The required application documents include:

– your detailed CV (including academic record)

art_cv_2013.pdf

– a sketch of your current research interests (1-2 pages)

Contemporary research methodologies (art, science, culture, politics) are influenced by the computational, including studies in software or hardware interfaces, interactivity and networks. Whilst explorations of such specific affordances have been important they have avoided a more informed engagement with the material structures that frame, underpin, and ultimately shape the discourse produced. Thus current research is purposed to identify, investigate, and implement a range of materialist and constructivist strategies with which to explore the ontological substrates of computation as means of production for new social and artistic works.

Current practice explores particular framings of the technical media that underlie all computational agencies. Richer understandings of the creative potentials of computational media as a form of practice can accrue from such deeper investigation of and creative engagement with the distributed materialities in which any computational device is embedded (as mineral niche systems). The research derives from a hypothesis that unter-signifying computational components like voltage behaviours and the thermodynamics of minerals, cannot be conceived of as just belonging to one abstract level of say, hardware, but should be seen as having a motility far beyond just facilitating those other levels of software interface or code. Thus to open up the machine methodologically, so as to recast its materiality and physics, is a central object of current research, affording new theoretical and practical frameworks for both the analysis and creation of new social and artistic productions.

The research is based on the assumption that while contemporary technological and aesthetic innovations rely on the configuration of arrays of material substrates, an account of such materiality has been generally left out from both theory and practice. For example, the arc of “digital” practices incorporated around an ethos of “free software” or “open hardware” have not provided any similar account along the lines of what might be described as “open materials”. Hence a second assumption of current research is that this bracketing out has impacted and skewed the geology of ideas and practice around technology and computation.

The scope of current research includes:

i) exploring how material and technological practices drive wider philosophical practices, especially recent 'new materialisms', in order to

ii) investigate the material architectures of computational media through public practical investigation into their material substrates through open laboratories, workshops, and events, with attendant publications;

iii) and develop a range of creative strategies that both involve and are made freely available to other cultural practitioners and a wider interested public.

The research is thus premised on a series of practical investigations into the materiality of components from the level of the computer circuit board and into the earth. These investigations then can feed froward into a series of theoretical proposals that impact on variants of 'new materialism' in recent philosophical discourse. Given the hypothesis, it should also be noted that although a detailing of, say, technology's emancipatory promises or its toxic legacies is outside the scope of this research, such themes will explicitly modulate investigations into these materialities.

Constructive sketch

Title: Stack. Frame. Heap.

A series of investigations into the material (non-human) are proposed with long term collaborator Martin Howse. Previous work with Howse has been framed by questions around precisely where software or the computational executes and how the symbolic (thought, inscription) enters into or is embedded within landscape, into earth. This research has led to practical investigations into the materiality of algorithms and the mirrored geology of the computational/abstraction.

Recent open laboratories and installations, convened as The Crystal World and Earth Computer, have expanded these researches to include notions of non-human agencies and aleatory ontologies through deep excavation into computational substrates.

Discussions of this work have also pointed towards the (oxymoronic) instability of ontology made explicit through the compression of distinct material-discursive agencies deployed in their execution (for example, that gold can only be understood as any one sensuous (exclusive) object emergent under distinct framings). This lack of ontological certainty can be charged as being both necessary and nihilistic (truth) which under/overmine notions of thought and the sensuous. The project is proposed to further explore this indeterminacy in relation to where thought (psyche) itself is executed.

For “Life versus Object. Comrade Things and Alien Life” new research into an expanded notion of the computational is proposed through insertions of computationally derived (component, process) products into the wider earth, clocking technology's acceleration of discontinuity between, and destabilisation of, thought, human certainty, and matter.

Production will be centred on the reconfiguration and re-situating of some of computation's production processes (etching, leaching, doping) and products within ad-hoc laboratories in Berlin, Leuphana and in situ in the Lüneburger Heide. Practical research will also centre on an exploration of parallels between the geological metaphors employed within contemporary digital computation (sedimentation, notions of memory) and a reworking of the earth itself. For example, stack and heap refers both to a visualisation of methodologies of memory management within a processor, and to techniques of mining (eg. heap leaching) which refine minerals in situ, forming the material basis of such computation. Under one interpretation a parodic cybernetic “thinking machine” can be seen as being embedded by such processes in the earth.

Re-animating the disjuncture of nature and pysche (animism), selected computational substrates and refining by-products will be re-interred or returned into the earth (in nature) as a series of stacks and heaps, of mines and pits, nurtured and alimented over time.

These in turn will be mined and disinterred in both public/private arenas and demonstrated within the context of a seminar, text, and a public event convened around sites of stack heap execution. Outside any operative (representative) diagrammatic (ontological stability) materiality is seen here as crucially dependent on the how of its enactment, on the execution of specific material-discursive cuts with their attendant exclusions (waste).

Through deeper experimental excavation into computational substrates combined with the heaping of its matter on matter, a logic of a skewed exclusion is highlighted by the project with the aim of re-emphasising the _necessary_ contingency thought has over matter (thus updating recent debates in Speculative Realism and the like), and, further, re-characterizing through practice any discussion of (im)permaculture and technological autophagia.

Research will take the form of a series of stack and mine insertions which will be assembled and installed as physical interventions in suitable sites in Luneberg and Berlin. These constructions will be devised and tested in the studio before insertion in local environments (contaminated land in Berlin, in the Lüneburger Heide areas).

Collected elements (mineral substrates, metals ores, computer components) will be processed in operations that:

These heaped deposits and the wider stack/mine environment (including earth, fauna, flora) are subject to further processing, including:

Interested parties will be invited to events convened around selective site extractions/dissections, demonstrations and discussions.

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Please submit your application electronically no later than 09.06.2013

bewerbungen.postmedialab@inkubator.leuphana.de.