States of Consciousness in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2019 | New York City

Performance Space New York
June 1 – 15, 2019

Faculty Bios


Claire Bishop is a Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include Installation Art: A Critical History (2005), Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship(2012), and Radical Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? (2013). She is a regular contributor to Artforum, and her essays and books have been translated into eighteen languages. Her current research investigates the intersection of attention and technology in contemporary art and performance.

Patricia Ticineto Clough is a professor of sociology and women studies and currently is teaching in Performance Studies at NYU. She is the author of a number of publication, among them, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology, editor of The Affective Turn; Theorizing the Social, co-editor of Beyond Biopolitics Essays in the Government of Life and Death, and most recently, The User Unconscious: Affect, Media and Measure. She is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City where she also teaches at Institutes for psychoanalytic training.

Suzanne Dikker is a research scientist affiliated with Utrecht University and New York University. Her research merges cognitive neuroscience, education, and performance art in an effort to understand the brain basis of human social interaction. Together with media artist Matthias Oostrik and other collaborators from both the sciences and the arts, she uses portable EEG in a series of crowd-sourcing neuroscience experiments / interactive brain installations that investigate the role of brainwave synchronization between two or more people in successful communication. These experiments are executed outside of traditional laboratory settings, such as schools and museums (e.g. American Museum of Natural History, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Eye Institute Amsterdam). After completing her PhD in Linguistics at New York University, Suzanne received postdoctoral training at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology and New York University.

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer and the Andrew Banks Endowed Professor of Art at the University of Florida. She is a recipient of a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 Cintas Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 US Artists Fellowship and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, two Whitney Biennials (2008 and 1993), BAM’s Next Wave Festival, The Liverpool Biennial, the Sydney Biennale, The Johannesburg Biennial, The Kwangju Biennale, The Shanghai Biennale, Mercosul, VideoBrasil and Performa05. Her works have also been shown at the The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, KW Institute of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. She is represented by Alexander Gray Associates in New York. Fusco is the author of English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995) and The Bodies that Were Not Ours and Other Writings (2001), and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). She is also the editor of Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas (1999) and Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self (2003). Her latest book Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba was issued by Tate Publications in 2015, and a Spanish translation was published by Turner Libros in 2017. Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985) and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007).

Conceptual artist, Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic and ecological systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. Probing collective intelligence, surveillance capitalism, AI and the evolution of culture, labor, knowledge and creativity, she investigates automation, crowdsourcing, data exploitation, evolution of memes and social movements, artificial societies, mining industries and energy circuits in the context of art production. Her works often behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines. Collaborating with professionals from various fields, from biologists to computer scientist, Kurant explores the hybrid and shifting status of objects in relation to value, authorship, production and circulation. Her past projects include a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum (2015), a solo exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York (2013). In 2010 she co-represented Poland at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (with Aleksandra Wasilkowska). Her work was also featured in exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Guggenheim Bilbao, Tate Modern, Witte de With, Moderna Museet, MUMOK, Bonner Kunstverein, Grazer Kunstverein, Albright Knox, CCA in Tel Aviv, Stroom Den Haag, SFMOMA, MoMa PS1, MOMA in Warsaw, The Kitchen, Frieze Projects and Performa Biennial. Kurant’s writings were published in Frieze, Artforum and Cabinet magazine. She is the co-editor of Joy Forever. The Political Economy of Social Creativity, Mayfly, 2014. She is an artist in residence at MIT CAST and a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute and the Berggruen Institute.

Sanford Kwinter is a theorist, writer, and editor, Professor of Science and Design at the Pratt Institute in New York City and University Professor of Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Kwinter holds degrees from Canada, France and the United States and a Doctorate from Columbia University in New York. In the early 1980s he co-founded the journal ZONE and the independent publishing company Zone Books as a transdisciplinary project to integrate philosophy and cultural production. He has contributed numerous essays and articles (many of which have been translated into a variety of languages) to periodicals such as: Art in America, L’autre Journal, Harvard Design Magazine, Yale Journal of Architecture, Assemblage and PRAXIS, among others. He curated the first ever Harvard University-wide art exhibition “The Divine Comedy” in 2011 where for 8 years he co-directed the Masters in Design Studies department and the “Art, Design and the Public Domain” program. As diverse as Kwinter’s books are, Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001) is considered “a critical guide to the modern history of time and to the interplay between the physical sciences and the arts.” Whereas his second book, Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008), is “an extended meditation on infrastructure, war, computation, mechanical and material intelligence, and other multivariate facets of modernity,” which was followed by Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010) an urban textual requiem that “addresses the sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal transformations that characterized the modernization processes set into motion at the turn of the millennium.” Together with Rem Koolhaas and the Harvard Project on the City, Stefano Boeri, Nadia Tazi and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, they published the book project Mutations (Actar, 2000), “an atlas of new urban spaces.” Additionally, Kwinter has edited many books in and around the field of architecture, urbanism and the environment including: Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students (Flying the Bullet or When Did the Future Begin?)(Princeton Arch. Press, 1996), ZONE 6: Incorporations (with Jonathan Crary, Zone Books, and MIT Press, 1992), and ZONE 1/2 The Contemporary City (with M. Feher, Zone Books, 1986, and MIT Press, 1987). Kwinter has taught at schools around the world, was a fellow at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and was recipient of the 2013 design writing award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Joseph E. LeDoux is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science at NYU in the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology. He is also a Professor of Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical School and Director of the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU and Nathan Kline Institute. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of memory and emotion and he is the author of The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, Anxious, and the forthcoming book The Deep History of Ourselves (August 2019). LeDoux has received a number of awards including William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science, Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society, Fyssen International Prize in Cognitive Science, Jean Louis Signoret Prize of the IPSEN Foundation, Santiago Grisolia Prize, American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and the American Psychological Association Donald O. Hebb Award. His book Anxious received the 2016 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association. LeDoux is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, New York Academy of Sciences, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids and performs with Colin Dempsey as the acoustic duo So We Are.

