Summer School Art History public lecture - RICHARD A. CARTER (University of Roehampton): "Arts of the Datascene: Sensing and Narrating a Technogenic Future "

The summer school Curating Art & Nature - The Knowledge of the Curator III offers a series of lectures open to the public. Tickets are free and available via eventbrite. All lectures take place online and are scheduled from 16.30-18.00 (CEST).

Arts of the Datascene: Sensing and Narrating a Technogenic Future

This presentation will discuss a range of artistic (re)deployments of sensing and data gathering technologies in the context of critiquing how we come to sense and make-sense of contemporary ecological crises. It shall examine the work of several practitioners, and will make particular reference to Carter’s own Waveform project, in which a drone is used to map the shapes of incoming ocean waves, before parsing the data gathered into enigmatic short texts meditating on themes of ecology and scientific measurement. With reference to the work of different theorists of sensory systems, this presentation will discuss these projects as making visible the highly complex, collaborative entanglements between varied sensing and interpreting agencies, human and more-than-human, that make it possible to characterise fundamental transformations in climate and ecology. In so doing, these projects shift our awareness beyond the current primacy of our data-driven episteme, highlighting alternative modes of experiencing, knowing, and expressing the origins, impacts, and possible futures of life in a profoundly damaged world.

About the speaker

Richard A Carter is an artist and Lecturer in Digital Media at the University of Roehampton. Carter is interested in examining the role of more-than-human agency within digital art and literature - considering how they generate insights into what it means to perceive, to articulate, and to act within the world. Carter’s research is embedded within his artistic practice, developing art objects that meditate on the potentialities of sensing, knowing, and writing at the intersection between human and machinic actors.