METABODY FORUM 2017 GREECE – With the Refugees in Lesvos & Athens
Metatopia 4.6 – Contesting hyperborders in the Algoricene
18th September to 4th October
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Interactive media art with refugees in Lesvos.
Spain based media artist Jaime del Val takes the Metabody project and the Metatopia nomadic interactive environments to Lesvos, to develop a project with refugees, to denounce old and new kinds of borders and promote new ways of resistance.
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The Metabody Forum 2017 presents a new phase, this time developing a workshop and co-creation process with Refugees in Lesvos, culminating in a new version of Metatopia done in collaboration with Refugees on the island, in the Lesvos Solidarity “PIKPA” Refugee Camp.
The purpose of this collaboration is multifaceted: on the one hand it’s about raising awareness of new kinds of bordermaking in the big data era which have to do with how our bodies and actions are continuously measured and mapped by algorithmic systems pointing to a new algorithmic governmentality. On the other it’s about experimenting with embodied collective creation processes in which new kinds of space are created which are not spaces of control and which imply a creative reappropriation of any space, object or gesture of our daily lives, so that people in nomadic situations, but also anyone, can entertain a radically creative relation with their spaces. Last but not least it’s about solidarity with refugees in denouncing their situation, new and old border policies and the policies of fortress EU, supporting refugees and taking art to be a meaningful playground and collective process in nomadic borderscapes and outside the museum or festival context.
This happens alongside an international Conference on the topic “Contested Borderscapes: Transnational Geographies vis-à-vis Fortress Europe” in the University of the Aegean in Lesvos, where Jaime del Val will also present a paper on algorithmic borders and postbiopolitical control, as well as a performance.
Apart from this Jaime del Val will also do a one day forum at the Athens Museum Of Queer Art, in dialogue with the queer and sexual minorities communities in Athens, again involving a talk, workshop and performance, on 3rd october, this time on the topic of Hypersex as algorithmic control, and microsexes as resistance to it.
Furthermore nomadic actions by del Val in Athens, Micenes, and Lesvos are expected and support actions to Refugee movements in Athens. To be announced.
This tour is part of the International Metabody Forum 2017, supported by the Spanish Ministry of Culture – INAEM.
PUBLICATIONS:
- Del Val, J., 2017. Hypermemory and micromemories in the algoricene: on memory, borders and healing. V!RUS, 15. [e-journal] [online] Available at: <http://www.nomads.usp.br/virus/virus15/?sec=4&item=4&lang=en>. [Accessed: 12 December 2017]
- Del Val, J. Hipermemória e micromemórias no algoriceno: memória, fronteiras e cura. Traduzido do inglês por Maria Júlia Stella Martins. V!RUS, São Carlos, n. 15, 2017. [online] Disponível em: <http://www.nomads.usp.br/virus/virus15/?sec=4&item=4&lang=pt>. Acesso em: 15 Fev. 2018.
18, 20, 23, 24 September and 2nd October – Performatic actions in the open air in:
- Athens: 18th september
- Micenes: 20th september – Hommáge a Iannis Xenakis
- Skala Eressos: 23th and 24th september
- Meteora:2nd Oc de octubre
27th-30th Sept (preparations 22nd-26th Sept) – Lesvos
WORKSHOP & PERFORMANCE
METATOPIA 4.6 Contesting Hyperborders in the Algoricene
with Refugees, in Lesvos Solidarity Refugee Camp based in ex-PIKPA Camp in Mytilini – http://www.lesvossolidarity.org/index.php/en/
With final public performance at the Camp Dome on 30th September at 9pm
28th Sept-1st Oct – Reverso coorganizes the
Contested Borderscapes Conference – http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/
with over 200 international speakers
1st October at 12’30pm – Lesvos
Talk by Jaime del Val
University of the Aegean – Lesvos
in Contested Borderscapes Conference – http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/
Algorithmic hyperborders, Big Data Refugees, and Post-biopolitical control.
1st October at 3pm – Lesvos
Jaime del Val participates in the Panel on the notion of border, in the Auditorium.
