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Books by Gabriela Galati

Ecologie complesse. Pensare l'arte oltre l'umano., 2021

Ecologie complesse: Pensare l’arte oltre l’umano è una rac- colta di articoli dedicati al tema de... more Ecologie complesse: Pensare l’arte oltre l’umano è una rac- colta di articoli dedicati al tema dell’arte e del postumano. Cinque degli articoli – di Alberto Micali e Nicolò Pasqualini, Edith Doove, Vincenzo Di Rosa, Federica Fontana e Massi- miliano Viel – sono stati selezionati tra quelli già pubblicati nei numeri 10 e 11 della rivista Scenari nella sezione sotto il titolo “Fare il postumano: Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica”, e ai fini di questa nuova pubbli- cazione rivisti ed estesi. Due di essi sono stati appositamente tradotti in italiano ed è stato elaborato un nuovo articolo di Gabriela Galati, curatrice del volume.
Questo lavoro nasce da una riflessione necessaria e attuale sulla declinazione degli sviluppi teorici e critici del postumanesimo nelle diverse aree della pratica artistica.

"Duchamp Meets Turing. Arte, modernismo, postumano" di Gabriela Galati - postmedia books 2017 - i... more "Duchamp Meets Turing. Arte, modernismo, postumano"
di Gabriela Galati - postmedia books 2017 - isbn 9788874901753

Questo libro parla di nuovi media e di teoria e pratica dell'arte. Essa intende riunire queste pratiche per proporre un modo di ricostruire gli effetti di ritorno che si sono costituiti fra il mondo dei nuovi media e quello dell'arte che definiamo mainstream.

Chapters in books by Gabriela Galati

Reading "Black Mirror" Insights into Technology and the Post-Media Condition, 2021

The chapter analyzes the “San Junipero” episode’s transhumanist optimism about mind uploading fro... more The chapter analyzes the “San Junipero” episode’s transhumanist optimism about mind uploading from the standpoint of critical posthumanis, The first thing that strikes one about the episode, given the apocalyptic nature of most of Black Mirror’s episodes and especially with regard to the effects of technology on society in the near future, is how happy (perhaps too happy) and hopeful the ending of “San Junipero” is. The uploading of the minds of dead people to a digital simulation is openly presented as a virtual paradise wherein subjects, leaving their obsolete and transitory flesh behind, have their minds (consciousnesses? souls?) stored in a computer server room so as to finally be able to live a liberated, f lawless life. This typically transhumanist perspective (see Hans Moravec, 1994), which believes that subjectivity is located in the mind and that it can be coded in terms of information, has been extensively analyzed and deconstructed by authors like Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, Antonio Damasio, and Roberto Marchesini, just to name a few. Following these works, especially that of Hayles, this text will explore, complex subjectivities in order to counter the fallacy of a disembodied mind that might eventually be downloaded to any materiality that is not the body. After tracking the concept of a technological unconscious through its genealogy from Sigmund Freud (1925; 1930 [1962]), Walter Benjamin (1935), Jacques Lacan (1955 [1991]), Jacques Derrida (1967b), Franco Vaccari (1979), Vilém Flusser (1983), Rosalind Krauss (1993), to Antonio Caronia (2006), the text will show that a stratus exists in technology, and the processes by which we inter- act with it, that is not accessible to human thought, but that is nonetheless symbolically structured. This stratus is a fundamental element in the con- sitution of complex subjectivities and the understanding that embodiment cannot be avoided, not even in interaction and enactment within digital environments.
ISBN: 978-3-8376-5232-1

(Book chapter) Galati, Gabriela (2016) Significante fluttuante, inconscio tecnologico e soggetto ... more (Book chapter) Galati, Gabriela (2016) Significante fluttuante, inconscio tecnologico e soggetto digitale. In: Bianchi, A. and Leghissa, G. eds. Mondi altri. Processi di soggettivazione nell’era postumana a partire dal pensiero di Antonio Caronia. Milano: Mimesis, pp. 195-211.

Editor by Gabriela Galati

La fine dell'uomo. Una controapocalisse femminista, 2021

Joanna Zylinska, La fine dell'uomo. Una controapocalisse femminista, a cura di Gabriela Galati ... more Joanna Zylinska, La fine dell'uomo. Una controapocalisse femminista,
a cura di Gabriela Galati

Ne La fine dell'uomo, Joanna Zylinska propone una narrativa alternativa alla lettura apocalittica dell'Antropocene secondo la quale la salvezza verrà da un altrove soprannaturale o tramite una evasione verso altri pianeti. L'autrice propone invece di considerare il concetto di relazionalità per evitare la tipica visione maschilista del soggetto che guarda disinteressatamente il mondo «come possesso e campo di gioco».

