Eco-Visionaries

17. Dezember 2021, 17.00 Uhr ONLINE on Gather Town

Interface Cultures lädt im Rahmen des Sankt Interface Day 2021 zur Keynote von Karin Ohlenschläger.

Streaming Link: Gather.town

The delicate state of planetary health - marked by environmental degradation, climate change, biodiversity loss and other disturbances of the Anthropocene - has long called for urgent changes in the way we manage our resources, energy and relationships with our environment and with other living beings. New knowledge, ways of thinking and acting are emerging to face today's multiple challenges.

This lecture will present some of the turning points in the evolution of (eco) systems thinking and its impact on media art and other hybrid artistic practices. The talk will showcase the contributions of some key eco-visionaries in art, science and environmental activism. It will also analyze projects that address in different ways the challenges of our deep ecological crisis and sustainable development goals.

Most of the recent transdisciplinary projects use current techno-scientific knowledge and tools to create innovative narratives and visions, which suggest new ways of understanding and development. Their proposals aim to contribute to the reconfiguration of the relationships and interactions between humans and non-human life forms, experiencing other ways of coexistence and connections between the biosphere and the technosphere. But some projects also address new incompatibilities between digital consumption and sustainable development.

Karin Ohlenschläger, artistic director of LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijon, Spain (2016-2021), is a historian, scholar and curator whose work has focused on media art, science and contemporary culture. She chaired the Banquet Foundation of Art, Science, Technology and Society (1998-2006) and the Institut of Contemporary Arts in Madrid (2011-2012). She co-founded and co-directed MediaLab Madrid (2002-2006), as well as festivals including Cibervisión (1999-2002) or the International Festival of Infoarchitecture, Ministerio de Fomento, Madrid (1997), among others. She has curated numerous exhibitions of contemporary media art and techno-scientific culture, including Eco-Visionaries (2018-2019) or Ecomedia. Ecological Strategies in Today´s Art (2007-2008), co-curated with Sabine Himmelsbach and Yvonne Volkart.