Убежище / Suoja / Shelter

Towards
a Techno-Flâneur

Gaspar Cohen produces text, image, sound and spaces amplifying the relational of an experimental urbanity. Their work is interested in thresholds of augmentation, unstable concept-driven systems, their dissidences and consequences of translation. Also as 130_IVXX, is part of the power electronics trio 100ROQUE, works as a sound artist and performer researching critical publishing formats, alternative interfaces for expression and composition. Since 2015 has collectively hosted independent events, street parties, noise bombings, concerts and exhibitions. Since 2017, Gaspar has been based in Portugal, where he has engaged with several spaces and venues as an artist and programmer. Recently performed in the UK for the Orpheus Institute of Artistic Research in Music (Ghent/BE), has been an artist-in-residence at the Fine Arts Academy Tallinn–EKA (Estonia), wrote for #18.ART: International Meeting of Art and Technology and is currently a researcher at the University of the Underground.

Towards a Techno-Flâneur follows the thread of Walter Benjamin by having phantasmagoria as a key concept, and aims to expand its discussion to contemporary paradigms, the visual culture that is informed by 3D technologies and the socio-geographic impact of decentralized computation. Such reading is made and updated through Lev Manovich's proposals of Augmented Spaces (2006) and constantly overlaid to the development of information technology towards artificial intelligence and convergence culture. These are the outlines to the condition of a media-city and the proposal of a techno-flâneur. The last months have shown that the normalized urban experience of augmentation had become unfulfilling-yet-enough, fundamental to social fabrics. The re-centralization of computational experience and the computer vocabulary in media has finally solidified Clouds into mainstream culture and Z00M meetings into business standard. It has turned media into the center of attention. Communication suddenly had a new format. Its experience has its flesh out, it is something time-intensive and new. As if the world had first seen the internet, the COVID-19 pandemic has given offspring a hyper-productive momentum for audiovisual and education. The state of compulsory movement in constrained space becomes psychologically challenging and hard to approach in critical thinking. Social distancing was easily fit as a stand-in for physical distancing while The Internet has seen a rise of solutions either serving left-social alternatives or instrumentalized by far-right governance.

*For the Zoom meeting, please, keep your audio/ video mute. Use the applicable pronoun and a real/ nick name in the Zoom profile (e.g. Newton's Binomial/ they). If you want to ask the question - let us know in the Zoom chat, we will switch your cam and mike.
Meeting ID: 897 0317 7398 Password: 980100

Lecture - Performance
June 13, 21:30 (CEST)

Workshop
June 14, 20:00 (CEST)

*For the Zoom meeting, please, keep your audio/ video mute. Use the applicable pronoun and a real/ nick name in the Zoom profile (e.g. Newton's Binomial/ they). If you want to ask the question - let us know in the Zoom chat, we will switch your cam and mike.
Meeting ID: 861 8311 2071 Password: 596562