The group exhibition “UMWELT” is curated by Marco Mancuso, in collaboration with pageant filosofia 2024—this yr’s theme the Psyche—and the Sensible Life Competition. The exhibition challenge highlights how artwork and the artefacts of technoscience convey us nearer to a deeper understanding of non-human expressions of intelligence, in order that we will relate to them, make them a part of a brand new collective atmosphere and unfold a renewed ecological ethic. In different phrases, it underlines how the anti-disciplinary relationship with the fields of design and philosophy sparks new sorts of relationship between human being and context, pure and synthetic.  

The artists who labored alongside the curator for his or her works to inhabit the Palazzo Santa Margherita exhibition areas are: Forensic Structure (The Nebelivka Speculation), Semiconductor (By means of the AEgIS), James Bridle (Photo voltaic Panels (Radiolaria Sequence)), CROSSLUCID (The Method of Flowers), Anna Ridler (The Artificial Iris Dataset), Entangled Others (Decohering Delineation), Robertina Šebjanič/Sofia Crespo/Feileacan McCormick (AquA(l)formings-Interweaving the Subaqueous) and Eryk Salvaggio (The Salt and the Ladies).

“Umwelt” is a time period which means “atmosphere” or “world round us.” It was launched by biologist and thinker Jakob von Uexküll in his seminal work A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and People (1933) to explain the distinctive perspective every organism has of the world round it. The sum of the topic’s perceptions, experiences and interactions with its atmosphere. Its capability to combine within the context surrounding it, primarily based on its wants and the collective wants of an “entangled” ecosystem that human beings are studying to know not as a immobile, passive background entity, however as very a lot dynamic, very important and endowed with actually unimaginable types of intelligence.

Following the identical route as von Uexküll’s thought—whose affect transcended the confines of biology to influence philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, anthropology, design and sociology—with the “UMWELT” exhibition curator Marco Mancuso performs with a slant on the idea of atmosphere that’s expanded to absorb the cognitive processes of figuring out, and the totality of the topic’s aware expertise in relation to the weather with which it dialogues. Additionally included within the equation of actuality are essentially the most superior types of scientific analysis and computational intelligence, with an more and more key function in investigating and modelling the world through which we’re immersed.

Within the phrases of artist and theorist James Bridle: “If all intelligence is ecological—that’s, entangled, relational, and of the world—then synthetic intelligence gives a really possible way for us to come back to phrases with all the opposite intelligences which populate and manifest by means of the planet. . . . Fairly than being a instrument to additional exploit the planet and each other, synthetic intelligence is a gap to different minds, an opportunity to completely acknowledge a fact that has been hidden from us for therefore lengthy” (Methods of Being, 2022). As curator Marco Mancuso echoes, it’s a topic succesful not solely of serving to us observe different types of intelligence current in nature—to consider “different” psycho-cognitive fashions than the strictly human one—but additionally, if built-in with all of the instruments of technoscience, of observing the world, gathering info and imagining a attainable way forward for the planet in non-extractive and non-hierarchical phrases.

By means of an exhibition consisting of a sequence of works starting from scientific investigations to works of hypothesis, from knowledge evaluation programs to predictive organisms, from fashions that combine organic and synthetic parts to attainable phrase buildings, “UMWELT” units out to open a debate on the essential, aesthetic and narrative potentials supplied by finding out the unexplored types of company shared by human beings, computational machines and pure programs.

at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, Modena
till January 12, 2025