INSPIRED BY… | Reading Club
Curated by Tuçe Erel

Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce.

The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform in a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.

Guest Artist on 22 November 2022

Interspecifics

TThe sixth and last event of 2022’s Inspired by… will be online via zoom meeting hosted by Art Laboratory Berlin. In this session, Interspecifics, whose work has been featured in the Hackers Makers Thinkers exhibition early this year, will be our guest artists. In this session, the collective chose the first chapter of the Ursula K. le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and selected part of Alien phenomenology, or, what it’s like to be a thing by Ian Bogost.

Interspecifics are an independent artistic research bureau founded in Mexico City in 2013. They have focused their research on using sound and A.I. to explore patterns emerging from biosignals and the morphology of living organisms as a potential form of non-human communication, developing a collection of experimental research tools we call Ontological Machines. Interspecifics’ current lines of research are shifting towards exploring the hard problem of consciousness and the close relationship between mind and matter, where magic appears to be fundamental. Sound remains their interface to the universe. Their work has been shaped by the Latin American context, where precarity enables creative action and ancient technologies meet with cutting-edge forms of production.
Interspecifics’ work has been supported by DAAD, International Cities for Advanced Sound, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Telefonica Foundation, Bancomer BBVA Foundation, and The National Fund for Culture and the Arts in México. Their works have been presented at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and Universitat der Kunste Berlin in Germany. Museum of Modern art in Medellin in, Colombia. National Council for Culture and the Arts and Museum of Contemporary art in Chile and shown at FACT Liverpool, European Congress for Artificial Intelligence in York, Spektrum, Acud Macht Neu, CTM Festival, and CLB in Berlin, ICAS Festival in Dresden, Casa del Lago, Centro Cultural de España, INDEX at the University Museum of Contemporary Art, Tamayo Museum, New Music Vancouver, Ars Electronica, and Art Laboratory Berlin, and SETI Institute.
Founders: Leslie García, Paloma López.
Members: Emmanuel Anguiano, Felipe Rebolledo, Maro Pebo, Carles Tardío, Alfredo Lozano.
interspecifics.cc/

Reading Materials:

1) Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien phenomenology, or, what it’s like to be a thing. Minnesota: U of Minnesota Press.
2) Le Guin, Ursula K. 1969. The left hand of darkness. New York: Ace Books.

Venue: Zoom meeting link and the texts will be shared with the registered participants.

Inspired by… reading club meetings are not recorded to create a safe space for guest artists and participants to talk about their practice.