Technologies of Abstract Experience
Workshop with Prof. Adam Nocek and Prof. Stacey Moran, Arizona State University. Organized by the FWF project “The Performance of Critique: AI, Bodily Intelligence and Posthumanist Aesthetics” (Director: Lisa Moravec), with Noit Banai (Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies) and Christina Jauernik (IKA), in collaboration with Tanzquartier Wien.
This workshop explores how technologies of abstraction function across myriad domains of contemporary experience and practice. Rather than treating abstraction only as reductive logic associated with technoscientific modernity, this session asks how the technicites of abstraction also play a foundational role in the production of lived and embodied experience—in other words, experience is already abstract. Drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks (process philosophy, STS, feminist epistemologies of science) and contemporary practices (design, performance, media arts, and computing), the session invites participants to experiment with various possibilities for thinking-feeling the necessity of abstraction. In doing so, we consider why it may be incumbent upon us to ensure that experience is more, rather than less, abstract.
Adam Nocek is Associate Professor in the Philosophy of Science and Technology and the Founding Director of the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University. He has published widely on the philosophy of biology, computing, and design and architecture. He is the author of Molecular Capture (University of Minnesota Press), the co-author (with Giuseppe Longo) of The Organism is A Theory (University of Minnesota Press), and the forthcoming book Abstract Design: A Philosophy of Design in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Nocek is also co-founding director of The School of Materialist Research.
Stacey Moran is Assistant Professor in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her work lies at the intersections of rhetorics of technoscience, art/design studies, and critical pedagogy. Her current book project offers a rhetorical reading of Karen Barad to show how writing, metaphor, and conceptual form are not secondary to knowledge production but integral to the transdisciplinary materialization of thought. Moran is Director of the Applied Theory Initiative at the ASU Humanities Institute, which explores the various ways theory shows up in the world; editor of the Techniques journal, an experimental publication that showcases artistic work alongside critical theoretical analysis to foster interdisciplinary discussion; Director of a design summer school in the Netherlands; and a collaborator with the School of Materialist Research’s Summer Institute for Advanced Design Practices.
Call for Participation
Due to limited spaces, we ask people who want to participate in the workshop to send us a short email with 2-3 sentences briefly outlining your motivations: l.moravec@akbild.ac.at