Joanna Zylinska è una teorica e artista dei media, che lavora sulla cultura digitale, l’intelligenza artificiale, la fotografia, l’etica e la crisi ecologica planetaria. Professore di New Media e Comunicazione presso Goldsmiths, è l’autrice di sette libri - più recentemente, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), Nonhuman Photography (MIT Press, 2017) e Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2014).

Gabriela Galati è docente di Culture digitali, di Teoria e Metodologia dei Mass Media, di Estetica dei New Media e di Fenomenologia dell’arte contemporanea presso NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano e di Teoria e Metodologia dei Mass Media presso IED, Torino.

Rivista Scenari-Mimesis Edizioni, 2020

Seconda parte Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura ... more Seconda parte
Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di Gabriela Galati

Fare il postumano: Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica
è la raccolta di una serie di articoli dedicati al tema dell’arte e del postu- mano. Originalmente l’idea era di realizzare un unico numero dedicato al tema, ma la quantità di lavori di rilievo ci ha convinto a dedicarvi due numeri, dei quali si presenta il primo.
Questi lavori hanno reso evidente quanto si dimostri pressante in questo momento ri ettere e declinare gli sviluppi teorici e critici del postumano alle diverse aree della pratica artistica. L’accelerazione espo- nenziale nello sviluppo tecnologico durante l’ultimo secolo ha portato a porsi delle domande sui cambiamenti nei rapporti tra uomo e tecnologia, e, quasi allo stesso tempo, sul vivente nel suo complesso. Da una parte queste domande sono state motivate dalla comprensione che l’intreccio costante con le nuove tecnologie stava generando nuovi e più complessi tipi identitari; dall’altro, che la teoretica predominanza umana su altre forme di vita non era più né sostenibile né tanto meno accettabile. Molte delle ricerche al riguardo venivano proposte sotto il nome di postuma- no: una “condizione” che implica un avanzamento dell’interesse verso una visione della contemporaneità più complessa, che mette sullo stesso piano tutte le forme di vita prendendo in considerazione anche i rapporti con l’inorganico.

Rivista Scenari-Mimesis Edizioni, 2019

Prima parte Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di... more Prima parte
Fare il postumano. Un nuovo scenario della teoria e della pratica artistica a cura di Gabriela Galati

Articles on journals by Gabriela Galati

MATTER journal of new materialist research, Universitat de Barcelona, 2024

This text aims to explore the archive as a powerful force that shapes life. Consequently, it seek... more This text aims to explore the archive as a powerful force that shapes life. Consequently, it seeks to develop an ethical framework for the archive from a feminist perspective. De-extinction can be linked to the archive as a stabilizing apparatus and a scene of responsibility (Wolfe 2018) that entails our ethical commitment to acknowledge the radical passivity of those who no longer exist in this world, both as individuals and species. This scene of responsibility is intertwined with the agency of the archive. In other words, the archive acts as a life-creating apparatus by shaping the conditions for reading, the future, and, to some extent, reality itself. By establishing the foundations for an ethics of the archive as a practice that creates life, this text aims to reframe the discourse surrounding extinction and de-extinction.

Rivista Scenari-Mimesis Edizioni, 2018

Starting from a brief genealogy of what may be considered the rst posthuman artistic practices, ... more Starting from a brief genealogy of what may be considered the rst posthuman artistic practices, from Marcel Duchamp to Land Art and the rst Art & Technology approaches, and from an analysis of some particular artistic practices I would like to outline a research hypothesis that will be further explored in works to follow. Although the predo- minant tendency in the theorisations on posthuman art is to clearly se- parate the topics concerning art and technology from those concerning artistic practices of the living, I will begin to work on an articulation that on the one hand can contemplate the speci c differences of each one of these practices, but where on the other hand the artistic practi- ces of the living and of new media art can be part of the same landscape, or ecology: that is to say, to be understood and outlined with a metho- dology that allows to investigate in depth, following Jacques Derrida, that what we share as humans with the living as a whole is not only a shared passivity and nitude, but also the fact that in the case of human animals this nitude is inseparable from the prosthetic constitution of the machine of language as always already technological beings. It is in this sense that a re ection on the living must necessarily include the technological dimension and vice versa. From this point of departure we can therefore speak of a complex, if not complete, ecology of post- human art.
Keywords: art, posthuman, ecology, living, technology.

