Workshop: Demystifying the black box! by Patrícia J. Reis
Hacking is in nowadays a common practice and creative strategy employed among post-internet artists. By subverting the system, reverse engineering, hacking creative processes, defending access and openismus, they instrument a top-down methodology using deconstruction as a method to “make” art. Acknowledging Vilém Flusser’s (1986) challenge of opening the “black box” they question what is behind commercial apparatus, defying its potentials with the awareness of the impact of technology in the current neo-liberal market.
Demystifying the black box is an invitation for those that are interested in intersecting their view points with other politics of perception contributing for a critical thought towards the necessity of demythifying and demystifying the ‘black box’.
Drawn on this context the participants will develop a specific DIY pressure sensor and learn the basics of electronics and programming in order to develop interactive art projects with microcontroller Arduino and/ or software processing.
Note: Please bring your laptop!
About Patrícia J. Reis
Patrícia J. Reis (b. 1981, Lisbon, Pt) is an installation artist based in Vienna (At) whose practice encompasses different formats and media to examine our relationship with modern technology. Through an ongoing investigation that destabilize the boundaries between science, technology, magic and spiritual believes, she explores questions “How do we believe in machines?” and “How technology is shaping us bodily?”. In her complex installations she often appeals to the visitor’s sensoriality in an intimate and sensual way, encourage them to become active participants. Seeking to subvert visuality as a primarily mode of experience, she plays with technology as a mean to expand and stimulate corporeal perceptions in the viewer. Inspired by Media theory and Cybernetics, Reis analyses similar modus operandi among humans and machines, such as program, system and automatism, suggesting the human body as such, and playing around with its own sensorial mechanisms. Her work becomes distinctive in the contemporary art scene by combining such disparate imagery, with contrasting media (painting, sculpture, photography, video, interactive systems) and materials (paper, resin, styrofoam, wood, metal, foam, textile).
She studied Painting (ESAD, Superior School of Art and Desing, Caldas da Rainha Portugal, 2004), Media Art (Master program at the Lusófona University, Lisbon, Portugal, 2011), and she holds a Ph.D. in Art (University of Évora, Portugal, 2016).
Reis was a fellow researcher from National Science Technology Foundation of Portugal (2011-2015). From 2006 to 2012, she was lecturing Photography, Video and Digital Arts at the Polytechnic Institute of Beja, Portugal, as a full-time Assistant Professor. Currently she lectures at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, Austria, and at the Kunstuniversität Linz, Austria.
Furthermore, she has a feminist approach on her artistic practice, focusing on the assigned female roles in terms of representation (in the digital image), and on the lack of female participation and visibility behind the production of new technologies and art. Since 2012 she is a board member of the collective Mz* Baltazar’s Lab, a feminist hackerspace based in Vienna that aims at generating a culture of fearless making and empower creativity, activism and thinking among female*, queer*, and tran* artists. As one of the key members she has been offering workshops, exhibitions, and talks, locally and internationally (Brussels, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Madrid, San Paulo, Rio de Janeiro).
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