Speculations on the Virtual
Registration
15 Jan 2022
Timing
4pm
Online
Free, registration required
The emergence of a new medium always gives rise to new possibilities for art, and each epoch seems to have key artists whose works signal novel encounters between technology and artistic creativity. What are the philosophical implications of this turn towards the virtual? Join Acute Art’s Daniel Birnbaum, Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, as well as guest speakers You Mi and Tobias Rees in this panel discussion about the philosophical implications of the virtual turn.
Daniel Birnbaum is a Swedish art critic, theoretician, curator, and the former Director of the Museum of Modern Art (Moderna Museet) in Stockholm. He is now the Artistic Director of Acute Art in London. He was a co-curator of the international section at the Venice Biennale (2003) and the artistic director of the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). Birnbaum was also co-curator of the first and second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2005 and 2007) and a member of the jury for the Turner Prize (2008). He co-founded the Zero Foundation in Düsseldorf in 2008. In 2010, Daniel Birnbaum became the Director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, revitalising the experimental legacy of the museum. Birnbaum has established a reputation for showing key artists very early in their careers, including internationally recognised artists such as Olafur Eliasson.
Ho Tzu Nyen makes films, installations and performances that often begin as engagements with historical and theoretical texts. His recent works are populated by metamorphic figures such as the weretiger (One or Several Tigers, 2017) and the triple agent (The Nameless, 2015), under the rubric of The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, an ongoing meta project.
Tobias Rees is the founding Director of the Institute’s Transformations of the Human Program. He also serves as Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School for Social Research and is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.The focus of Rees’s work is the philosophy, poetry, and politics of the contemporary.
Dr. You Mi is a curator, researcher and lecturer at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Her long-term research and curatorial projects straddles the two extremes of the ancient and futuristic, exploring the Silk Road as a figuration for deep-time, deep-space nomadic imageries and old and new networks/technologies. Under this rubric, she has curated programs at Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016), and is co-steering a research/curatorial project “Unmapping Eurasia” (2018-2021) with director of Casco Art Institute Binna Choi. Her interests in politics around technology and futures led her to work on “actionable speculations,” articulated in the exhibition, workshops and sci-fi-a-thon Sci-(no)-Fi at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019), as well as in her capacity as chair of committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational political NGO Common Action Forum. She is one of the curators of the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-2021)