University of the Aegean – Lesvos
in Contested Borderscapes Conference – http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/
1st October at 9pm – Lesvos
Performance by Jaime del Val
University of the Aegean – Lesvos
at the Roof Terrace
in Contested Borderscapes Conference – http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/
Metatopia 4.6 – Metaformance
3rd October 5pm-11pm – Athens (preparations 18th-19th September)
Talk, workshop and meta/performance by Jaime del Val
at AMOQA – Athens Museum of Queer Art
Microsexes: Ontohacking in the Algoricene – Queering and sex refugees in the Big Data Era
FULL PROGRAMME:
27th-30th Sept (preparations 22nd-26th Sept)
WORKSHOP & PERFORMANCE
METATOPIA 4.6 Contesting Hyperborders in the Algoricene
with Refugees, in Lesvos Solidarity Refugee Camp based in ex-PIKPA Camp in Mytilini – http://www.lesvossolidarity.org/index.php/en/
With final public performance at the Camp Dome on 30th September at 9pm
Metatopia is a nomadic interactive environment for outdoors or indoors sp aces made of physical dynamic structures (hacked tents) which become dynamic body extensions, as well as digital architectures and sound, where all aspects of the environments are created through full body movements of participants, via sensors or simple physical connections to structures.
The workshop will propose to explore the interactive environment as collective and therapeutic playground in which to collectively co-create a shared dynamic space, like a collective second skin, a metabody, a chrysalis or womb, a dynamic architecture created and inhabited from within by all participants.
The environments focus on non verbal communication, as every gesture contributes to the collective composition of the physical and digital environments, which becomes a collective body extension.
The environments propose very open landscapes of interaction where everybody can eventually project its cognitive and mobility capacities and potentials while relating non verbally to others. Metatopia is the collective open (indeterminate) space emerging from movement.
The environments invite participants to discover new movements and bodily sensations, as bodies connect to the physical structures and if they use sensors to interact with digital architectures, enhancing a sense of playful indeterminacy while empowering them to a collective creation of space.
The physical dynamic structures are tent-like and represent a recycling and reappropriation of existing objects, as they become dynamic body extensions for a collective experience.
The workshop could show, if there is available time, how to build such structures and also how to recycle and reappropriate other objects from the refugees environment in such a way that these objects become dynamic body extensions for collective creativity. Participants are thus empowered to creatively reappropriate elements form their surrounding.
Special attention will be devoted to the cultural specificity of refugees, their relation to perception, environment, gestures and non verbal communication. The workshop will propose them to subtly explore new experiences starting from their particular background.
Special attention will also be devoted to integrating in the process minorities within refugees, disabilities, gender/sex minorities, children, elderly and others.
https://metabody.eu/metamedialab/
https://metabody.eu/metatopia/
1st October at 12’30pm
Talk by Jaime del Val
University of the Aegean – Lesvos
in Contested Borders Conference – http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/
Algorithmic hyperborders, Big Data Refugees, and Post-biopolitical control.
Integration, assimilation, anticipation, modulation: New challenges to plurality and freedom in the Algoricene.
Challenging the ontological foundations of population and border control in the Big data era.
Reverso & Metabody Institute, Spain.
Keywords: post-biopolitical control, algorithmic borders, preemption, biometrics, big data – Track 1: the notion of the border
In the Big Data Era new threats to plurality and cultural difference emerge as strategies of preemption and modulation of behaviour of the human and nonhuman acquire increasing sophistication in algorithmic and Big Data environments. Preemption, anticipation and modulation strategies thus further problematise the already precarious situation of integration politics and the tendency to assimilate plurality rather than let it flourish. This post-biopolitical control regime, increasingly managed by autonomous algorithmic systems, focuses on the capture and capitalisation of emergent behaviours, down to the minutest unconscious gestures thus expanding older disciplinary notions of population control into a new wave of hyper-racism where biometrics explodes the horizon of quantification and categorisation of bodies and behaviours within emergent and increasingly unknowable algorithmic profilings.
The presentation will study the ontology and genealogy of such hypercontrol environments, their invisible architectures stemming from the rationalistion of sensibility enacted since the Renaissance, proposing that we inhabit the Algoricene, an era in which movements tend to be organised in algorithmic patterns of repeatable commands and calculable trajectories and geometries. These frameworks of perceptual organisation (more than the content of perception) are proposed as the ontological frameworks undelying colonial and necolonial politics of bordermaking on bodies and territories. The notion of the border is thus ontologically redefined, first as effect of static algorithms of perception that have over centuries and millenia generated the possibility to define and impose abstract lines diving bodies and territorios, and more recently as dynamic processes of information systems categorising our movements: both are defined as algorithmic borders.
