Убежище / Suoja / Shelter

Two Cosmology Pieces

Alexander Veryovkin was born in 1987 in Leningrad, USSR. Сurrently lives in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2009 graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of St. Petersburg State University with a Master of Science degree in astronomy. Studied at the Faculty of Photojournalism by J.A.Galperin, «Fotodepartament» and «School for Young Artists» of the «Pro Arte» foundation. Took part in group exhibitions in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Norilsk, Kaliningrad, Syktyvkar, Krasnoyarsk, Minsk, Amsterdam. In 2013 he took part in "New Saint Petersburg" exhibition in Amsterdam, which displayed the works of young visual artists and photographers from Saint Petersburg. In 2015 was a participant of AiR Barents art residency in Norway. In 2017 took part in the main project of the 4th Ural Industrial Biennale of contemporary art in Yekaterinburg. Solo exhibitions were held in St. Petersburg (Fotodepartament gallery) and Moscow (Multimedia Art Museum).

In recent years, the concept of "observation" in astronomy, and fundamental science as a whole, has shifted significantly. Big data has become the dominant production formula of scientific knowledge. For a long time already there is no person who would sit and watch through a telescope, would write something down. There is no longer any need to look into the sky since all data falls on the matrix and immediately ends up in the computer. The larger the scientific task and the larger the research budget, the more data is ultimately stored. Observations can now be fully automated. In projects such as the GAIA Survey of the European Space Agency, an observer is more likely to be a person who is already a satellite operator, rather than actually observing something himself. The resulting data is a huge array of information stored somewhere on the servers. Scientists who write their theoretical papers based on these observations deal with this data not directly, but through SQL queries necessary for filtering the array. The Large Hadron Collider project accumulates and stores information with such a flow density that it requires a complex distributed computing network consisting of supercomputers to process it. A project such as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) allows ordinary users to provide part of the computing power of their personal computers for calculations, while the user is not necessarily a scientist or person related to science but thereby contributes to calculations in an impersonal mode. So as it was shown the role of those institutions or national entities that own these expensive data and computing power to form a picture of the world for the rest of the majority is significantly expanded, thanks to the arrays obtained in the automated mode from scientific research. The question of how and by whom scientific knowledge is controlled seems important, since this form claims a dominant role in the hierarchy of all other types of representations of the surrounding world and has the authority to prescribe historical scenarios of the past and future. This project explores what historical scenarios, on an individual and collective level, the scientific discourse and the underlying big data computing can offer.

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Meeting ID: 891 0119 2508 Password: 746597

Lecture and Q&A
June 14, 12:00 (CEST)