ABOUT

Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems (hereafter MTLS) is an arts-based research project funded by FWF (Austrian Science Fund)*, in partnership with the Institute of Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

MTLS is a generative virtual ecosystem that aims to foster exchange between a wide variety of practitioners including but not limited to artists, scientific researchers, science-fiction writers, poets, and critical theorists. The project develops from the creative potentials emerging through collaboration and interplay between AI and non-human entities. We investigate the emancipatory possibilities of myth-making and speculative thinking by fusing technoscientific research with artistic practice and critique. Our goal with MTLS is to de-center the anthropocentric reasoning that undergirds dominant and hegemonic forms of knowledge production, in order to forge new narratives. Throughout this investigation we aim to create a thinking space, a process that is open-ended, experimental, and collective. This method aims to recast the human as integrated within a self-producing and mutating techno-organic system.

Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems is a three years artist research project investigating the emancipatory possibilities of myth-making, speculative thinking in propelling a dialogue with non- human subjectivities. Fusing technoscientific research with artistic critique, Mythopoesis for Techno Living Systems strives to decentre the anthropocentric reasoning which undergirds many forms of knowledge production, in order to forge new narratives which foreground more-than- human care. Key to the project then is the following provocation: how can speculative fiction and feminist fabulation contribute to a generative methodology for bringing about other life worlds, worlds which value the role that nonhuman agency plays in the production of alternative epistemologies.

Humanism, as grounded in the colonial and imperial traditions of the Enlightenment, enthrones the human – which is constructed as white, cisheteronormative male and able-bodied – as a planetary regent. Underwriting such rulership, western modes of extractive technicity render all that is deemed nonhuman to be a resource. Interrogating the supposed naturalness of such anthropocentric hierarchies, posthumanism posits an extended ethics which reconfigures our understanding of humankind as merely one actor within an entangled ecology of being. This more expansive understanding of being, both challenges hegemonic modes of technicity, what Haraway has termed the “informatics of domination,” whilst also finding apertures of possibility, other ways of being in the world through and with technology. Pushing at such potentials, Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems thus seeks to redefine humankind as ever-emerging and mutating technico-organic systems. Systems which must be calibrated to a posthuman ethics where consciousness is constantly interfacing with myriad forms of being. Key to eroding the humanist presuppositions that being creates and orders knowledge, the posthuman acknowledges the inseparability and reciprocity between being and knowledge, what Karen Barad has called “onto-epistemologies”. Emphasising the co-productive operations of being and knowledge enables Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems to expose the contingency of humanist precepts around what comprises the human, thereby enabling the interrogation of intersectional issues relating to class, race, sexuality and gender.

Through such interrogations, this project propagates new configurations for posthuman futures with the arts-based method of ‘writing speculative collectivities’. For the duration of the project over three years, Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems invests in developing a non- public workshop; a progressively intelligent digital platform; a series of curated exchanges; symposia; commissioned artworks and text works including short stories of fiction and a critical reader publication. Taking the work of feminist Science Fiction writers such as Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin as guides, this project instigates a form of artistic research which works through creative and speculative forms of thought, to ultimately formulate new futurally orientated narratives. These new narratives and myths are premised upon posthuman ethics which valorize the mixed agencies of multiple entities and forms of being, in order to bring about new forms of world-making. Crucial to Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems is the formulation of alternative ways of being together through the collective writing of new myths.

The experimental forms of knowledge produced by artistic research provide an alternative matrix of interrelations that challenge conventional delineations between academic disciplines. The project Mythopoesis for Techno-Living Systems will promote such cross-pollination and contaminations of thought between the arts and humanities and the sciences. Fusing technoscientific research with artistic critique,  for strives to decentre the anthropocentric reasoning which undergirds many forms of knowledge production, in order to forge new narratives.

ABOUT PEEK
Funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), PEEK Programme for Advancement and Development of Artistic Research, is a three-year program supporting high-quality and innovative arts-based research in which artistic practice is integral to the inquiry. The scope is to increase both public awareness and awareness within the academic and the arts communities of arts- based research and its potential application.

MTLS is initiated by Ursula Mayer and organized in collaboration with Attilia Fattori Franchini, Rachel Hill, Mirela Baciak and Rose-Anne Gush.

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PROJECT LEAD

URSULA MAYER

is an artist and researcher based in Vienna. Her artistic practice spans a range of media, including film, video, and sculpture. Mayer interweaves myth, biopolitics, and the semiotics of cinema to visualize and ruminate upon future post-human ontology. She received the Derek Jarman Award in 2014 and the Otto Mauer Prize in 2007. She is the co-founder of KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS, Vienna.

RESEARCH TEAM

ATTILIA FATTORI FRANCHINI

is an independent curator and writer based in Vienna. Working on the creation of experimental contexts for the production and display of contemporary practices, her work deals with technology and power structures, late capitalism, and the creation of alternative forms of subjectivity and representation. She is the co-founder of KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS, Vienna, and curator of BMW Open Work by Frieze.

RACHEL HILL

is an AHRC funded PhD candidate in the Science and Technology department of University College London. She is a co-director of the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) and explores the revolutionary potential of speculative fiction as a member of the feminist research collective Beyond Gender. Rachel is also an affiliate of the Centre for Outer Space Studies.

ROSE-ANNE GUSH

is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Contemporary Art at TU Graz. Since completing her PhD, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich and was awarded a Research Grant from the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK) in Paris. She is working on a book titled Artistic Labour of the Body, and a postdoctoral project exploring questions of form, hybridity, and the prehistory of “Global Contemporary Art”.

MIRELA BACIAK

is a curator and researcher in the field of visual arts. She currently serves as director of Salzburger Kunstverein. Most recently she has curated and co-curated the exhibitions Suspension of Disbelief (2023) at TANK Shanghai, A War in the Distance (2022) at steirischer herbst festival, Surface Tension (2022) at Blickle Kino Belvedere21.

PROJECT COORDINATOR

CHRISTINA LINHER

DESIGN

ROXY ZEIHER

WEBSITE

BLACK SHUCK

CONTRIBUTORS

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA
FLORIAN CRAMER
RACHEL HILL
BARBARA KAPUSTA
NORA N. KHAN
K ALLADO MCDOWELL
LUCIA PIETROIUSTI
FILIPA RAMOS
CHEN QIUFAN
NISHA RAMAYYA
JENNA SUTELA
SHERRYL VINT
NEON YANG
PATRICIA MCCORMACK
LUCIANA PARISI
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
CLAIRE G COLEMAN
NISI SHAWL
KEN LIU
REGINA KANYU WANG
SOPHIA AL-MARIA
RINDON JOHNSON
ANA TEIXEIRA PINTO
NELLY YAA PINKRAH
ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS