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Art and Agency in times of wetware

  • Publish On 8 October 2020
  • Jens Hauser
  • 7 minutes

Art critic and curator, Jens Hauser teaches at the University of Copenhagen in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies. Specialist of bio-art and DIY biology, he was the curator of the exhibition L’Art Biotech’ at the LieuUnique de Nantes in 2003 and Wetware: Art, Agency, Animation at the Beall Center for Art + Technology (University of California, Irvine) in 2016.

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Art and Agency in Times of Wetware

Jens Hauser

Article

Art and Agency in Times of Wetware

Faced with an obsessive questioning about the nature of life, art has tried to understand and recreate the living, developing the myth of “revival” and a fascination with the staging of the living. Having always sought to imagine, represent and imitate, then simulate the living, it now manages to manipulate it directly via wetware. If information technology provided art with a new direction in the seventies, favoring dynamic processes rather than objects, the convergence of synthetic biology and technologies of the living that now allow us to explore this wetware, “wet machines”, blurs the borders between organisms and machines. The creation of “artificial life” goes beyond computer simulations and robotics, giving birth to hybrid and semi-living systems that challenge the boundaries between the living and the non-living, between synthetic and organic life. For the Artificial life art, organic simulation and re-materialization are no longer distinct but rather operations that are compatible with wetware, shifting concepts of art, agency and animation.

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The Architecture Project as a Strategy

Didier Fiuza Faustino

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The Architecture Project as a Strategy

Didier Fiuza Faustino discusses the strategies that have guided his production since he created his architecture firm. His incursions in the art world and his relationship with the market economy account for his position, which developed in response to the programs proposed by his clients, as well as their biases and misconceptions. Always fully engaged in every one of his projects and reluctant to compromise, Didier Fiuza Faustino has limited his architectural output and eventually entered the artistic field, finding it less subject to the constraint of commissions. But this demanding experimental work, full of promise, begins to find followers among potential customers who are willing to embark on the adventure. (interview with Christophe Le Gac and Aurélien Gillier) Didier Fiuza Faustino is a French architect and artist working at the crossroad of art and architecture.

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Multiple networks of globalization

David Ruy

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Multiple networks of globalization

For David Ruy, the key change in contemporary globalization lies in the way it is narrated, departing from the naive optimism in the beginning and now moving on to new fears, with each technology seemingly creating its own threats. Nevertheless, humankind will not renounce this knowledge and we will witness the emergence of new worlds based on technological platforms that will provide them with both coherence and communicability. David Ruy is convinced that we are starting to experience a shift in the metaphor of nature, which in earlier times was based on divinity, then later on the machine, and now, on the computer. This connection between nature and computation appears in his eyes to be the major challenge of tomorrow’s architecture, as a hybrid practice informed by new concepts in philosophy, especially Speculative Realism. David Ruy is an architect, co-director of the Ruy-Klein agency in New York, and teaches at SCI-Arc à Los Angeles.

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