The Unmanned: a Fiction about the Technological Construction of Narratives
In this seminar, we will navigate through The Unmanned (2013-2022), a series of video installations and film performances realized by the French artists Raphael Siboni and Fabien Giraud. These highly speculative explorations around the history of technology show how the latter has been shaping the social body and its forms of (self)representation. Indeed, rather than considering technology as a set of tools serving human production, Siboni and Giraud consider the human as a technical product. While spanning from ancient epochs to far away futures, the works bring special emphasis on the computational revolution as well as on the most shattering event of all times: the introduction of money.
The seminar is divided in three sessions where we will watch and discuss the series of artworks in relation to different texts and authors that have inspired the artists in their creative process, among which George Bataille, Alain Badiou, Jean-François Lyotard and Quentin Meillassoux. The first session will be dedicated to the first season of the project (2013-2017), an history of calculation made up of 8 videos culminating with the invention of modern computing and its automatization in machines. The following session will explore the second season (2018-2022), entitled The Everted Capital. The 4 films compose a history of value, ranging from the appearance of money to the rise of capitalism and beyond, while wondering about the possibility of exiting a system predicated on infinite growth and apparently unlimited expansion. The third and last session will revisit the artwork as a whole and discuss the construction of the exhibition’s elaborated dispositive, which includes the projection of the videos in interactive site-specific installations using different forms of automation.
SESSION 1
26 April: 10h30–13h30
SESSION 2
26 April: 15h–18h
SESSION 3
27 April: 10h30–13h30
Bio
Anna Longo is a philosopher. She obtained her PhD in Aesthetics Philosophy at University Paris 1. She is a member of the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris). She has taught at the University Panthéon-Sorbonne and CalArts (Los Angeles), and is an instructor at the New Centre for Research & Practice. Her research crosses several fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. She is the author and editor of several books such as Le paradoxe de la finitude (2019); La genèse du transcendantal (2017); Breaking the Spell: Speculative Realism under Discussion (2015); Time without Becoming (2014), and Divenire della conoscenza: estetica e contingenza del reale (2013). Her last book, Le jeu de l’induction: automatisation de la connaissance et réflexion philosophique (Mimésis, 2022), reconstructs the transformations of inductive reasoning that lead to the automatization of knowledge production thanks to probability theory.
Online participation: if you wish to receive the Zoom link, please contact Erik Bordeleau at erikbordeleau@fcsh.unl.pt.
This event is organized by Erik Bordeleau and will take place within the scope of the activities of the Art and Technology working group.