BIO
Gabriela Galati is Professor of Theory and Methodology of the Mass Media at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, and at IED Istituto Europeo di Design, Turin; and of Aesthetics of New Media and Phenomenology of Contemporary Art also at NABA. She published Duchamp Meets Turing: Arte, Modernismo, Postumano (Postmedia Books, 2017), she writes reviews of books on art, philosophy, science and technology for Leonardo Reviews / Leonardo Journal (The MIT Press), and regularly collaborates with AdVersus and Scenari (Mimesis) with scientific publications. For Scenari she is guest editor of the #10 and #11 issues dedicated to Posthuman Art, and is editor of the book Ecologie complesse: Pensare l’arte oltre l’umano (Complex Ecologies: Thinking Art Beyond the Human) that will be published by Meltemi in 2020. She is founder of the curatorial platform ECCENTRIC Art&Research and co-founder of IPERCUBO. She obtained a PhD at the University of Plymouth for which her dissertation addressed the relationship between art theory, digitalisation processes and posthuman theory.
TITLE
“Posthuman Agency and the Archive”
ABSTRACT
The present work proposes to consider the archive as a contemporary apparatus not only of conservation of memory, but of creation and actualisation of (new) knowledge, and more broadly, to use Joanna Zylinska's expression, as "a life shaping force" (2017). Following Derrida, who considers that the archive creates the conditions of possibility for its own reading, as well as of what is archived, it becomes clear how the archive enables the possibility not only of a collective memory, but most importantly a projection to the future (1967b, 1995). In this conceptualisation, the archive has a hypomnesic sense, it is not just memory, an external and auxiliary memory, but it is creative and active: it implies reflection, creation, comments on the margins and constant possibilities of modification—it works in fact as a notepad (or better, as a Wunderblock). Evidently the archive is not only conceived here in the pedestrian sense of ‘the web as an infinite archive’, or even as a library, but it is conceptualised as an apparatus that is being created and actualised every time one writes and presses “Save” on the computer, for instance. In this sense, the archive can only exist as an event, as a constant actualisation and modification, as a block of notes on which one can comment, contribute to, create, alter and consult, but which is in turn continuously modifying our experience of it, and of its contents, as Derrida says, not only of its contents of events of the past, but also of the future. This is possibly its only interest: the archive as event, an archive that is acknowledged in its agency.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
Gabriela Galati is Professor of Theory and Methodology of the Mass Media at NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, and at IED Istituto Europeo di Design, Turin; and of Aesthetics of New Media and Phenomenology of Contemporary Art also at NABA. She published Duchamp Meets Turing: Arte, Modernismo, Postumano (Postmedia Books, 2017), she writes reviews of books on art, philosophy, science and technology for Leonardo Reviews / Leonardo Journal (The MIT Press), and regularly collaborates with AdVersus and Scenari (Mimesis) with scientific publications. For Scenari she is guest editor of the #10 and #11 issues dedicated to Posthuman Art, and is editor of the book Ecologie complesse: Pensare l’arte oltre l’umano (Complex Ecologies: Thinking Art Beyond the Human) that will be published by Meltemi in 2020. She is founder of the curatorial platform ECCENTRIC Art&Research and co-founder of IPERCUBO. She obtained a PhD at the University of Plymouth for which her dissertation addressed the relationship between art theory, digitalisation processes and posthuman theory.
TITLE
“Posthuman Agency and the Archive”
ABSTRACT
The present work proposes to consider the archive as a contemporary apparatus not only of conservation of memory, but of creation and actualisation of (new) knowledge, and more broadly, to use Joanna Zylinska's expression, as "a life shaping force" (2017). Following Derrida, who considers that the archive creates the conditions of possibility for its own reading, as well as of what is archived, it becomes clear how the archive enables the possibility not only of a collective memory, but most importantly a projection to the future (1967b, 1995). In this conceptualisation, the archive has a hypomnesic sense, it is not just memory, an external and auxiliary memory, but it is creative and active: it implies reflection, creation, comments on the margins and constant possibilities of modification—it works in fact as a notepad (or better, as a Wunderblock). Evidently the archive is not only conceived here in the pedestrian sense of ‘the web as an infinite archive’, or even as a library, but it is conceptualised as an apparatus that is being created and actualised every time one writes and presses “Save” on the computer, for instance. In this sense, the archive can only exist as an event, as a constant actualisation and modification, as a block of notes on which one can comment, contribute to, create, alter and consult, but which is in turn continuously modifying our experience of it, and of its contents, as Derrida says, not only of its contents of events of the past, but also of the future. This is possibly its only interest: the archive as event, an archive that is acknowledged in its agency.
EVENT
NYU Global Posthuman 2020
