20.00 - KREAS Colloquium / Panel II (Louis Armand, Václav Janoščík, Noemi Purkrábková, Lukáš Prokop, Lenka Veselá)

Sunday 16 October 2022

The panel will speculatively question the position of difference and sameness on the level of culture as determined by technological means. In what ways have cybernetics kept their original meaning of “steering” capital towards a presumed end point, and how can such a sense of looming universality be rethought, resituated and repurposed? What is the potential for a cosmotechnical shift from “Western” technics, and where to find space for what Yuk Hui has termed “technodiversity” which, going into the future, might be a prerequisite for the continued sustainability of diversity and life on Earth? Discussion follows.

Louis Armand (FFUK), Václav Janoščík (AVU), Noemi Purkrábková (FFUK), Lukáš Prokop (FaVU VUT), Lenka Veselá (FaVU VUT)

moderated by Vít Bohal

Lenka Veselá

Lenka Veselá is a PhD researcher at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, Czech Republic. Her art-based research practice concerns “synthetic bodies” (bodies emerging by synthesis) and “synthetic bodies of knowledges” (knowledges synthesized across multiple sites). She is an initiator of a collective publication and exhibition project Synthetic Becoming bringing together work by artists, activists, and feminist technoscience practitioners concerned with sympoietic becoming with hormones and hormone-disrupting chemicals. Building on material feminist, new materialist, and posthumanist lines of thought and embracing queer ecological sensibility, the project is a series of critical but hopeful provocations that affirm posthuman mutability and articulate our “synthetic becoming” in ways that facilitate and promote caring relations. In so doing, they allow us to envision and enact hopeful futures as we learn to live well with and despite these peculiar chemical agents. Recent publications include “Hormonal Design: Synthetic Sex Hormones and the Management of Living” and “Artistic Research as Academic Borderlands”.

Lukáš Prokop

Lukáš Prokop is currently studying a master's program at FFA BUT’s Video studio. Abstraction, complexity and experimentation are of key importance in the thematical infrastructure of his work, materialized through labyrinthine 3D modeling processes, digital image manipulation and post-processing. His alias, h5io6i54k, is closely tied to the experimental electronic music scene via the creation of music videos, cover graphics or A/V collaborations. His work has been exhibited in Galerie Mladých, Zaazrak|Dornych, his works include Whisper Divulging, Svitanie, Opilio, and the long-term collaboration with labels and collectives include Genot Centre, Gin&Platonic or SOfT, among the most noteworthy of his projects to date.

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Louis Armand

Louis Armand is a Prague writer, theorist & visual artist. His novels include, among others, Vampyr (2020), GlassHouse (2018), The Combinations (Equus, 2016), Abacus (2015). His theoretical works include Videology (2015), Solicitations (2013), Event States (2007), and others. In addition, he is the author of eleven collections of poetry — most recently Monument (with John Kinsella, 2020), East Broadway Rundown (2015), and others. He is formerly an editor of VLAK magazine & Directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague.

Official website

Václav Janoščík

Václav Janoščík is a pedagogue, theorist and curator currently teaching at Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) and Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM). He edited several volumes on problems of contemporary thinking ranging from new materialism, speculative realism, acceleration, future and media theory (Object, 2015 [CZ]; Reinventing Horizons, 2016; Mind in Terrain, 2018 [CZ]; Back to the Future (2019) [CZ]). His own books include Nonsleeping (2018) [CZ] giving a highly personal account of social acceleration or abstraction, and Straining the Contemporary, Detective Search for a Shared World (2020) [CZ], Dystopian Realism, How to learn through Capitalism and Dark Futures (2022) [CZ] which try to reinterpret and weaponize pop-culture. He curates extensively, focusing on expanding art into gaming, technology or experimental and collaborative practices. He focuses on political ecology (of affects), vernacular ontologies, philosophy of technics and media, democratization of contemporary art, thinking, and gaming.

Noemi Purkrábková

Noemi Purkrábková is a media theorist, art writer, curator, DJ and co-founder of the amorphous audio-visual collective BCAAsystem, exploring future territories somewhere between music and visual arts. Together they are involved in a variety of projects, from audiovisual performances to video work, writing, gallery exhibitions and music label activities. She is an editor of Art Antiques magazine and a contributor to a number of others, as well as a PhD candidate at the Film Studies department of the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague, where she deals primarily with productive poetics of digital fiction and ontogenetic qualities of contemporary moving image (art).