ARTISTIC RESEARCH, EMPATHY & EMBODIMENT
with Kristoffer Gansing, Hermen Maat & Simona Kicurovska

For this 1st session of the online ARCtalks, we are happy to welcome Kristoffer Gansing (Professor of the newly formed ‘International Center for Knowledge in the Arts’ & former Artistic Director of the Transmediale festival) to share his thoughts on artistic research in a panel discussion together with ARCers Hermen Maat and Simona Kicurovska, who will present their research and share their views on empathy and embodiment.

KRISTOFFER GANSING
Professor of the International Center for Knowledge in the Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. Former Artistic Director of Transmediale (2011 – 2020), where his achievements included: the launch of a residency programme for artistic research, research workshops and other activities that extended beyond the annual festival. His PhD from K3 School of Art & Communication in Malmö is titled Transversal Media Practices. It entails a practice-based perspective on knowledge in the fields of art and technology. In the 00s, Swedish-born Gansing lived in Copenhagen, where he was a key player in a number of collective and self-organised projects such as the artist-run TV channel tv-tv (2006-2010) and The Art of the Overhead festival (2005-2009). His recent publications include across & beyond – a transmediale reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions (Sternberg Press, 2017) and The Eternal Network (Institute of Network Cultures, 2020).

HERMEN MAAT
Can I touch you online? Can we measure intimacy?
How does your kiss feel in EEG data?
Artists and researchers Hermen Maat and Karen Lancel are considered pioneers exploring the tension between embodied presence, intimacy and alienation, social cohesion and isolation, privacy and trust in posthuman bio(techno)logical entanglement with (non-)human others. They radically deconstruct and re-orchestrate automated biometric control
technologies neuro-feedback and sensory perception, to create poetic Trust-Systems. In internationally presented performances and installations in public space, they explore a
sensitive, ethical AI design approach, based on social and embodied co-dependency in shared reflection and dialogue. Through their artistic research Shared Senses, they aim to rethink and inspire a sustainable socio-technological eco-culture of merging realities. The audience meets on imaginative planes for exploring future empathetic connections, in ‘Shared Reflexive Data-Scapes’.

SIMONA KICUROVSKA
Simona Kicurovska is maker, researcher, teacher and thinkerer, working in (graphic) design and education. She is currently developing a PhD proposal under the ‘Consortium for Future Modes of Meaning Making’ (HKU University of the Arts Utrecht & UvH University of Humanistics Utrecht) and is part of the Artistic Research Community (ARC) in the North.
Prototyping ways to capture knowledge as it flows from theory to practice (and back), Simona defines her activities as part of ‘a practice that thinks’ where thinking with the hands and body is a form of critical investigation and knowledge creation method. Within her current research she asks: Will a design practice in the near future be contained in algorithms? Is there possibility for complexity, nuance and criticality in a binary reality? As computing and media merge, what kinds of literacies are needed for a socially responsible design practice? Simona Kicurovska proposes to develop a toolkit to enable designers to reformulate critical positions, built through a collective process of meaning-making, where insights from media archeology coalesce with ideas from philosophy of technology.