Metabody 2018 Milan

28th and 29th April 2018:

• 28th at 5’30pm: Talk: Microsingularities: neurodiverse futures and minor ecologies in the Algoricene.
• 28th at 11pm: Metaformance: Metatopia 5.0: Microsingularity 
• 29th from 4pm to 10pm: Workshop: Microsexes: Ontohacking in the Algoricene

by Jaime del Val

Metatopia 5.0 – Microsingolaritá

A singularity is an event that creates its own physical or space-time laws, impossible to know outside of it, such as the Big Bang or a black hole. Currently some of the largest corporations on the planet promote the idea that the current technological acceleration of digital culture advances towards a technological singularity, associated with the emergence of an artificial superintelligence, and paradoxally also with a will to reach individual immortality and to digitize and subject the world to total control. METATOPIA 5.0 – Microsingularity – proposes an intra-active environment emerging from the movements of the performer and the audience that does not follow the laws of the Cartesian space nor of the subject-object dualism, an amorphous, anti-object and anti-perspectival environment with a focus on multisensory micromotion, and perceptual ambiguity as a characteristic, mobilizing an amorphous and postanatomical body: a microsingularity as alternative for contestable futures in face of the domination of digital control.

TALK:

MICROSINGULARITIES: neurodiverse futures and minor ecologies in theAlgoricene.
A singularity is an event that creates its own physical or space-time laws, impossible to know outside of it, such as the Big Bang or a black hole. Currently some of the largest corporations on the planet promote the idea that the current technological acceleration of digital culture advances towards a technological singularity, associated with the emergence of an artificial superintelligence, a will to digitize and subject the world to total control, and a new mode of government carried out by increasingly autonomous algorithmic systems, which surpasses neoliberalism and increases its inequalities.

The theory of Algoricene, as era of algorithmic formations * speaks about a long historical process of impoverishment of the multisensory experience of the body, which has allowed movement to become calculable, algorithmic. Renaissance perspective culminated the articulation of a geometric, calculable and algorithmic way of perceiving and moving, thereby reducing our worlds of interactions more and more to calculable geometries. Current digital interfaces, Smartphones and selfies are direct heirs of Renaissance perspective and guide our movements in ever smaller, unconscious, dynamic, ubiquitous and continuous ways.

The Metabody 2018 Forum proposes that in response to the technological singularity associated with control, which is based on impoverishing and directing corporeal experience, it’s necessary to value and explore modes of movement, perception, body and relationship that are more complex, open and indeterminate, that create less geometric and calculable worlds of relations, open and plural ecologies, “minor ecologies” (which are not imposed on others), but at the same time singular, and resistant to the domain of digital capture, like parallel but open multiverses within our daily experience: micro-singularities. Microaffects, microsexes, microtimes, microspaces: indeterminate fields of with emergent dynamics.

It is about creating conditions for a neurodiverse culture: one in which not one single mode of perception, reason and movement is imposed, but in which multiple modes of perception and relationality proliferate, in which diverse bodies in their kinetic-cognitive qualities (bodies that are considered disabled or deviant by the current culture) can project and elaborate their diverse but open worlds. It is, in the age of digital natives, to understand that we are all primarily bodily natives, and to create tools to explore the complexity of a body that has the potential to resist digital control through the complex indeterminacy of its movement.

* See https://metabody.eu/algoricene/ and also: Del Val, J., 2017. Ontohacking. Ontoecological politics in the Algoricene. – en LEONARDO JOURNAL – special issue on BunB Conference http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/LEON_a_01521?journalCode=leon.

** An algorithm is a step-by-step sequence of commands, functions, actions or movements that can be codified.

WORKSHOP:

MICROSEXES: Ontohacking in the Algoricene

Ontohacklab/Metamedialab is an itinerant citizen lab, part of the International Metabody Forum, which so far has taken place in 33 cities of 22 countries, whose aim is to explore and elaborate minoritarian perceptions, a laboratory of research into the ways in which media shape societies not so much at the level of content but of their very structures, particularly in terms of how they organise perception. Ontohacking implies a critical reinvention of perceptual structures, which alters the way bodies move, relate and constitute social ecologies.

The 1^st part of the workshop will expand on some aspects of the theory presented in the talk (see above) as well as on the following aspects:

Normative sex-gender is an algorithm, a movement and perception algorithm, and we need to hack it. It’s an ontological algorithm that creates an algorithmic reality. The workshop proposes that normative sex and gender are the effect, not of discursive, performative articulations, but of the way in which movement and perception have become articulated in algorithmic patterns over millennia as part of the articulation of slave societies.

The Algoricene is the era of algorithms, first of static algorithms, since ancient Greek geometries and Renaissance perspective, that generate repeatable, calculable relations and ecologies. Now we enter the era of dynamic algorithms in which deviations become capitalised in Big Data systems as our activities are modulated by planetary scale computations systems and autonomous algorithms of Facebook or Google.

Macrosex is the repetitive algorithm of Greek geometry and Renaissance perspective culminating in porn culture. Hypersex is the new dynamic algorithm of capitalisation of any deviant activity in Big Data culture. How to escape such a control?

Microsexes are amorphous indeterminate movements and perceptions which hack this millenia long tradition of algorithmic sex, of framing bodies and calculating movements. Ontohacking is the proposal to generate alternate perceptions and movements for an amorphous, indeterminate, postanatomical body, a metaformance politics beyond the politics of queer performativity in the Big Data Era.

The  2nd part of the workshop will involve a particular ontohacking technique:

Surveillance cameras placed on the skin and electronically processed voice, a metaformative perceptual experience in which the body sees/feels itself away from the perspectival framings that reduce it to a morphology, opening up the participant’s perceptions, mobilising an amorphous postanatomical body of infinite potential microsexes. The participants will experience one after another, in immersions of about 20 minutes each, what it is to feel a dramatic change in selfperception (proprioception) of the body, towards an amorphous, microsexual, postanatomical body.

Jaime del Val is meta-media artist, philosopher and queer activist, director of Reverso www.reverso.org and coordinator of the METABODY EU Project www.metabody.eu.  Jaime del Val develops transdisciplinary projects in the convergence of arts, technologies, critical theory and activism, proposing redefinitions of embodiment, perception, sex and affects that challenge the ontological foundations of contemporary control society, which have been presented in more than 100 performances and exhibitions, mover 100 conferences and over 60 artist workshops in over 25 countries, with over 30 publications and having organised more than 30 International Metabody Forums and other transdisciplinary events worldwide.