Leonardo Journal, 2018

Leonardo, Volume 51, Issue 5, October 2018, p.527, Top-rated LABS Abstracts 2017

Techno-Ecologies II. Acoustic Space #12

In his book Différence et répétition (1968), Gilles Deleuze elaborates an essential concept for t... more In his book Différence et répétition (1968), Gilles Deleuze elaborates an essential concept for the theory of the image: the simulacrum. The plane of the simulacra is characterised by the co-extensiveness of images, which are individuated by their own difference, and not by their placement in an ontological hierarchy, platonic at its origin; and that has as its poles true and false, being and not-being, fair or unfair.
In current times, the concept of simulacrum seems to be one of the most efficient tools to overcome a further dichotomy: a dichotomy - old and based on past ontologies -, between virtual and real, and therefore, between virtual images and real images.
Firstly, the present work intends to apply the notion of simulacrum to the study of digitally-based images to make evident their belonging to the same plane of any other kind of images, namely the material ones.
Secondly, the notion of simulacrum is applied to the screen, to make evident how it has been mistakenly included in the plane of the images. Historically, the consequence of this mistake has been inauthentic experiences, and the triggering of processes of desubjectification.
After verifying the mentioned hypotheses and removing the screen from a potential ontology of the image, the screen is then correctly relocated in a semiotic and mediologic horizon. In this context, C.S. Peirce’s notions of icon and symbol, and Bolter-Grusin’s polarities of hypermediation and transparency are applied to demonstrate how the evolution of the screen in the last thirty years has culminated in a strong mannerist phase in the recent past, especially since the touch-screen technology has lead to a blurring of the limits between screen and interface. However, it is relevant to notice that in more recent releases of contemporary interfaces a return to a symbolic and hypermediated regime can be observed.
As a conclusion, the main aim of this article is to restore, in the light of the notion of simulacrum, a clear and fair relation between image and screen, so that from both of them an authentic and subjectifying experience can be drawn.

La ricerca artistica di Camilla Alberti parte da un’analisi dell’architettura come dispositivo di... more La ricerca artistica di Camilla Alberti parte da un’analisi dell’architettura come dispositivo di relazione con il mondo e come strumento privilegiato attraverso il quale indagare l’occupazione dello spazio. Per portare a termine la sua indagine, Alberti non privilegia un medium in particolare, ma passa dalla pittura all’installazione, al disegno, allo sviluppo di maquette, nelle quali in tempi piu recenti hanno iniziato ad abitare muschi, licheni e bachi da seta. Allo stesso tempo, si avvale di strumenti teorici provenienti da diversi campi di studi e conoscenza: architettura, psicologia, urbanistica e, ovviamente, dal confronto con altri artisti.

espanolDel mismo modo en que el ser humano ha sentido la necesidad de inventar mundos ficticios y... more espanolDel mismo modo en que el ser humano ha sentido la necesidad de inventar mundos ficticios y virtuales, tambien siempre experimento una atraccion por las ideas amenazadoras y fascinantes del doble (doppelganger), de los automatas, y por fenomenos tales como la ubicuidad, incorporeidad (disembodiement), la vision a distancia, la bilocacion y las personalidades multiples. El fenomeno de la bi-locacion, por ejemplo, ha sido mencionado extensamente en diferentes sistemas religiosos y filosoficos como el chamanismo, el hinduismo, el misticismo cristiano, el paganismo y otros, como la habilidad que tendrian ciertos individuos (generalmente santos, monjes o misticos) de encontrarse en dos o mas lugares al mismo tiempo. El advenimiento de Internet, las nuevas tecnologias y las redes sociales han abierto nuevas posibilidades respecto a esto, permitiendo la expansion del «yo» en cuerpos virtuales teledirigidos. Si no mucho tiempo atras, experiencias de este tipo debian ser vividas a trav...

AdVersuS, X, 25, diciembre 2013/abril 2014: 212-219

Ecologie complesse. Pensare l'arte oltre l'umano., 2021

Reading "Black Mirror" Insights into Technology and the Post-Media Condition, 2021

La fine dell'uomo. Una controapocalisse femminista, 2021

Joanna Zylinska, La fine dell'uomo. Una controapocalisse femminista, a cura di Gabriela Galati ... more Joanna Zylinska, La fine dell'uomo. Una controapocalisse femminista,
a cura di Gabriela Galati

Rivista Scenari-Mimesis Edizioni, 2020

Rivista Scenari-Mimesis Edizioni, 2019

MATTER journal of new materialist research, Universitat de Barcelona, 2024

Rivista Scenari-Mimesis Edizioni, 2018

Leonardo Journal, 2018

Leonardo, Volume 51, Issue 5, October 2018, p.527, Top-rated LABS Abstracts 2017

Techno-Ecologies II. Acoustic Space #12

AdVersuS, X, 25, diciembre 2013/abril 2014: 212-219

Far & Wide-Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Dec 15, 2013

Leonardo Reviews, 2022

Prosthesis by David Wills; foreword by Jacques Derrida University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis... more Prosthesis
by David Wills; foreword by Jacques Derrida
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2021
392 pp. illus. 4 b/w. Paper, $27.50
ISBN: 978-1-5179-1155-3.

