Ontwerp: The Rodina
Uncertainty Seminar #1 with Andrew Norman Wilson
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Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
Thursday, January 12, 2017, 18:00 - 21:30
Admission: €7.50 (includes soup meal and a drink)
Students (with ID): €5
Free for We Are Public members
Language: English
Screening, lecture, and discussion
With: Ibo van de Poel, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor of Ethics and Technology at TU Delft.
Stroom Den Haag launches a new series of events, the Uncertainty Seminars, as part of the Attempts to Read the World (Differently) program. In this series, Stroom explores the concept of 'uncertainty' as a potential cultural strategy with thinkers, makers, and doers. Rather than fearing the unknown and eliminating uncertainties, the Uncertainty Seminars focus on the value and power of detours, being-in-between, and doubt: unique and undervalued tools for rethinking established patterns.
In this first edition of the Uncertainty Seminars, American artist Andrew Norman Wilson unravels, through philosophical and cinematic detours, the role doubt plays in his work. In addition to new work and an analysis of his artistic practice, he presents a curated screening program featuring films from outside the art world. These works depict formal uncertainty through ‘puppets’ that take on human forms. An unease surrounding their shapes, due to anthropomorphism, bodily fragmentation, and physically impossible scenarios, raises the question: "What can a body do?"
After his lecture, Wilson will engage in a conversation with Ibo van de Poel, Professor of Ethics and Technology at TU Delft and head of the new department of Values, Technology & Innovation (VTI). Van de Poel sees technology as a social experiment in society and is concerned with the values and frameworks surrounding technology, which inevitably change over time. How can we use the necessary and more constructive role of 'uncertainty' in science and political decision-making?
The series is named after Uncertainty Seminars: Group Therapy by Andrew Norman Wilson, a video installation in various forms from 2013. In a visual search for the essence of well-being, Wilson unravels the uncertainty of our time and the spiritual, psychoanalytic, medicinal, and sometimes clichéd forms of healing that humans develop in response. The work is an emblem of the potential of not-knowing and served as a link to a more fundamental deconstruction of doubt as a driving force in Wilson’s artistic practice.
According to Wilson, uncertainty as an inherent part of the human condition manifests itself in a constant state of mild paranoia, driven by the thought that we may be puppets of external forces, rather than in control: steered by economic networks, algorithms, or our genetic code. In recent work, he uses both handmade and computer-generated puppets to explore these thoughts. Scientific visualization and cinematic techniques converge to present 'science' as a cultural, rather than an objective, practice.
Andrew Norman Wilson (USA, 1983) exposes the structures behind power, technology, and capital with sometimes radical alternatives. He began his artistic practice in 2011 with the controversial Workers Leaving the Googleplex. Through installations, video works, and workshops, Wilson deconstructs our thinking about emotional, social, and ecological crises that our world may or may not face. Recently, his work has been featured in publications such as Frieze, Wired, and e-flux journal, as well as exhibitions like Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Gwangju Biennale, and the 9th Berlin Biennale (2016).