AIArtscienceNew Media ArtMachine LearningArtTechnologyInteractive InstallationsImmersive ArtCritical ThinkingCreative TechnologyConsciousnessMindEmbodiment
Superradiance
Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter
Biography
Memo Akten is an artist, researcher, and computer scientist working with emerging technologies both as creative medium and as subject of critical inquiry. He creates Speculative Simulations and Data Dramatizations that probe the cultural, social and ecological impacts of our contemporary techno-lifestyles, and the collisions between science and spirituality, modernity and ritual, self and collective intelligence. His practice spans moving image, sound, language, dance, installation and performance, often employing algorithmic, data-driven, and interactive processes. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, is Associate Professor at UC San Diego, and cofounder of the Superradiance Center for Entangled Intelligence and Planetary Consciousness. He has exhibited and performed internationally and received numerous awards including the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica.
Katie Hofstadter is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator exploring the intersections of embodiment, consciousness, and technologically mediated imagination. Her work examines the dynamics between knowing and feeling, investigating how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, shape both cultural narratives and direct experience. Her work is in the Whitney Artport collection and exhibited internationally. She co-founded the global art initiative, ARORA network, and the ClimateClock NYC. Her projects have been featured in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times; her essays and interviews appear in Flash Art, The Believer, BOMB, and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Gallery
©SFAC, ©Ye Rin Mok, ©Saul Villegas, ©Hanna Radek, ©Superradiance, ©Jacobs Pillow, ©Taikang Beijing, ©GrayArea Blue
About the talk
Cosmosapience: Embodying our Planetary Mind
Beginning with the body as a porous collaboration of cells, microbes, matter and environment, this performance-lecture moves through cephalopods, symbiotic bacteria, ant colonies, language, computation, oceans and planetary systems, tracing intelligence across scales and beyond the boundaries of the individual.
Weaving together ancient biotechnologies like poetry, dance, and ritual with artificial intelligence, simulations, and generative systems, Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter explore what our technologically mediated culture has severed us from, and what happens when the abstractions we use to make the world legible are mistaken for reality itself. The world is full of communication, and it is not all meant for us. Yet it affects us in ways far beyond what our simple models can comprehend and far beyond the reach of machine metaphors and computational frameworks.
The performance-lecture moves from the dense webs of feedback loops through which bodies, minds and planetary systems emerge, to the massive superorganism arising from billions of local actions and disrupting those cycles. It asks what it means to have developed planetary power without a planetary sense of self, and how art might help metabolize intellectual knowledge into felt experience.