Reviewed by:
Gabriela Galati
March 2022
https://leonardo.info/review/2022/03/prosthesis "

Philosophy Kitchen, 2020

Utilizzando come attivatore di ogni capitolo una "specie harawaiana", Federica Timeto nel suo Bes... more Utilizzando come attivatore di ogni capitolo una "specie harawaiana", Federica Timeto nel suo Bestiario Haraway (Mimesis 2020) analizza e mette a sistema il pensiero di Donna Haraway a partire da una serie di figure zoo-tecnomorfe che hanno accompagnato e inquadrato il lavoro dell'autrice americana in maniera organica nella sua costante mutazione. Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD

Philosophy Kitchen, 2019

Cercare di definire la New Media Art è come cercare di circoscrivere l'arte contemporanea: i conf... more Cercare di definire la New Media Art è come cercare di circoscrivere l'arte contemporanea: i confini della categoria e le opere e i nomi che vi possono far parte in un determinato momento inevitabilmente cambiano e si spostano solo cinque anni dopo. La New Media Art è una galassia di riferimenti, spesso interdisciplinari, che devono essere continuamente mappati. Una parte importante del libro di Marco Mancuso affronta questo compito in modo esaustivo. Nonostante ogni tassonomia sia in parte arbitraria, dieci anni dopo il libro di Deseriis e Marano Net.Art. L'arte della connessione, un aggiornamento era necessario. Mancuso non solo si dedica ad aggiornare la tassonomia, i nomi, le opere, i festival e tutti gli autori che ne fanno parte, ma propone anche una lettura che mette in gioco un nuovo attore: le art industries, "industrie artistiche e culturali che producono beni, servizi e attività e che hanno la capacità di agire come catalizzatori di questo processo" (p. 13). L'ipotesi di base che sostiene la sua analisi è che tutto il sistema che aveva supportato la New Media Art nell'ultimo decennio è stata assistenzialista e non più sostenibile, e che sono quindi le art industries a prendere questo ruolo. L'autore ha utilizzato la piattaforma da lui fondata e diretta, Digicult, come un osservatorio privilegiato dal quale non solo si è limitato a guardare, catalogare e descrivere il campo della New Media Art, ma essa gli ha permesso di conoscere, intervistare, curare molti degli eventi, le opere e gli artisti di cui parla. Così il libro è diviso in quattro parti: "Scenario", "Ambiti disciplinari", "Case studies" e "Scenari futuri".

Leonardo Reviews, 2018

Review of the book: Museum and Archive on the Move: Changing Cultural Institutions in the Digital... more Review of the book:
Museum and Archive on the Move: Changing Cultural Institutions in the Digital Era
By Oliver Grau (ed.) together with Wendy Coones and Viola Rühse
De Gruyter, Berlin, 2017
pp. 316, illus. col., b/w
ISBN: 978-3-11-052051-4

Leonardo Reviews

Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and the Arts by Carsten Strathausen University of ... more Bioaesthetics: Making Sense of Life in Science and the Arts
by Carsten Strathausen
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2017
320 pp. Trade, 120;paper,120; paper, 120;paper,30
ISBN: 978-1-5179-0074-8; ISBN: 978-1-5179-0075-5

Reviewed by
Gabriela Galati
May 2018

Leonardo Journal

The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age Edited by Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christ... more The Participatory Condition in the Digital Age
Edited by Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne and Tamar Tembeck
The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2016
pp. 404, illus, b/w
ISBN: 978-0-8166-9771-7

Reviewed by Gabriela Galati
info@ec-centric.eu

Book review on Leonardo Reviews (Published April 2016): A Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka Unive... more Book review on Leonardo Reviews (Published April 2016):
A Geology of Media
by Jussi Parikka
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2015
224 pp., illus. 20 b/w. Trade, 87.50;paper,87.50; paper, 87.50;paper,24.95
ISBN 978-0-8166-9551-5; ISBN: 978-0-8166-9552-2.

Reviewed by Gabriela Galati
University of Plymouth

gabriela.galati@plymouth.ac.uk

Review on Leonardo Reviews of Alexander Galloway's Laruelle: Against the Digital (2014).

L’ecologia è la sensibilità a considerare qualsiasi elemento nel suo ambiente. Essa porta con sé ... more L’ecologia è la sensibilità a considerare qualsiasi elemento nel suo ambiente. Essa porta con sé un’attenzione complessa, relazionale, che oggi non può evitare di confrontarsi con la problematica delle immagini e dell’immaginario. Forse nulla più delle immagini permette di correlare quanto invece i confini dividono: opposizioni come dentro e fuori, puro e laido, coscienza e inconscio, si scoprono inseparabili nella loro congiunzione immaginaria. Affronteremo dunque questo tema, volgendoci ai dispositivi e in generale alle tecniche della nostra contemporaneità, con le quali l’arte permette di sperimentare. Ne discuteremo con studiosi, che hanno osservato e rimarcato le potenzialità e i rischi dell’incontro tra arte e tecnologie, ma anche con chi questo incontro ha tentato di attuarlo nella propria pratica artistica: esperimento che è in sé ecologico.

