News
Superhuman Probabilities
Written by Daniel Kotja, reporting on his experience at the Super Human Symposium presented by Australian Network for Art and Technology, Melbourne 2009.
Taking a moment to digest the incredible experience that was the Super Human Symposium, master class and exhibition, presented by the Australian Network for Art and Technology, is an interactive pleasure to the senses.
Through a collaboration with ANAT, Arts Access Victoria provided a position for an artist with a disability to participate in the workshop and symposium. Selected by proposal submission, this position was offered to me as a new media artist.
An incredible opportunity to work with, and experience a menu of Australia's new media arts royalty and colleagues, this was not to be passed up. Curators, arts writers, artists, producers, theatre directors and arts workers united to explore the cutting edge explorations and practices of international arts science collaboration.
The art works and research projects presented offered a unique and personal insight into the world of Augmentation, Cognition, and Nanoscale interventions. These futuristic themes, a foreign language to many, where related to the human body and proposed many questions of form verses function, aesthetics verses representation, and perhaps the most controversial; the morals of scientific inquiry.
The entire Symposium was based on the collaboration between arts and science bodies and yet this union has for many years remained as two very separate and unique islands of human practice. This was, and remains, a remarkable relationship to witness and experience as a growing arena for creative practice. It was not long ago that science and art shared the same academic battlefield as science and religion. It is perhaps fitting that Darwin has captured so much attention over the last year, reigniting the creationist versus evolutionary debate.
Physical limitation of the human body was a common protagonist within the research projects and this is of course is an area of interest to those who, like myself, could benefit from such technologies as augmentation and other such science fiction fascinations.
As a paraplegic, I am an artist first and this question was debated through several visions. The question of 'to label or to not' was left on an area of tectonic instability; political arts or personal practice, should one be a disabled artist or, artist working with disability, or simply an 'Artist'; be it new media or sculpture.
Ethics were discussed throughout the symposium in various contexts however this is ethics in real life application. As a debate this has only just begun in Australia.
Art and science appear to have been 'going out' now for some time and although the usual relationship drama appeared frequently in some of the most engaging research projects and artistic interventions presented at Superhuman, they have evidently achieved a comfort only exhibited in those perfect relationships that everyone else has.
The entire Symposium opened this once 'other' place, to an audience dramatically engaged within complex theories made accessible through the artistic interpretation and intervention of some of contemporary arts most unique practitioners.
With these doors now wide open, the networking fever of conference etiquette will undoubtedly seed many extensions from this incredible event. I for one eagerly await the offspring from this unique science art happening, and remain unable to contain the ideas, concepts, proposals and dreams that have filled the space we all relish as inspiration.
I would strongly recommend anyone with an interest in the future of humanity through the wide-angle lens of the science art collaboration to access the research and information online at www.superhuman.org.au.
Many thanks to Arts Access Victoria, Accessible Arts NSW, and ANAT, for the opportunity and experience that was super human.
Daniel Kojta
30 November 2009