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Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2024 Paris: call for applications

Type: Residencies, Workshops, Exchanges [View all]
Posted by: Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art
Deadline: Sun, August 18th, 2024

The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism

Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2024 Paris September 30 – October 5

In cognitive capitalism, the brain and the mind are the new factories of the twentieth and twenty-first century. We are no longer proletariats using our muscular bodies to labor on assembly lines in industrial sheds to produce physical products, but cognitariats (or mental laborers) using our brains and minds in front of screens to produce data. In our post-pandemic era, characterized by excessive engagement with social media and corporate owned search engines, this accumulated data is not only passively collected and organized as statistics in order to mediate public opinion and encourage online shopping, but through siloed online engagement actively shapes the brain’s materiality by sculpting its neural plastic potential and normalizing its innate variability; in turn, producing an easily governed people and subjugating the multitude. Instead of finger clicks, this late-stage of cognitive capitalism will focus on brain waves to surf the web and interact with social media. New cognitive-based technologies such as the “wired brain” and optogenetics will directly and indirectly act upon the brain’s materiality and put both our conscious and unconscious thoughts to work. Like other resource extraction models, our basic mental capacities are insidiously externalized one by one by neural extractivism trending us towards a senile population. This technological escalation has repercussions for both our modes of individuation and forms of subjectification, and climate collapse is one consequence. 

 

This year’s Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Paris, organized in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme, will convene to both understand these new forces of algorithmic tyranny as well as how we might participate in an ontological turn from Homo sapiens towards the production of Planetary Sapiens. We humans have coevolved with the biosphere and therefore must continue to embrace the deep ecological thinking that it requires. Instead of generating technologies that poison, destroy and ravage the environment, we must embrace technics (or anti-technics) that care for it. We must give up the Anthropocentric dyad of globalization and sustainability, with its historical relation to the acceleration of capitalism, and replace it with that of the planetary, which includes all species and epistemologies, and habitability, which focuses on what is best for the continued existence of complex and diverse life on this planet. As Achille Mbembe suggests, habitability is not concerned with power or might but with life and the possibility of a radical openness. Planetarity requires decolonization and the production of cognitive justice. 

 

Towards these goals, we will retrace the body without organs (BwO), a phrase originating in the writings of Antonin Artaud and expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), upon a notion of the brain. The brain without organs (BrwO) is dependent upon two important epistemological frameworks: Jean Pierre Changeux’s work on the epigenesis of neuronal networks by the selective stabilization of synapses and Bernard Stiegler’s concept of exosomatic organogenesis which emphasizes the role played by the evolution of technics in the developing brain. The brain without organs releases the biological brain from the organizing capacities of the endosomatic genetic code subsumed by the despotic, exosomatic, capitalist-driven techno-socio-political milieu which secondarily sculpts the brains’ neural plasticity as well as normalizing its variation creating a neurotypical population of citizens. BrwO rejects behaviorist and computational/cognitivist approaches to the mind and brain and understands it rather as a becoming intra-extracranial complex sculpted by the social, political, linguistic, cultural and ecological milieu in flux over deep time. Bernard Stiegler’s theory of exosomatic organogenesis describes the expansion of the frontal cortex from Homo habilis to Homo erectus as a mirroring, or maieutics, through human time. In other words, our maieutics has been constituted by Anthropocenic technics over the past two million years and thus we are burdened with an Anthropocenic brain and its thoughts. Eco-agnosia, or climate denial, is one such result. In this way, cognitive-based technologies such as ChatGPT can be understood as the most recent Anthropocenic (and Capitalocenic) technologies to join fire, spear points, social hunting, slash and burn agriculture, the steam engine and the atomic bomb, that threaten our environment and ourselves. 

 

The implications of this exploration are grand and broad. Through “The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity, and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism,” we aim to understand the potential of planetary and ecocentric transformers that adhere to the tenants of deep ecology, as understood by Arne Næss, to lead the charge against Anthropocenic logic including its inherent biases and the neural-material consequences so beautifully illustrated in the recent sci-fi movie Don’t Look Up (2021). With this new thinking, we might discover the tools with which to devise these new methods and, as Isabelle Stengers has suggested, new forms of emancipating planetary governmentalities which together promote peaceful organs of cosmotechnical consciousness.

 

Warren Neidich, founding director
Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art

 

Faculty

Gabriel Alonso, Nicolas Bourriaud, Yves Citton, Emanuele Coccia, Igor Galligo, Agnieszka Kurant, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Anna Longo, Geert Lovink, Antonia Majaca, Amna Malik, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich (founder/director), Sinziana Ravini, Laurent de Sutter, Jennifer Teets, Tiziana Terranova, Aline Wiame, and Charles Wolfe.

 

Applications

Applications for SFSIA 2024 Paris are open to students, practitioners and scholars from the fields of art (including video, photography, installation and multimedia), ecology, science and technology studies, philosophy, design, architecture, critical theory, cultural studies, film and media studies, and beyond. Please see our application guidelines for more information.

 

About SFSIA

Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory that stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. SFSIA originated in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in 2015 and then migrated to Berlin, Germany where it has been hosted by Import Projects (2016) and Spike (2017-2019). Additional programs have been hosted by Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Performance Space New York, The Brooklyn Rail, and sonsbeek20→24 in Arnhem, The Netherlands. SFSIA was founded and is directed by Warren Neidich. Sarrita Hunn is the assistant director.

 

About Maison Suger

Since its creation, Maison Suger has been seen as a hub of social exchange, fostering the sharing of approaches, methods, and knowledge. Every year, some 200 researchers cross paths within its walls. Paving the way for cross-sectional discussion, Maison Suger offers the opportunity to confront interdisciplinary issues and encourage collaboration. Maison Suger regularly hosts scientific meetings (workshops, regular seminars, conferences, and summer schools) organized by the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) and its partner institutions. It also encourages encounters organized by residents as part of their activities in Paris (monthly meetings, residents’ seminar, etc.).

 

About Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH)
Created in 1963 by the historian Fernand Braudel, the Fondation Maison des Science de l’Homme (FMSH) supports innovative and international research in the humanities and social sciences, and disseminates knowledge to the greatest number of people. For sixty years, the foundation has been advancing knowledge in the humanities and social sciences to better understand the complexity of the world and explore the common challenges facing our societies. By supporting nearly 400 researchers each year from around the world each year and ensuring the dissemination of a wide range of scientific resources, the FMSH is the largest humanities and social sciences foundation in France.

 

Posted on Fri, July 12th, 2024
Expires on Sun, August 18th, 2024

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