Intervengono:
Gabriela Galati (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano)
Paulo Fernando Lévano (Deckard; ubiminor; UniBO)
Irene Fenara (Artista)

Round table Festival Mimesis 2018 Gabriela Galati (storica dell’arte, Nuova Accademia di Belle A... more Round table Festival Mimesis 2018

Gabriela Galati (storica dell’arte, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano) / Luigi Antonio Manfreda (filosofo, Univ. di Roma) / Andrea Tagliapietra (filosofo, Univ. San Raffaele)

Partendo dalle riflessioni contenute nel recente libro di Gabriela Galati Duchamp Meets Turing: A... more Partendo dalle riflessioni contenute nel recente libro di Gabriela Galati Duchamp Meets Turing: Arte, modernismo, postumano (Postmedia Books, 2017), i relatori dialogheranno sull’intreccio fra teoria dell'arte, il rapporto attuale con il vivente e la soggettivazione indotta dalle nuove tecnologie.

L’incontro è organizzato da ALL Associazione Laureati/e in Lingue e Letterature Straniere, Università degli Studi di Udine, in collaborazione con RAVE East Village Artist Residency, con il supporto della Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia Giulia.

Università degli Studi di Udine
Palazzo Antonini, Aula 2, Via Petracco, 8, Udine

venerdì 2 marzo ore 11.00

intervengono:
Gabriela Galati, NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti di Milano
Giovanni Leghissa, Università di Torino
Tiziana Pers, RAVE East Village Artist Residency
Introduce:
Nunziana Mastrangelo

Gabriela Galati è docente di Teoria e Metodologia dei Mass Media presso NABA, Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano, e docente di Media Art Theory presso Domus Academy. Scrive recensioni su libri per Leonardo Reviews / Leonardo Journal-MIT Press, e collabora con Noema e AdVersus. Fondatrice di ECCENTRIC Art & Research, dopo un’esperienza quindicennale come direttrice di galleria e curatore, prima a Buenos Aires, sua città natale, poi a New York e Milano, è attualmente direttrice della galleria d'arte contemporanea aA29 Project Room di Milano.

Giovanni Leghissa, membro della redazione della rivista “aut aut” e direttore della rivista online “Philosophy Kitchen”, è professore associato di Filosofia teoretica presso il Dipartimento di Filosofia dell’Università di Torino. I suoi interessi di ricerca comprendono: fenomenologia, filosofia continentale e psicoanalisi; studi culturali, di genere e postcoloniali; filosofia del postumano; epistemologia dell’economia e teoria delle organizzazioni. Tra le sue ultime pubblicazioni: Postumani per scelta. Verso un’ecosofia dei collettivi (Mimesis, 2015). The Origins of Neoliberalism (Routledge, London 2016, con Giandomenica Becchio).

Tiziana Pers, artista visiva e co-fondatrice del progetto RAVE, concentra la sua ricerca sulla questione animale e sui temi del biocentrismo. Sue opere sono state presentate in svariate istituzioni tra cui Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Parigi, Seoul Biennale of Architecture, aA Project Room, Milano, One Night Stand Gallery, Sofia, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milano, PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Torino, Villa Manin, Passariano, MAC Milano Animal City, Castello di Rivoli, Palais De Tokyo, Parigi, e.c.53. Biennale d’Arte Venezia, Museo MADRE, Napoli, Dade Public Library Miami.

The issue of Scenari #10 is dedicated to posthuman theory and art, and aims to bring together a ... more The issue of Scenari #10 is dedicated to posthuman theory and art, and aims to bring together a series of researches both on concrete artistic practices and completely theoretical reflections that will focus, though not exclusively, on the following topics:
- What are the conditions of possibility of a posthuman art? In what sense can one speak of a posthuman art? What is its ethical / aesthetic relevance today?
- Art and technology, and artistic practices of the living: Origins and developments.
- Posthuman art and the problem of the medium: technology and the living, as “medium” (Krauss 1999 [2005]) and not as mere material supports.
- Posthuman art and activism: ecology, antiespeciesism, biocentrism, feminism, eco-feminism, cyber-feminism, hackerism. The risk of “pedagogism” (Zylinska 2009, Wolfe 2009) and "melodrama" (Wolfe 2009).
- The construction of subjectivities, art and the posthuman (Caronia 1996, Hayles 1999, Galati 2017).
- Problems of criticism, curatorship and exhibition display (Deseriis-Marano 2008, Galati 2017).
Proposals should be sent to redazione@mimesis-scenari.it and need to include: - title and abstract (max 500 words);
- 5 keywords;
- brief bio;
- email address.
Deadline for submitting proposals: November 5th 2018
Notification of acceptance: November 12th 2018
Deadline for submitting full article (max 40.000 characters): March 18th 2019

