The Lab’s raison d’être is to reconcile the epistemological and ontological break between finance and ecology at planetary (Spivak, Bratton) scale. Beyond a solutionist approach, this thought experiment of the chimerical intelligence (CI) design demands non-linear thinking and instead forces us to dive into the entangled ramifications over multitude of physical and metaphysical domains. Such journey calls for a collection of reflective detours, unraveling all the hegemonic dichotomies of ‘modernity’ (Latour) about nature/culture (Descola), natural/artificial, animate/ inanimate (Bennett) object/subject, object/space, body/environment (Haraway), thinking/sensing (Escobar), body/mind (Maturana, Varela), mind/matter (Bergson), matter/space, space/time (Einstein), wave/particle, physical/conceptual (Barad), physics/philosophy (Bohr), etc.
The Lab’s experiments are supported by a theoretical framework that embraces the manifold nature of reality. The thesis finds its roots in Complexity Science to submit a correspondent ontologies of complexity rhetoric. This new dialectal proposal aspire to keep integrity when translating the high- dimensionality of the world into technological means of abstraction such as natural language, mathematics, computation and money.
The lab investigates the epistemologies that govern scientific, technological, spatial and economic practices and dissect the geometries displaying ‘objective’ facts in order to highlight the cognitive agency that has been outsourced (or given up) to those artefacts. Such ‘intelligent’ automation is perfectly illustrated by financial metrics, which attempt to offer a consistent framework of universal equivalence actually imposes violent, reductive depiction of the living, that ultimately serve the extractive agenda of capitalism.
Our team consists of a multitude of practitioners from the fields of the arts, architecture, computing, philosophy and science.
Ianis Dobrev, Founder | ianisdobrev.com
Andreas Höfert, Co-Founder | andreashoefert.at
The Lab operates in various levels: textual, visual but also performative. What it means is that a great part of the research process and knowledge dissemination happens from the gathering of people within a same room. In other words, the Lab engages strongly in the design of spaces to sparkle dialogs nurturing the thought experiments we are pursuing. In a simplified picture, this could be expressed at three stratums: