18.6.2025
Today we had a studio visit from Goda Klumbyte, a researcher at the University of Kassel. She specializes in feminist new materialism, posthumanism, human-computer interaction and algorithmic systems design and she is a researcher at the AI Forensics project. We did a demo of the mantra experimentation inside our yantra installation with a tantra activation… I wanted to get all those words in. I hope it makes sense.
Later many will ponder this word ‘activation’ which I use instead of ‘performance’. Today I found something which could help to understand. Thinking about the moment of exhibition, Nikolaus Gansterer says:
“More towards exposition, meaning ‘putting forth something’, more ex-posing than ex-hibiting, less showing what you already know rather than posing a question that you want to share with others. It needs these moments of activation. The work is actualised to become alive, in reference to what is ‘here and now’: through the space, through the visitors, through various presences.” (367, italics mine: “Thinking-Making in Relation” in Choreo-Graphic Figures: Deviatons from the Line, 2017)
The activation lasted half an hour, it ended quite unexpectedly when all three models went quiet at the same time. The three of us had a conversation afterwards and these things came up:
Is a ritual a pedagogical device?
Is the fact that “cause and effect are not straightforward” the cause of suffering?
What if everything ‘we’ create as an -ism is attempting to channel the ‘unknown’.
Play as participation. But playing outside of a system… that means not computer games.
Cracking open an overdetermined system.
Imagine an an ‘abject AI’… what would Julia Kristeva make of it?
Can we create a ‘sui generis’ grotesque… as a ‘mutation ‘of Butoh. The way many people continue to work with Butoh now, is through predetermined form – a ‘predetermined grotesque’ that saves them having to face their own grotesque. This is similar to the way people are using ChatGPT: you don’t have to do the work, don’t have to think, just use…
Can an AI trained model prompt humans to become sensitive to unknown knowing about ourselves: in other words spiritual seeking.
Each life as a fold; a fractal way of thinking.
Care and control
‘Model collapse’ that happens from feeding on too much synthetic data.
The human/physical presence introduces difference into the digital feedback loop.
Relation of score to protocol. Ethics versus morality. This takes me to Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro’s thinking of ethics as relational.