Quayola (IT)
Quayola employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibriums between seemingly opposing forces: the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new. Constructing immersive installations, he engages with and re-imagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology. Landscape painting, classical sculpture and iconography are some of the historical aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola’s hybrid compositions. His varied practice, all deriving from custom computer software, also includes audiovisual performance, immersive video installations, sculpture, and works on paper.
His work has been performed and exhibited in many prestigious institutions worldwide including V&A Museum, London; Park Avenue Armory, New York; National Art Center, Tokyo; UCCA, Beijing; How Art Museum, Shanghai; SeMA, Seoul; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ars Electronica, Linz; Sonar Festival, Barcelona and Sundance Film Festival. Also a frequent collaborator on musical projects, Quayola has worked with composers, orchestras and musicians including London Contemporary Orchestra, National Orchestra of Bordeaux, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Vanessa Wagner, Jamie XX, Mira Calix, Plaid and Tale Of Us. In 2013, Quayola was awarded the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica.
Keywords: software, machine-human collaboration, process, visual art
Morning topic: Machinery Missionaries
The boundary between human and machine activity is increasingly blurred with each technological advancement. What techno-human ecosystems are we creating? Are these ecosystems intentionally designed, or are they merely accidental consequences? What are the opportunities and limitations of collaboration between humans and machines? What are the dynamics of this collaboration in creative and artistic processes? How can interdisciplinary cooperation support innovation in policy?
The parallel world in the form of machine and robot systems generates in society not only ambivalent feelings of oscillation between utility and threat, but also a never-ending series of outstanding works of art in literature, film and visual arts. The tension that arises between the living human and the "animated" machine is one of the most topical lines among the energetic themes in art. At a time when control over many vital resources is being handed over to data centre algorithms, there is an almost parallel increase in the level of anxiety, fear, or feelings of loss of control over the previously valid ecosystem. The works presented in the chapter Machinery Missionaries refer precisely to this ambivalence of autonomous machines and at the same time insistently recall the old Faustian question of the possibilities and limits of human knowledge.
