http://95.216.75.113:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/198 2026-04-06T11:08:09Z 2026-04-06T11:08:09Z Goriunova, Olga http://95.216.75.113:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/238 2019-06-19T15:49:56Z 2007-11-01T00:00:00Z

Vitalist technocratism in the times of materialist idealism on the philosophy of technology by Piotr Engelmeier in pre- and early Soviet Russia Goriunova, Olga The talk interprets the body of work by the philosopher-engineer Piotr Engelmeier dating from the 1910s-1920s. A few stories are tangled together here: a brief history of Russian philosophy of technology; an account of Engelmeier's core theoretical concepts; a mapping of the philosophical scenery of the beginning of the century with a leading role given to Bergson and a reflection of his influence on Engelmeier; a 'materialist-idealist' dynamics of the official Soviet doctrine and its performance in banning theories and imprisoning their authors; Engelmeier's own attempts to resolve the 'materialist-idealist' tensions of the technocratic / technical / pragmatist / intuitive / creative / 'vitalist' categories. The body of theory produced by Piotr Engelmeier is of some interest for it represents not any specific hidden and forgotten 'treasure' but rather retrospectively sheds light on sets of trends, motifs, and patterns constituting some of the backbones of cultural processes of his and subsequent times. The first works of Engelmeier demonstrate engagement with understanding the system and origin of technical invention. This trend develops towards setting out to understand technical creativity, the creativity of everyday, and creativity that builds material culture that acts as an ecology within which a human being is to exist. Developing a culturalist approach to technology, Engelmeier proceeds to establishing the philosophy of technology as a new discipline describing a human being as a 'technical being', andsuggesting 'technicism' as a title for such an endeavour. Engelmeier's theory of creativity that arises from the area of the instinctive, from the sphere of the 'vital', of intuition, and 'ascends' into the sphere of conscious work, is applicable, according to his model, to any creative act, and, thus, since all human activity is saturated and based on creativity, to any human activity. Also, a human being is essentially a technical being capable of fulfilling her goals in various areas of life. And since the technical action is essentially creative in the way it is perceived and carried out, as he specifies in his theory of technical creativity, Engelmeier merges the technical and the creative, with the technical 'growing out' of the creative. In such a way, intuition / surmise / vital energy becomes the basis of his technicism. Engelmeier makes a curious junction of technicality and creativity: he is an idealistic technocrat, who believes technology is an engine of any progress, whose main precondition, however, rests in human intuition, 'dark vitalism' and creativity. Thus, Engelmeier's way of dealing with the indefiniteness of human (technical) activity and limitations of technocratic thinking is to link it to intuition and creativity; his technology is an environment, an engine and a potential for a creative action, for an improvement on usefulness, based on intuition, and emanating from an individual. For dialectical materialism, Engelmeier is truly 'idealistic' in his culturalist approach. But the Soviet ideology is 'naïvely idealistic' despite its materialist declarations. Engelmeier's desire to marry the materiality of the technical environment and human creativity emerging from the unconscious, somewhat tragically interplays with the failures of the Soviet version of Marxism in its attempts to arrange the materiality of the idea. This text was presented at re:place the second conference on the histories of media, art, science and technology - November 15-18 2007, as a peer-reviewed scholarly work chosen for inclusion. This text may have been or will be published and/or presented elsewhere by the author.

2007-11-01T00:00:00Z Veel, Kristin http://95.216.75.113:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/237 2019-06-19T15:46:20Z

Video: Once Upon a Time There Was a Database…Database and Narrative from a Cognitive (...) Veel, Kristin Once upon a time there was a database-Database and narrative from a cognitive (...) If narration makes up a core element in how we perceive and understand the world, such as has been argued from various corners of the academic field within the last couple of decades, how should we then understand the anti-narrative logic of the database that seems to penetrate our contemporary environment, experience, imagination, and art? What are the cognitive and existential implications of this form of representation? This paper aims to illuminate the cognitive mechanisms underlying the juxtaposition of narrative and database in David Clark´s net artwork A is for Apple (2002) and possibly in aesthetic representation more generally. My thesis is that aesthetic representation can be understood and described as mediating between a narrative urge and a database logic, an observation which especially comes to the fore in new media artworks such as A is for Apple. This video was recorded at REFRESH! THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORIES OF ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY - September 28 - 0ct 1, as a peer-reviewed scholarly work chosen for inclusion.

Hansen, Mark Huhtamo, Erkki http://95.216.75.113:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/236 2019-06-19T15:43:33Z

Video: Introduction Panel 4 METHODOLOGIES Hansen, Mark; Huhtamo, Erkki This video showing the discussion after panel 3 was recorded at REFRESH! THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE HISTORIES OF ART, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY - September 28 - 0ct 1, as a peer-reviewed scholarly work chosen for inclusion.

Salter, Christopher L. http://95.216.75.113:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/235 2019-06-19T15:42:16Z 2007-11-01T00:00:00Z

Unstable Events: Performative Science, Materiality and Machinic Practices Salter, Christopher L. It is increasingly accepted that, alongside cybernetics, computer science, music and the visual arts, experimental performance practice is also essential for an understanding of past and present media arts history. After years of obscurity, for example, EAT’s Nine Evenings of Theater and Engineering is now held up by scholars as the quintessential event of art science collaboration. Theoretically, the term performance appeared in the work of anthropologists, sociologists and theatre makers such as Erving Goffman, Victor Turner and Richard Schechner in the 1960s, who wanted to connect the performing arts with the social sciences. However rich theories of social dramas (Turner) or interaction rituals (Goffman) are for understanding performance as a general cultural paradigm, however, these models are proving inadequate for grappling with the complex human-machinic relationships that mark contemporary artistic practices within techno-culture. Now performance is migrating to the sciences, with increasing interest from disciplines outside of artistic contexts, for example, science and technology studies (STS) and Human Computer Interaction. As articulated by scholars investigating how science constructs and disseminates knowledge, “performance” is seen as a methodology for an understanding of complex, dynamic phenomena and systems. Theorists like John Law, Karen Baarad and Bruno Latour, for example, use performance to grasp the materiality of fluid techno-scientific objects/processes that are produced in scientific practice. The physicist Hans Diebner (2006) focuses on the characteristic of unrepeatability central to the act of performance; something that contradicts the well understood idea of reproducibility in science. Performance involves “the moment of action, its continuity, inherent temporality and relationship to the present.” Science and its by product, technology, are performative in that they function as potentially unpredictable, material acts that do something to the world we inhabit. This paper examines how the migration/transfer of performance from the arts to the sciences can then be used to understand the practices between humans and machinic systems that mark performance in the artistic domain and how these ideas could articulated to scholars/practitioners working in the design of complex, pervasive computation systems that increasingly pose new kinds of performative relationships between humans and machines in our everyday, quotidian world. This text was presented at re:place the second conference on the histories of media, art, science and technology - November 15-18 2007, as a peer-reviewed scholarly work chosen for inclusion. This text may have been or will be published and/or presented elsewhere by the author.

2007-11-01T00:00:00Z