Susan Schuppli’s guest talk "From Screen Burns to Oil Spills" Event

About 'From Screen Burns to Oil Spills'

Materials, whether naturally occurring, industrially manufactured, or computationally derived behave in essence as mediatic sensors that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history. I call these non-human entities and machinic ecologies material witnesses. Through the presentation of a series of cases and screening of clips this public lecture tries to account for the myriad ways in which the responsiveness of matter to external forces demands an acute and renewed sense of material and technical specificity in order to grasp the full political implications that such ongoing changes or interactions might yield. The dare posed by materials, to invoke philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, is that they emphasise what is needed from us to think matter differently. Apprehending materials as dynamic and expressive entities rather than inert and silent witnesses is achieved not only by means of the specific forensic probes that can be brought to bear upon them in order to extract information and translate their material encodings into actionable modes of public address, it also results from being compelled to think about the limits of our own knowledge. How do our subjective modes of perception and choice of interpretative frameworks play a decisive role in determining what kinds of matters actually matter?