Artist Agnieszka Kurant and researcher Tobias Rees in conversation with e-flux journal Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk.
Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic and ecological systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, surveillance capitalism, AI and the evolution of culture, labor and creativity, she investigates automation, crowdsourcing and data exploitation in the context of art production. Her works often behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines. Her past projects include a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015) and a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York (2013). In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Her work was featured in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Modern, Witte de With, Moderna Museet, MUMOK, Bonner Kunstverein, The Kitchen, Frieze Projects and Performa Biennial. She is an artist in residence at MIT CAST and a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute and the Berggruen Institute.
Tobias Rees is the Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School for Social Research, Director at the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Rees finds himself intrigued by situations that are not reducible to the already thought and known—by events, small ones or large ones, that set the taken for granted in motion and thereby provoke unanticipated openings for which no one has words yet. In his writings he seeks to capture something of the at times wild, at other times tender, almost fragile openness that rules as long as the new/different has not yet gained any stable contours—when it is pure movement.
Over the last decade his research has explored possibilities of practicing the human sciences after the figure of the human on which the human sciences (and art) has been contingent failed us: The human—the object of the human sciences is a figure not known before the late eighteenth century.
He is the author of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary (2008), Plastic Reason (2016), and most recently of After Ethnos (2018).