Università degli studi Milano-Biccoca: 11th EFRCSocial change in a feminist perspective , 2022

Focusing on a series of topics which range from 'the animal question' and the mal d'achive to the... more Focusing on a series of topics which range from 'the animal question' and the mal d'achive to the more recent discussions on extinction and de-extinction, the present work proposes to consider the archive as a 'a life-shaping force' and thus to advance an ethics of the archive from a feminist perspective. It will follow an approach that aims at avoiding the typical masculinist view of the subject who 'desinterestedly looks at the world as its possession and playground' (Zylinska 2018). On the contrary, this work will adopt a situated perspective in order to propose, following again Zylinska, a 'counterapocalypse' (2018) which downsizes the anthropos of the Anthropocene as an alternative approach grounded on precarity (Tsing 2015), and, I will add, on a shared passivity (Derrida 2006). Cary Wolfe (2018) has linked de-extinction with the archive as a 'stabilising apparatus' and with the 'scene of responsibility', namely, our ethical commitment towards the radical passivity of those who are not in this world anymore, as individuals or species. Subsequently, this work advances that the scene of responsibility is also related to the archive's agency, that is to say, to the archive as a life-creating apparatus, because the archive produces it conditions of possibility, of reading, of the future, and thus it shapes (at least in part) reality. Thus the scene of responsibility includes also the different archives that are being created: What kind of future will they construct, at least partially? This question is fundamental to the issue of de-extinction: what kind of future will the seed banks, or the DNA of extinct species will help bring about? And then, for whom? In laying the grounding for an ethics of the archive as a life-creating practice, this text intends to rethink extinction and de-extinction with the aim of contributing with other ongoing efforts to think and build counterapocalypses from a intra-active and situated vantage.

Art in the Anthropocene, Trinity College, Dublin, 2019

In general, the predominant tendency in the theorisations on posthuman art is to clearly separate... more In general, the predominant tendency in the theorisations on posthuman art is to clearly separate the topics concerning art and technology from those concerning the artistic practices of the living. In recent research, I have been working on an articulation that on the one hand can contemplate the specific differences of each one of these practices, but where on the other hand the artistic practices of the living and of new media art can be part of the same landscape, or ecology: that is to say, to be understood and outlined with a methodology that allows to investigate in depth, following Jacques Derrida, that what we share as human animals with the living as a whole is not only a shared passivity and finitude, but also the fact that in the case of human animals this finitude is inseparable from the prosthetic constitution of the machine of language as always already technological beings. Thus, in the present work I propose to deepen the research and analysis of the artistic practices of the living, focusing on concrete cases whose subject of reflection, research and often also of action, is the living independently of the medium used to investigate it. By articulating these lines of research, it will be possible to delineate a complex, if not complete, ecology of posthuman art.

RENEWABLE FUTURES CONFERENCE, Latvian National Library, Riga., 2015

In her book How We Became Posthuman (2001) Katherine Hayles analysed the process through which th... more In her book How We Became Posthuman (2001) Katherine Hayles analysed the process through which the conception of the liberal humanist subject let its way at the posthuman subject, a subject who lives in complete intertwining with the digital. This process, however, was not innocuous: it made pervasive within many fields of knowledge the (imaginary) perception that information could do without material instantiation, a process to which Hayles finds an origin in the Macy Conferences and the evolution of cybernetic theory. This research identified an analogous process within the artistic realm: When Clement Greenberg delineated the concepts of opticality and colour field as the main characteristics that “defined” Modernist painting he conceived of these in a purely disembodied subject (Krauss 1997). In this context, this work proposes to consider that the actual overcoming of Modernism comes along with the advent of the Posthuman tracing its origin to Marcel Duchamp and his “invention” of the readymade, and not with Postmodernism, which theoretical consistency, at least in the artistic field, this work will question. A desired result of this research in the long term will be to unify the main concepts of the artistic field with those of cybernetics, to bring together, or at least closer, “Turing land” and “Duchamp land”, to put it in Manovich’s words.

Logic Lane: Giornate di studio Antonio Caronia, Jun 5, 2015

Questo lavoro tratta il rapporto tra significante fluttuante, come definito da Claude Lèvi-Straus... more Questo lavoro tratta il rapporto tra significante fluttuante, come definito da Claude Lèvi-Strauss in termini di manà nell’ “Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss” (1950), l’inconscio tecnologico, in seguito al breve saggio di Franco Vaccari del 1979, Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico, in relazione all’evento digitale. In questo senso, il rapporto tra significante fluttuante, inconscio tecnologico e simulacro si sono rivelati come concetti adatti a dar conto del rapporto tra materiale e digitale considerandoli come un continuum, e quindi evitando la dicotomia che pretende opporli.

