Workshops with Jon Cates and Warren Neidich

Workshop 1 with Jon Cates, 11:00-13:30

Glitch Western Film and video games

Workshop description: In this workshop, I will present Glitch Western Film and video games in which participants will dig into and discuss how to create new genres and define theorypractices that confront overdetermination and question overcoding. Glitch Art, the art of surprise, is a gift delivered to us from the ways in which our technological systems behave unpredictably, malfunction, and/or misbehave. Glitch artists capture and perform glitch, glitch affects, and aesthetics. From personal cinema, art films, to personal dynamic media, digital and computational approaches, I explore and explain how individuals and small groups create artworks that meet the challenges of our technological times. This workshop includes screenings of experimental works that span my 20+ year career of making unstable media, close readings, and discussion in the film-talk workshop format. The workshop is limited to 30 participants.

Jon Cates is an internationally recognised founder in the field of Glitch Art. Cates founded festivals, open archives, and educational programmes for these artistic approaches over the last 20+ years. He created the concept of Dirty New Media Art in 2005 and defined the term postglitch in 2012. As a professor at several international New Media and Media Art Histories programmes, Cates teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Donau-Universität Krems, Austria and NØ SCHOOL in France. He is the first full-time tenured New Media Faculty hire at School of the Art Institute where he developed the New Media Art curriculum. His programme is now one of the Best New Media Programmes, ranked top 5, in Best Fine Arts Schools. Cates is the curator of exhibitions including the acclaimed Chicago New Media exhibition and catalogue, a featured program of Art Design Chicago and Ars Electronica Festival.

Workshop 2 with Warren Neidich, 14:30-17:00

The Brain without Organs: Art and Indeterminacy

Workshop description: Artistic interventions attuned to chance, indeterminacy and unpredictability, e.g. those used by Duchamp in his 1915-23 Large Glass, or the works of the Fluxus group, play havoc with the cultural milieu’s gestalts, affordances and attention networks. Using Activist Neuroaesthetics as a framework I want to understand how such artistic interventions arbitrate between the material conditions of the mutating cultural habitus (what I call the extra-cranial brain) and the material architecture of the intra-cranial brain housed in the bony carapace of the skull. In the workshop, we will explore the emancipatory political consequences of indeterminacy through deep reading, performance and participatory action to understand the links between the brain’s neural variation and its plasticity, and to understand how and why Brain without Organs (like Deleuze’s Body without Organs) rejects the discipline of the organization of the organism. The workshop is limited to 20 participants.

Warren Neidich is an internationally renown conceptual artist, writer, and theorist. He is the founding director of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and the English editor of Archive Books, Berlin. Neidich’s Pizzagate Neon was exhibited in the 2019 Venice Bienniale and at Wolfsburg Kunstmuseum in 2020. Selected Awards and Fellowships include: Fulbright, University of Cairo, 2013; Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Berlin, 2010; and AHRB/ACE Arts & Science Research Fellowship, Bristol, 2004. Recently published books include Glossary of Cognitive Capitalism (2019) Neuromacht (2017) and The Colour of Politics (2018). Neidich has been guest tutor at Goldsmiths, London, the Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin as well as lecturing at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton and Brown universities, the University of Oxford, Cambridge, and at Jan Van Eyke Academy and Cal Arts, among others. His work is represented by Priska Pasquer Gallery, Koln, and Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich.

Artist Talks with Jon Cates and Warren Neidich, moderated by Natasha Lushetich & Iain Campbell, 17:30 – 18:30