader in Digital Culture and Communications at the University of East London.

Charlie Tweed will discuss the development of his work for the show and will look at some ongoing themes in his research including: new forms of technological control,  the use of fictional writing and fictional identity as a form of agency, media ecologies, affects and non-human agency and its political potential in art.

Tony D. Sampson will give a talk titled: From Virality to Neuroculture: What Can a Brain Do? In this talk Tony D. Sampson will draw on the late 19th century sociology of Gabriel Tarde to develop a conceptual approach to contagion theory before going on to think through Tarde’s relevance to contemporary experiences of networks, software culture and the technologies of neuromarketing.

Charlie and Tony will then draw on connections in their research and there will also be an opportunity for the audience to get involved in the discussion and ask questions.

Please use Eventbrite below to book your FREE place!

http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/event/6977250143/eorg

More Virality dates

Just confirmed an invited talk on Virality as part of the “I am Algorithm” show by the artist Charlie Tweed (6pm on Wednesday 19th June at the Aspex Gallery in Gunwharf Quays, Portsmouth. More details to follow).

Tweed was the winner of Emergency5. His I am algorithm show continues an exploration of the human desire to control and systematise the natural world, and how new technologies have instilled a complex form of social control over populations in both the physical and virtual sphere.

His films attempt to visualise an approach that moves beyond the separation of human and environment and physical and virtual space in order to present a flat ontology where the voice of all types of organic and inorganic materials, architectures, technical components, processes and algorithms is heard.

Here’s an example of Tweed’s work: http://vimeo.com/63355716

And an interview with him: http://www.aspex.org.uk/blog/interview-with-charlie-tweed/

Also confirming details of another very interesting visit as part of the open lectures/seminars Mediatic Affects, Biological Pathos and the Psychotechnology of Gender in the University of Arts Bucharest and organised by The Bureau of Melodramatic Research based in Bucharest. I’ll talk about “Virality, Chaos and the Brain” on the 22nd-23rd June. More details to follow. http://www.thebureauofmelodramaticresearch.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/news

Other confirmed speakers in this series include Luciana Parisi whose new book Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and the Control of Space (MIT Press, 2013) was published very recently.