Following Gilles Deleuze’s analysis in his 1968 book Difference & Repetition, the present work wi... more Following Gilles Deleuze’s analysis in his 1968 book Difference & Repetition, the present work will consider both, memory and digitalisation processes not as forms of representation but as forms of repetition in which difference is conveyed. In this sense, there is no “original” and “copy”, whether considering mental images or memories, or digitised objects, but “ontological repetitions”.
At the same time, the consideration of the temporal dimension of the (artistic) object – and not only the spatial one- is fundamental for understanding that the object only exists in its change, in its movement, in its action, in its metamorphosis, and therefore the digitalisation process is an event. Thus, this work proposes that for memory, especially in its (digital) archival form, to be kept alive, that is to say that to be actualised (in the deleuzian sense), both as a mental image and as part of the archive, it needs a subject, a viewer, who is part of the process, an in taking part of this process actualises the event.

In his book Pictorial Nominalism. On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade (198... more In his book Pictorial Nominalism. On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade (1984), Thierry De Duve proposes to read the birth of abstraction in painting, Marcel Duchamp's abandonment of the pictorial practice, his "invention of the ready-made" and industrialization as events which are fundamentally intertwined, and are not independent from one another, as modernist critic Clement Greenberg proposed. Moreover, the ready-made has to be considered in continuity with Duchamp's pictorial practice; in fact, this pictorial practice is what De Duve proposes to consider as "pictorial nominalism", which would imply the passage from an ontological to an epistemological conception of painting; from the conception of "painting as being" to the conception "painting as knowing". Taking De Duve's analysis as a point of departure, the present paper will explore the passage from modernism to postmodernism in art critical discourse and its implications for digital art theory and practices using the development of the concept of "medium" and its "reinvention" as the file rouge for this analysis; considering also that, so far, what is called "postmodernism" has been examined mainly through the categories of modernism (historicism or avant-garde). Duchamp's artistic practice and his invention of the ready-made has been definitive in eroding from within the basic modernist conceptions, mainly conceptualized by Greenberg such as the "intrinsic properties of the medium"; and in opening the possibilities for an implosion and reinvention of the medium itself. In this regard, the relationship between obsolescence, innovation, authorship and originality in relation to the historical avant-gardes and digital media strategies will also be addressed, trying to understand how and which contemporary digital art practices (i.e. hackering, culture jamming, net art, Second Life, etc) are reappropriating and re-signifying strategies developed by the avant-gardes, and especially by Marcel Duchamp, at the beginning of the twentieth-century.

Presentation title: The Electronic Representation of Information: New Relations Between the Virtu... more Presentation title: The Electronic Representation of Information: New Relations Between the Virtual Archive and its (Possible) Referent

AdVersuS: Revista de Semiótica, 2014

Reading »Black Mirror«, 2021

The chapter analyzes the »transhumanist optimism of the »San Junipero« episode about mind uploadi... more The chapter analyzes the »transhumanist optimism of the »San Junipero« episode about mind uploading from the standpoint of critical posthumanism. The first thing that strikes one about the episode, given the apocalyptic nature of most of Black Mirror's episodes and especially with regard to the effects of technology on society in the near future, is how happy (perhaps too happy) and hopeful the ending of »San Junipero« is. The uploading of the minds of dead people to a digital simulation is openly presented as a virtual paradise wherein subjects, leaving their obsolete and transitory flesh behind, have their minds (consciousnesses? souls?) stored in a computer server room so as to finally be able to live a liberated, flawless life. This typically transhumanist perspective (see Hans Moravec, 1994), which believes that subjectivity is located in the mind and that it can be coded in terms of information, has been extensively analyzed and deconstructed by authors like Donna Haraway,...

International Journal of Communication, 2018

nonPeerReviewe

Transitions and Dissolving Boundaries in the Fantastic , 2014

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the threshold has been linked to the status of repre... more The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the threshold has been linked to the status of representation and of language since the dawn of humankind, or better, since the moment in which the homo sapiens started visualizing her/his thoughts covering the walls of the Lascaux caves with pictures.

