The group exhibition “UMWELT” is curated by Marco Mancuso, in collaboration with festival filosofia 2024—this year’s theme the Psyche—and the Smart Life Festival. The exhibition project highlights how art and the artefacts of technoscience bring us closer to a deeper understanding of non-human expressions of intelligence, so that we can relate to them, make them part of a new collective environment and spread a renewed ecological ethic. In other words, it underlines how the anti-disciplinary relationship with the fields of design and philosophy sparks new kinds of relationship between human being and context, natural and artificial.
The artists who worked alongside the curator for their works to inhabit the Palazzo Santa Margherita exhibition spaces are: Forensic Architecture (The Nebelivka Hypothesis), Semiconductor (Through the AEgIS), James Bridle (Solar Panels (Radiolaria Series)), CROSSLUCID (The Way of Flowers), Anna Ridler (The Synthetic Iris Dataset), Entangled Others (Decohering Delineation), Robertina Šebjanič/Sofia Crespo/Feileacan McCormick (AquA(l)formings-Interweaving the Subaqueous) and Eryk Salvaggio (The Salt and the Women).
“Umwelt” is a term that means “environment” or “world around us.” It was introduced by biologist and philosopher Jakob von Uexküll in his seminal work A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (1933) to describe the unique perspective each organism has of the world around it. The sum of the subject’s perceptions, experiences and interactions with its environment. Its ability to integrate in the context surrounding it, based on its needs and the collective needs of an “entangled” ecosystem that human beings are learning to know not as a motionless, passive background entity, but as very much dynamic, vital and endowed with literally unimaginable forms of intelligence.
Following the same route as von Uexküll’s thought—whose influence transcended the confines of biology to impact philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, anthropology, design and sociology—with the “UMWELT” exhibition curator Marco Mancuso plays with a slant on the concept of environment that is expanded to take in the cognitive processes of knowing, and the totality of the subject’s conscious experience in relation to the elements with which it dialogues. Also included in the equation of reality are the most advanced forms of scientific research and computational intelligence, with an increasingly key role in investigating and modelling the world in which we are immersed.
In the words of artist and theorist James Bridle: “If all intelligence is ecological—that is, entangled, relational, and of the world—then artificial intelligence provides a very real way for us to come to terms with all the other intelligences which populate and manifest through the planet. . . . Rather than being a tool to further exploit the planet and one another, artificial intelligence is an opening to other minds, a chance to fully recognize a truth that has been hidden from us for so long” (Ways of Being, 2022). As curator Marco Mancuso echoes, it is a subject capable not only of helping us observe other forms of intelligence existing in nature—to think of “other” psycho-cognitive models than the strictly human one—but also, if integrated with all the tools of technoscience, of observing the world, gathering information and imagining a possible future of the planet in non-extractive and non-hierarchical terms.
Through an exhibition consisting of a sequence of works ranging from scientific investigations to works of speculation, from data analysis systems to predictive organisms, from models that integrate biological and artificial elements to possible word structures, “UMWELT” sets out to open a debate on the critical, aesthetic and narrative potentials offered by studying the unexplored forms of agency shared by human beings, computational machines and natural systems.
at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena
until January 12, 2025
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