Curator's Tour

Exhibition Tour with Curator Elisabeth Falkensteiner

Guided Tour through the exhibition Fabric of Dreams. Towards a Technodiversity.
A cooperation with the department of Media Theory, concluding the series of talks and performances on ‘Decolonizing Technology’

The starting point for the exhibition ‘Fabric of Dreams: Towards a Technodiversity’ – which is the culmination of a semester-long lecture series – is the assumption that weal and woe of digital media technologies have always been two sides of the same coin. Rethinking today’s techno-scientific model with its extractivist and increasingly violent logic calls for concepts capable of moving beyond the flawed idea that universal technological solutions are the answers to our social problems; and, conversely, the assumption that our political distortions are merely induced by technological developments. Instead, we need to lay bare the complex – and often contested – relations we entertain with our machines.
To do so, we need to genuinely engage with diverse understandings of technology and explore the in-between spaces of our socio-technical situation.
The exhibition raises the question of how we can escape this singular vision of technology and its rather definitive configuration as a fully automated machine intelligence. It therefore investigates new openings, narratives, and potentials by pursuing a two-fold goal: it seeks to address the challenges current technological transformations pose to art and artistic practices, and, at the same time, it also asks how those practices can in turn challenge the technological status quo.
Ultimately, the underlying concern is how art can contribute to the project of building a variety of futures, a true technodiversity.
In addition, the exhibition serves as a platform for discursive and performative interventions in technological discoveries and inventions. For this purpose, it will be structured around three key issues:
(i) the (prosthetic) body and disembodied experiences in the digital realm;
(ii) multiple ways of being in the world that challenge the human condition of intelligence and sentience; and
(iii) techno-ecologies and the synthetic foundation of organic matter.
The exhibition will engage with diverse and relatively unknown perspectives and narratives in order to better understand the challenges posed by our technological present – and to produce critical and promising visions of its multifaceted future.
Artists:
Christina Gruber
Cyrus Kabiru
kennedy+swan
Mary Maggic
Kumbirai Makumbe
Christiane Peschek
Luiza Prado de O. Martins
Anna Vasof
Christian Freude/Christina Jauernik/Johann Lurf/Fabian Puttinger/Rüdiger Suppin