In turn algorihmic borders are ontological borders: conditions of possibility of other more explicit ways of tracing limits and lines over bodies and territories. Biopolitics and population profiling related to state racism took to the limit the possibilities of slow or static systems of border making. Current algorithmic systems are far more dynamic and generate more diffuse and dynamic borders.
Static macroborders, such as defined by nation states, migration policies and normative regimes, are the result of slow and static algorithms that trace lines and impose static abstractions on bodies and territories. But decision making being more and more in the hands of autonomous algorithms and Big Data systems, what kind of world of hyperborders (dynamic and changing borders enacted by algortihms) are we facing, for instance in health systems and insurance policies, but also in migration policies? Every subject becomes a threat and a risk factor subject to dynamic profiles, whose parameters are increasingly unknowable as they are offspring of autonomous algorithms. Is the leading to a new kind of Big Data refugees? How can such a power be resisted or escaped?
Furthermore, how is and will be the complex interplay between static macroborders and dynamic hyperborders as the second gain terrain over the first? How is the interplay between state policies of border control and algorithmic profiling infiltrating corporate and state power?
Such problems need to be considered at the level of ontological conditions of both macro and hyperborders. The project Minor ecologies in the Algoricene proposes to highlight minoritarian, non algorithmic, perceptual ecologies focusing not on the content but on the perceptual organisation of bodies. How to mobilise spaces that favour a positive account of indeterminacy within our multifaceted spaces of control?
This will involve an experiential exploration and co-creation through the workshops and installation-performances (metaformances) of the intra-active environments Metatopia, as in-between spaces, metatopias rather than heterotopias, spaces emerging from the body and movement that may be enacted in nomadic interventions, fostering a bahavioural indeterminacy that may challenge the increasing tendency to categorise identities and actions in the attempt to capitalise and control our most minimal gestures.
1st October at 9pm
Performance by Jaime del Val
University of the Aegean – Lesvos
at the Roof Terrace
in Contested Borders Conference – http://www.contested-borderscapes.net/
Metatopia 4.6 – Metaformance
Reverso & Metabody Institute, Spain.
METATOPIA is an architectural paradigm of indeterminate space, enacted as a nomadic, interactive & performative environment for outdoors & indoors spaces that merges dynamic physical & digital architectures, with 3D and multisensory immersion, focusing on indeterminacy, unpredictability and open-ended relation to bodies and surrounding environment, an indeterminate space of emergent behaviours and movements that defies prediction and control in the Big Data Era.
3rd October 5pm-11pm – Athens
Talk, workshop and meta/performance by Jaime del Val
at AMOQA – Athens Museum of Queer Art – http://amoqa.net/
Microsexes: Ontohacking in the Algoricene – Queering and sex refugees in the Big Data Era
Talk, Workshop and Performance/Metaformance by Jaime del Val – Reverso-Metabody
3rd October at AMOQA
- Microsexes: Ontohacking in the Algoricene – talk and Ontohacking – Disalignments-Alien contacts workshop on – 17’00
- Microsexes – Metatopia – metaformance/performance 20’00-22’00 – one to one encounters
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 talk and workshop propose 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 millenia.
The Algoricene is the era of algorithms, first static algorithms since ancient Greek geometries and Renaissance perspective, that generate repeatable calculable bodies and morphologies. 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. 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 body, a metaformance politics beyond the politics of queer performativity, in the Big data Era, where refugees and algorithmic hypercontrol expose new dynamics of multifaceted border regulations.
The talk will explore philosophical dimensions of the Metaformance theory proposed.
The workshop will explore a technique of exploration of microperceptions, micromovements and alien microcontacts between bodies in a collective improvisation.
The performance/metaformance will involve a particular ontohacking technique: surveillance cameras placed on the skin and electronically processed voice, in one to one encounters with the audience, where the perfomer -as postqueer technoshaman and alien microsexworker- mediates a perceptual experience in wich 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.
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.