Inspired by… | Reading Club

With Guest Artist Aslı Dinç

Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in our ongoing discursive format – a reading club, curated by Tuçe Erel (next to our colloquium, curated by Regine Rapp).
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 1 October 2024

On 1 October 2024, Inspired by… welcomes Aslı Dinç. Inspired by cyberfeminism and tech-capitalism, she crafts playgrounds using speculative and dystopian narratives as tools for resistance. Her approach involves simulating and shape-shifting to explore and question existing structures and systems. In this session of the Inspired by… Aslı selected Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species by Anna Greenspan and Suzanne Livingston for a collective reading to refer to Aslı’s artistic research and practice. This book delves into cybernetics and emerging technologies in the rapidly changing landscape of Shenzhen, China, while drawing parallels between technological mutations and evolutionary biology.

Aslı, who is narrating the undercovering of the lurking pieces of the present within the future, draws on the quote "the future of the future is present" as one of the key reference points of the Future Mutations alongside her research into cybernetics, power structures, and human-machine hybridity.

Aslı Dinç is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. Her artistic research and narrative are deeply influenced by sci-fi culture, RPGs, cybernetics, interconnected networks and power. These influences, along with gamer theory, hacker culture, and the deep sea milieu, shape her practice.
Asli is a member of the PASAJ independent art space and the international performance art platform Performistanbul. Her works have been featured in venues and festivals, including Ars Electronica, Linz (2023); IMPAKT, Antwerp, (2023); FutureFantastic, Bangalore (2022); HKW, Berlin (2022); UdK, Berlin (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); and VECTOR FESTIVAL: Network Dependencies, Toronto (2021).

Reading Material:
Greenspan, Anna, and Suzanne Livingston. Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzai and the Evolution of Species. e-book, 1st edition. Timespiral Press, 2015.

Venue: Online via zoom. (Link will be provided 3 days prior to the event)

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