OutlabCultureLab • Seminar

X-Centric Futures — Art and Cosmotechnics

Talk with the author Yuk Hui and Giovanbattista Tusa

On Saturday, July 8th, at 6 pm, a talk on “Art and Cosmotechnics” will take place at Galeria Zé dos Bois, led by Giovanbattista Tusa, in which Yuk Hui will address the challenge of technology to the existence of art and traditional thought, especially in light of current discourses on artificial intelligence and robotics. Thinking art and cosmotechnics together is an attempt to look into the varieties of experiences of art and to ask what these experiences might contribute to the rethinking of technology today.


This event will take place within the scope of the activities of the X-Centric Futures research seminar, coordinated by Giovanbattista Tusa, and was developed in collaboration with ICNOVA, and the Arts and Humanities in Digital Transition Conference, and with the support of Galeria Zé dos Bois.


Free admission.

Yuk Hui

Yuk Hui is the author of several monographs including  On the Existence of Digital Objects (prefaced by Bernard Stiegler, University of Minnesota Press, 2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China – An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Urbanomic, 2016), Recursivity and Contingency (R&LI, 2019) and Art and Cosmotechnics (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). His books have been reviewed and endorsed by The Philosophical QuarterlyRadical PhilosophyJahrbuch TechnikphilosophieTheory Culture and SocietyIssue in Science and Technology, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Folha de Sao Paulo among others; and have been translated into a dozen languages including German, French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Spanish and Portuguese.

More info
The X-Centric Futures research seminar, coordinated by Giovanbattista Tusa, aims to extend critical thought in the humanities and social sciences and to develop rigorous critical practices that move beyond academic interdisciplinarity. The mission of the program is to deepen different perspectives that concur in the redefinition of critical thinking in a planetary age, and to explore art practices that challenge well-established assumptions of research and the methodologies used for analysis by privileging critical approaches to thinking that have generally not yet entered into academic discussions.

We believe that there is a philosophical vacuum on the subject of futurity other than that imagined as a data visualisation leading to decision-making by corporate, administrative or political bodies. To some extent, it is as if philosophy has abdicated its function and delegated to corporate global think tanks the responsibility for formulating viable paths for the transformation of our present. To explore X-centric, divergent futures means for us to experiment with time, space, and politics. It means to complicate our time with invisible, insurgent, multiple temporalities that fissure the material layers of our history, to reframe global historical narratives that incorporate decolonising processes and climate justice, nurturing ourselves as a community, creating wishful images inhabited by unseen, dissident realities that are coming into being.

Research and dissemination activities have included The X-Centric Futures Monthly Debates Program, a series of public seminars organized by Giovanbattista Tusa and Bartholomew Ryan which took place in 2022 at the Cultural Centre Carpintarias de São Lázaro, featuring the art collective Claire Fontaine on Magical Materialism; the musical performance Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen by Michael Marder, Peter Schuback, and Márcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback; the presentation of Uriel Orlow’s Imbizo Ka Mafavuke; and the screening and discussion of Bahar Noorizadeh’s After Scarcity and The Red City of the Planet Capitalism.

In 2023 the ADVANCED PROGRAMME IN X-CENTRIC FUTURE STUDIES will combine the research seminar with workshops (in presential and remote format)and a student-led reading group in Lisbon to promote the growth of research and artistic projects on emerging social movements, future political constellations, and x-centric communities.