Shaping Things: Notes on the New Sensory Apparatus

In the era of highly automatized devices for extracting, collecting and processing huge amounts of data, normalization of mass surveillance and militarization, permanent state of exception, algorithmic governmentality, smart industry and autonomous robots that rapidly re-structure capital-labour relations, this performance lecture in four scenes spotlights modes of examining today’s ‘Sensory Apparatus’. Like for Aristotle, this apparatus connects all peripheral sense organs with a central sense organ, constructing a perceptual complexity which feeds the soul. To examine this apparatus means to keep pace with and reflect on current technological changes.

Focusing on the new shift in the visual and discussing the politics behind contemporary aesthetics, as well as exploring medial artifacts as material witnesses of this changes, the talk will introduce the work ‘Shapes of Things Before my Eyes’, realized in 2017 collaboration with scientist and informatics. Through this lens, the potential of art-based investigation in helping navigate through the complexity of the global system will be discussed. The talk brings together spatial and physical transformations of urban and rural spaces through smart and autonomous technology with the artist’s current involvement into an art based research project developed at the IZK in Graz. At the crossroad of multiple disciplines and non-disciplines, the project searches for ‘incomputable’ entities that could resist or brake the computational logic of ‘digital capitalism’.

Dejan Marković
Visual artist, researcher and coordinator of the project ‘The Incomputable’ and ‘Curatorial Design’ at IZK Institute for Contemporary Art, Graz University of Technology. From Februar 2015 until March 2016 he was Assistant Professor at IZK Institute for Contemporary Art. In long-term and transdisciplinary projects he brings together different media, formats and working methods. By means of installative and discursive works he questions and casts light on complex artistic, social and political relations. He completed a Master in Art in Context at the University of Arts, Berlin, after graduating in Fine Arts at the University of Arts, Belgrade. Since 2014 he is a member of the project group “Art in the Underground” at the nGbK, Berlin.