Visioner av Nuet 1966–2026: Friday @ Fylkingen
In connection with the 60 year jubilee of festival Visioner av nuet , Fylkingen and The National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm present a two-day festival spanning panels, film screenings and concerts ranging from the legacy of the 1966 festival to contemporary artistic explorations of the relations between art and technology.
Program for Friday 13th November at Fylkingen
The afternoon starts with panels featuring researchers and artists considering cultural heritage, conservation and the history of technology, but also the social and artistic conditions that led up to the 1966 festival Visioner av nuet . The program continues during the evening with a film screening and concerts.
Art, experiments and the 1960s
Ulla Wiggen, Anna Orrghen, Magnus af Petersens
(The panel will be held in Swedish)
The panel invites Anna Orrghen, Magnus af Petersens, and Ulla Wiggen, who shares her first-hand account of the 1960s and the events leading up to Visioner av Nuet. Taking TRASK, Wiggen’s painting of the Swedish early semiconductor-based computer, as a point of departure for the conversation, the panel looks back at an emerging culture in which artists interacted with engineers, and at formative moments such as 5 New York Evenings, organised by Fylkingen and Moderna Museet, and 9 Evenings, the unrealised part of the Stockholm Festival of Art and Technology that eventually took shape in New York and preceded the inception of E.A.T.
Art & Technology: Conservation and Hidden Histories
Chris King in conversation with My Bundgaard and Paul Purgas
(The panel will be held in English)
The panel brings together Chris King, conservator of time-based media art at Tate and My Bundgaard, modern sculpture conservator at Moderna Museet in a discussion chaired by artist and researcher Paul Purgas. Considering historical projects by figures including Robert Rauschenberg and Nam June Paik, the panel explores the nature of care and custodianship within art and technology and the often hidden role of the technician within that history. The conversation will cover both the practical and philosophical roles of technical knowledge within the past and present of artistic practice and the importance of protecting associated skills, archives and knowledge for the benefit of future generations.
Joost Reekveld in conversation with Helena Linder
Joost Rekveld presents his practice of dialoguing with machines, followed by a conversation with Helena Linder on the ways we might interrogate the material and ecological relationships between art and science.
Screening: Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena: #59
(Joost Reekveld, 2023, 79 minutes, 2K DCP)
#59 is an abstract animated science fiction film that looks at the experiences shared by humans and electronic circuits during the Cold War. Our computing technology is a side effect of the development of atomic weapons and their associated planetary surveillance systems. In the same era, Edward Lorenz and Yoshisuke Ueda independently discovered deterministic chaos through their computing systems. In film #59, humans, aliens and devices vacillate between these two poles of machinic chaos and planetary control.
In an extrapolation of ancestral ways of computing, the animations were made as analog electronic signals. These were generated using period equipment, including an analog computer from 1963, early sonar and radar oscillators, and bits from flight simulators. This film is an attempt to liberate these technologies from their military origins.
Adam Pultz Melbye: The Spectral Parrot
The Spectral Parrot is a self-actuating (feedback) instrument with 8 strings, each of which is controlled by a motorized tuner. The motors are controlled by a deep reinforcement learning algorithm that learns to tune the instrument's strings to approximate a target audio spectrum. In this concert, Adam Pultz Melbye (double bass) enters into dialogue with the Parrot. As the instrument physically has to tune its strings, the learning process proceeds slowly and becomes a way to explore machinic learning in real time.
Header image: Still from Mechanisms Common to Disparate Phenomena: #59, Joost Reekveld, 2023