Art i Context Program | Conference: “Persistent (In)materiality: from the Internet to AI” with Toni Navarro and Alejandra López Gabrieli
“This conference aims to challenge the ontological foundations on which the ideology of digital immateriality has been built. In the cyberculture of the 1990s, this ideology led to a mistaken understanding of the Internet as a disembodied space allowing for multiple and fluid identities. Today, artificial intelligence is often conceived as the machine implementation of cognitive skills through statistical calculation and numerical or semantic analysis, independent of dimensions such as the somatic or the non-conscious. However, neither of these realities is immaterial: the Internet requires extensive infrastructure, and the body remains the point of access to virtual environments. Regarding AI, the dualistic notion of “intelligence” as purely logical-mental activity diminishes the importance of other scales and agents that make cognition possible as an embodied, distributed, and situated process. Therefore, we must consider these layers to avoid naive or grandiose narratives (like those proposed by transhumanism) and attend to the concrete material possibilities for articulating human-technical synergies.”
Alejandra López Gabrieli
Philosopher specializing in art and digital technologies. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Communication Networks and Social Change (CNSC) group at the Interdisciplinary Internet Institute (IN3/UOC) and a member of the Vector of Sociotechnical Conceptualization collective promoted by the Technopolitics unit of the same group. She teaches Aesthetics and Art Theory in the Design and Fine Arts degrees at BAU, Barcelona University School of Design. Her research examines the relationships between body and data from a distributed agency and cognition perspective. She has translated Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s Phenomenology of the End. Sensitivity and Connective Mutation (Caja Negra, 2017) and published articles and essays in journals and editors such as Holobionte, BRAC, InterARTive, Teknokultura, Arquine, El Salto, and exhibition texts including Ssssssssilex (La Capella) and Body and Fiction (Dilalica).
Toni Navarro
Philosopher specializing in feminist theories of technology. He is currently a professor at EINA, University School of Design and Art (UAB), and researches in the Vector of Sociotechnical Conceptualization promoted by the Technopolitics unit of the Interdisciplinary Internet Institute (IN3/UOC). He publishes occasionally in specialized media and journals and has taught courses and conferences at various universities and art centers. Recently, he translated and wrote the prologue for New Vectors of Xenofeminism by Laboria Cuboniks (Holobionte Ediciones, 2022) and Terraforming by Benjamin Bratton (Caja Negra, 2021). He authored the prologues for Xenofeminism by Helen Hester (Caja Negra, 2018) and The War of Desire and Technology by Sandy Stone (Holobionte Ediciones, 2020), and translated works by several authors for the anthology Cyberfeminism. From VNS Matrix to Laboria Cuboniks (Holobionte Ediciones, 2019).