Techno-Ecologies II. Acoustic Space #12

n his book Différence et répétition (1968), Gilles Deleuze elaborates an essential concept for th... more n his book Différence et répétition (1968), Gilles Deleuze elaborates an essential concept for the theory of the image: the simulacrum. The plane of the simulacra is characterised by the co-extensiveness of images, which are individuated by their own difference, and not by their placement in an ontological hierarchy, platonic at its origin; and that has as its poles true and false, being and not-being, fair or unfair. In current times, the concept of simulacrum seems to be one of the most efficient tools to overcome a further dichotomy: a dichotomy - old and based on past ontologies -, between virtual and real, and therefore, between virtual images and real images. Firstly, the present work intends to apply the notion of simulacrum to the study of digitally-based images to make evident their belonging to the same plane of any other kind of images, namely the material ones. Secondly, the notion of simulacrum is applied to the screen, to make evident how it has been mistakenly included in the plane of the images. Historically, the consequence of this mistake has been inauthentic experiences, and the triggering of processes of desubjectification. After verifying the mentioned hypotheses and removing the screen from a potential ontology of the image, the screen is then correctly relocated in a semiotic and mediologic horizon. In this context, C.S. Peirce’s notions of icon and symbol, and Bolter-Grusin’s polarities of hypermediation and transparency are applied to demonstrate how the evolution of the screen in the last thirty years has culminated in a strong mannerist phase in the recent past, especially since the touch-screen technology has lead to a blurring of the limits between screen and interface. However, it is relevant to notice that in more recent releases of contemporary interfaces a return to a symbolic and hypermediated regime can be observed. As a conclusion, the main aim of this article is to restore, in the light of the notion of simulacrum, a clear and fair relation between image and screen, so that from both of them an authentic and subjectifying exp …View full abstract

cultural geographies, 2016

Book review on Leonardo Reviews (Published April 2016): A Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka Unive... more Book review on Leonardo Reviews (Published April 2016): A Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2015 224 pp., illus. 20 b/w. Trade, 87.50;paper,87.50; paper, 87.50;paper,24.95 ISBN 978-0-8166-9551-5; ISBN: 978-0-8166-9552-2. Reviewed by Gabriela Galati University of Plymouth gabriela.galati@plymouth.ac.uk

Technology and Culture, 2016

as they happen.” PAMAL has three interconnected axes: on conservation/ restoration/archeology of ... more as they happen.” PAMAL has three interconnected axes: on conservation/ restoration/archeology of media; Digital Art Vanishing Ecosystem, which seeks through artistic experimentation to reenact and develop work with a particular interest in the glitch (the MCD issue has a number of interesting discussions on bugs and glitches); and a third, which is curatorial and exhibition theory and practices. The archaeology of media field is beneficiary of the long life expectancy of a generation of pioneers, many of whom are living and active in their 80s and 90s and in a position to “push back” on the young historians, curators and theoreticians trying to write multiple narratives of our art, science, technology fields of practice. By coincidence, the exhibition Primary Codes ran 15 June–16 August 2015 at Oi Futuro Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with staging of early work by Frieder Nake, Paul Brown, Harold Cohen and Ernest Edmonds—all four early pioneers in computer arts and still very active; these four artists have plenty to say on how the archeologists of media misinterpret or misread developments in which they were players. As pointed out by Kittler, Huhtamo, Grau and others, many of the underlying cultural imaginaries have long histories, particularly as they are tied to emerging recording and transmission technologies in the 19th century. Yet often current artistic work is driven by a sense of ahistorical immediacy (e.g. the current déjà vu of Oculus Rift). As I have argued elsewhere, we are seeing the development of what might be called the “hard humanities,” where historians and theoreticians find themselves not only articulating narratives of the past but also being asked to be prescriptive on future cultural change and innovation. In this we benefit not only from the pioneers still alive and able to challenge our interpretations but also the creation of hybrid spaces where artists, historians, theoreticians and curators work elbow-to-elbow, if not linking arms. b o o k s

The Participatory Condition in the Digital AgeThe Participatory Condition in the Digital Age edited by Darin Barney, Gabriella Coleman, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne and Tamar Tembeck. The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A., 2016. 352 pp., illus., 33 b/w. Trade, $94.50; pape...

Leonardo

Leonardo, 2017

greenhouse gas emissions through land clearing and resource exploitation, land conversion for agr... more greenhouse gas emissions through land clearing and resource exploitation, land conversion for agriculture, rearing livestock, production and use of cement for infrastructure development, energy generation, and transportation of humans, their goods, and their materials. A warming Earth selects for those species with the suite of physiological traits that allow them to adapt to changing conditions. Those that are incapable go extinct (p. 84).

Leonardo electronic almanac, 2013

“Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that hig... more “Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.” ”” Nam June Paik [1] The present work focuses on the new relationship generated by electronic information between the virtual archive (the Web in a broad sense, certain specialized archives in particular) and its referent (material reality in general, museums, inter-art practices, and artworks in particular). It proposes that the relationship between information, its representation and the referent (or in other words, the relation between reality and the conceptual construction of reality) has to be re-thought. Douglas C. McGill, “Art People,” The New York Times , October 3, 1986, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/03/arts/art-people.html (accessed September 1, 2013).