Rodrigo Guzman-Serrano

No abstract available.

In art, fermentation can be understood metaphorically as a representation of transformation. However, as a biocultural phenomenon within a posthuman framework, it manifests a complex lattice of multispecies relationships, microbiopolitics, and metaphorical figurations that are adopted in works of art and biology as medium and content. In this article, the authors analyze artworks and projects that utilize fermentation by artists such as WhiteFeather Hunter, Amor Muñoz, Anna Dumitriu, and others. These works explore fermentation in the creation of biomaterials, its role in foods like cheese, and its status as a metaphorical figuration in hybrid mechanisms that give central stage to fermentation as a biocultural artifact embodying a nature-culture continuum in a microbial postanthropocentric framework.

The Winogradsky column is a nineteenth-century device for culturing microorganisms using samples of water, mud and other nutrients in transparent tube-shaped containers. In this device, metabolic processes and microbial functions are not reduced to mere illustration but are staged at the intersection of presence and representation. In this article, the Winogdrasky column is analysed as a cultural artifact that embodies recent changes of conceptualization of microorganisms in the life sciences and the humanities. As an instrument that models specific ecosystems, the Winogradsky column moves away from conceptualizations of microbial species as isolated and self-defined organisms in favour of a more ecological, interdependent, multi-species interpretation of life. This paper also traces the transition of the Winogradsky column from an experimental device of the natural sciences into a form of display in natural history museums and later appropriated as an artistic medium. With examples from displays at natural history museums as well as works of art and biology, the Winogradsky column embodies the shift in thought and discourses regarding microorganisms, their ubiquity and impact on the environment and on us, which corresponds to a larger epistemological transformation to re-frame microorganisms towards a post-anthropocentric turn.

The digital revolution has already left its footprint in the cultural industry by not only introducing new aesthetics and art forms, but also by crucially transforming the practices of museums, libraries, archives, and cultural institutions in general. However, although most museums rely on the use of digital technologies in one way or another, few actively collect and preserve media and digital art. This apparent contradiction has not only endangered the future availability of specific artworks but it has also impeded the proper contextualization and historicization of media art. In this paper, I start from the premise that a significant factor preventing media art from being fully assimilated by museums and the art market is its fluctuating condition between materiality and immateriality, as well as other issues associated with the identification of its artistic medium. In order to approach these problems, I emphasize both the material and immaterial, as well as medial dimensions of media art by drawing from discussions around the concept of medium in art, Rosalind Krauss’s postmedium condition, and Christiane Paul’s notion of neomateriality. As a case study, I use Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s project "Portrait on the Fly" (2015), which addresses the issue of media art preservation in three different levels: an iconographic level through the symbolism of the fly as an image of decay and loss, a pragmatic level as an artwork existing in multiple materialities, and a narrative level in the creation of a growing archive of portraits of the figures that have shaped the field of media art.

Discussions on the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in the production of art have gained attention in recent years. In this paper, we critically address the binary narratives surrounding AI that ponder it either as tool or as agent of artistic production. Later, we discuss the general idea of AI systems as potentially replacing humans in different endeavors by presenting some arguments posited by Artificial Intelligence expert Kai-Fu Lee. Afterwards, we submit the idea of AI as artistic medium by drawing from discussions on the concept of medium in art. We show that the issue of AI-tool versus AI-agent is a continuous narrative that dates back to the so-called algorithmic art or computer art of the 1960s and 70s. We then tie the idea of artistic medium with the issue of artistic agency and artistic identity.

This paper focuses on explicit attempts at developing artificial intelligence in the production of art that generate outcomes similar to, or even technically superseding, the works of human artists. We aim at revealing the underlying discourses that equate art production with transformation of information, artists with input/output systems, and artistic creativity with an unlimited and autonomous generation of art-like outcomes. As a point of departure, we begin from an exposition of Margaret Boden’s account of creativity and proceed by examining different arguments to the effect that computers can be truly creative, primarily those offered by Boden (2004, 2010). We question what the assumptions, operative in the discourse on artificial or computational creativity, entail. AI-agents can produce creative outcomes because they implement our best models of creativity. By implementing these models, however, AI-agents evidence a particular understanding of what art is and what constitutes artistic production. This understanding does not fully conform to how contemporary artistic practices are perceived and valued. As a result, we argue, better models to frame artistic AI and computational creativity are needed to fully appreciate the developments in this field and their articulation within the existing art world.

Water is one of the most recognizable areas of impact of climate change. Moreover, industrial pollutants and unjust policies over water management and distribution have also resulted in sever water crises around the world, particularly in developing nations. Against this global backdrop, Mexico faces its own water crisis, particularly in the Valley of Mexico, where Mexico City is located. This crisis, which is only expected to get worse, is not a recent phenomenon, but the result of a long and evolving process that includes the desiccation of Mexico City’s natural bodies of water, inefficient urban planning throughout the colonial era and the nineteenth century, as well as corrupt environmental policies that allowed the pollution of its major sources of water, such as the Lerma River. Through the lens of political ecology as an approach to unmask the externalities of environmental action—understood as the disowned political, social, and Western capitalist offshoots of the ecological discourse—this paper analyzes two recent techno-scientific artworks that frame the issue of water beyond being purely environmental and more as pertaining to the realm of modern infrastructure and the post-anthropocentric turn. A continuation of his previous work in search of autonomous bio-mechanical creatures that interact with their environment, Plantas Autofotosintéticas [Autophotosynthetic Plants] (2015) by Gilberto Esparza questions the human primacy over natural resources by presenting fictional scenarios in which hybrid bio-machines exist and live off the waste and technological products of humanity. On the other hand, Possessing Nature (2015) by Tania Candiani and Luis Felipe Ortega, presented at the 2015 Venice Biennial, offers a critique of the politics of modern infrastructure over the management and distribution of water resources, as well as a broader exposure of the geopolitical dynamics between center and periphery.

No abstract available.