Bio
Olga Ast is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist, curator and independent scholar. One of her main goals is to investigate connections between time, space and information. Ast has exhibited and lectured in the U.S. and abroad, presenting her work at various interdisciplinary conferences and projects. In 2009, Olga Ast organized and curated the ArcheTime conference and exhibition dedicated to exploring artistic, academic and scientific concepts of time and published Fleeing from Absence, a book of four essays that explores the nature and interpretations of time. Later Ast collected the ArcheTime papers and artworks and designed a book titled "Infinite Instances: Studies and Images of Time" released by Mark Batty Publisher in 2011.
title
"Virtual Equality: Towards the Fair Distribution of Wealth and Health, Beauty and Brains, Information and Reality"
Abstract
This talk examines some of the egalitarian underpinnings of our cultural fixation with the future and our drive toward utopian technology. Our transition to a “post-human state” has already begun with the creation of countless artificial environments, beings and simulated realities for our convenience and comfort. Does this mean that we are moving toward individual autonomy with greater capabilities; or mutating into a unified post-human organism, with each human as a functionally highly restricted unit, a tiny cell of a greater body? I will examine whether there is a conflict inherent in our drive toward egalitarianism exemplified in the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, (or Death)” that can create conditions of forced equalization, submission, oppression and control that will be exacerbated in a post-human society and environment.
