On Thursday 8 June, Jaime del Val, one of the most significant artists/ philosophers in Europe working at the transdisciplinary frontiers of body, subjectivity and the algorecene will present METABODY 2017 Kent – Ontohacking Workshop: Ontopolitics of perception in the Algoricene: Ecologies of indeterminacy in the Big Data Era. This takes place in the School of Music and Fine Art’s Galvanising Shop Performance Space at Historic Dockyard Chatham.

The workshop would offer participants a unique opportunity to explore some of the key questions driving current trans-disciplinary and practice based research through active participation with a leader in the field. This would enable artists and researchers alike to develop and test their research methods, and gain valuable insight into trans-disciplinary and practice based research processes and collaborative practice based investigation, thus opening up the potential of futurity, navigation and speculation within practice as research.

In the Big Data Era new threats to plurality emerge as strategies of preemption and modulation of behaviour of the human and nonhuman acquire increasing sophistication in algorithmic and Big Data environments. From Trump and the Brexit, whose victories were seemingly modulated through big data analytics, to cyberwar, and affective mass media politics, from ubiquitous surveillance, modulation of consumer’s behaviours, capitalization of microgestures, to the war fronts, a new turn to power is happening (which Brian Massumi calls Ontopower), focusing on capturing potentiality and emergence while operating in affective, not in ideological registers. Which is the underlying perceptual ecology of Ontopower, and most importantly, how to elaborate new modes of resistance to, and reinvention beyond, such modes of power and violence?

For more info go to https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/events.html?eid=25526&view_by=month&date=20170630&category=&tag=