METABOLIC RIFTS III
29 de abril 2018
Campo Alegre Theatre, Café-Teatro
Porto, Portugal
2.30 pm Opening Statement
2.45 pm Helena Rickett, Acts of Support:
Contradictions of Curating and Care
3.45 pm Susana Caló, Can an Institution be Militant?
4.45 pm Coffee Break
5.00 pm Ligia Lewis, minor matter (2016) Venue: Auditorium
6.30 pm Ligia Lewis, Alexandra Balona and Sofia Lemos
7.00 pm Matteo Pasquinelli, The Machines of the Anthropocene:
On the Transformation of Labour into Energy and Information
8.00 pm Roundtable discussion moderated
by Alexandra Balona and Sofia Lemos
8.30 pm Closing Remarks
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→ PDF program
The Machines of the Anthropocene: On the Transformation of Labour into Energy and Information
The history of industrial civilization can be depicted as a bicephalous chimera whose heads grew out of the same machine, innervated each other and, after further metamorphoses, still attempts to hegemonize each other. The two heads are Energy and Information and they bifurcated out of the industrial machine of the 19th century, although at different tempos. They initiated and extended two technological lineages: the civilizations of Carbon and Silicon respectively, the one of energy as a medium of motion and the one of energy as a medium of control and communication. In an attempt to recombine the energy theory of labour (as manual and energetic activity) with information theory as a source of intelligence that gives form to energy, Matteo Pasquinelli introduces two notions — carbosilicon machine and cyberfossil capital — in order to rethink social autonomy in the Anthropocene.
Matteo Pasquinelli is Professor in Media Philosophy at the University of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe. He recently edited the anthology Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas (2015) among other books. Together with Wietske Maas he authored the Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism. His upcoming monograph on Verso Books is provisionally titled The Eye of the Master: Capital as Computation Cognition.