Carlo McCormick is a pop culture critic, curator and Senior Editor of Paper magazine. His numerous books, monographs and catalogs include Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture, The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, Dondi White: Style Master General, and Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Public Art. His writing has appeared in Art in America, Art News, Artforum and many other publications. Recently, he curated the exhibition “Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985” now on view at the Museum of Sex in New York City.

DJ Spooky aka Paul D. Miller is the executive editor of ORIGIN Magazine and is a composer, multimedia artist, editor and author. His DJ MIXER iPad app has seen more than 12 million downloads in the last year. In 2012-2013 he is the first artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC starting this fall. He’s produced and composed work for Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, and scores of artists and award-winning films. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. His book Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media is a best-selling title for MIT Press. He has been featured everywhere from Elle to CNN to SyFy. Miller’s deep interest in reggae and dub has resulted in a series of compilations, remixes and collections of material from the vaults of the legendary Jamaican label, Trojan Records. Other releases include Optometry (2002), a jazz project featuring some of the best players in the downtown NYC jazz scene, and Dubtometry (2003) featuring Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Mad Professor. Another of Miller’s collaborations, Drums of Death, features Dave Lombardo of Slayer and Chuck D of Public Enemy among others. He also produced material on Yoko Ono’s recent album Yes, I’m a Witch.

Yann Moulier Boutang, born in 1949, is a graduate from Ecole Normale Supérieure (Philosophy 1970). He is now emeritus professor of economics at University of Technology of Compiègne which is part of Alliance Sorbonne University France (formerly Paris 4 + Paris 6 + ENSEAD), where he teaches political economy, economy of complexity, law economics of intellectual property rights. He is member of the Costech Laboratory (Knowledge, Organization and Technical Systems) in the same University. From 2007 to 2015, he taught culture and digital contemporary culture at the Superior School of Arts and Design at Saint-Etienne and innovation by design at ENSCI (National Superior School of Industrial Creation). In 2008 he was appointed first visiting professor in economics  at the National Superior School of Architecture (Paris-Malaquais). He has been running the quarterly Multitudes since its foundation. He is also associated professor at the Sino-European Faculty of Technology (UTSEUS) in Shanghai University (SHU). Now he is President of the Scientific Board of the newly founded IHETN (Institute of Hight Studies of the Digital Transition).

Warren Neidich is a conceptual artist, writer, and theorist. He is currently Professor of Art at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin, founding director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and the American editor of Archive Books, Berlin. Selected Awards and Fellowships include: The Fulbright Specialist Program, Fine Arts Category, University of Cairo, 2013; The Vilem Flusser Theory Award, Transmediale, Berlin, 2010; AHRB/ACE Arts and Science Research Fellowship. Bristol, UK 2004. Recently published books include The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 3, Archive Books, 2017 Neuromacht, Merve Verlag, Berlin, 2017 and The Colour of Politics, Kunstverein Rosa-Luxemburg Platz, Berlin, 2017-2018. His work represented by the Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland.

Reza Negarestani is a philosopher. He has lectured and taught at numerous international universities and institutes. his current project is focused on renewed philosophies of rationalism, their procedures, and their demands for special forms of human conduct. His latest book, Intelligence and Spirit (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2018) is focused on philosophy of intelligence at the intersection between philosophy of mind, German Idealism, cognitive sciences and theoretical computer science. He is currently directing the Critical Philosophy programme at the New Centre for Research and Practice.

Alva Noë is a writer and philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Center for New Media and the Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He works on consciousness and art. Alva is the author of Action in Perception (MIT, 2012), Out of Our Heads (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009), Varieties of Presence (Harvard, 2012), and Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015). His latest book is Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ball Park (Oxford, 2019). Alva is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 recipient of the Judd/Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies.

Luciana Parisi’s research is a philosophical investigation of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She is a Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory at Goldsmiths University of London and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit. In 2017-18 she was a Visiting Professor at the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, California. She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press). She is currently completing a monograph on the automation of reasoning and logic in artificial intelligence.

Christiane Paul is Chief Curator / Director of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center and Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School, and Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media arts, lectured internationally on art and technology and is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation’s 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her recent books are A Companion to Digital Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2016); Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 3rd revised edition, 2015), Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012), co-edited with Margot Lovejoy and Victoria Vesna, and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). As Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum, she curated exhibitions including Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies, 1965-2018 (2018-19); Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011); Profiling (2007); Data Dynamics (2001), and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial; and is responsible for artport, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to Internet art. Other recent curatorial work includes Little Sister (is watching you, too)  (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC, 2015); What Lies Beneath (Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, 2015); The Public Private (Kellen Gallery, The New School, Feb. 7 – April 17, 2013), Eduardo Kac: Lagoglyphs, Biotopes and Transgenic Works (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010); Biennale Quadrilaterale (Rijeka, Croatia, 2009-10); Feedforward – The Angel of History (co-curated with Steve Dietz; Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain, Oct. 2009); and INDAF Digital Art Festival(Incheon, Korea, Aug. 2009).

Daniel Pinchbeck is the best selling author of Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and How Soon Is Now?, among other works. He co-founded Evolver.net and was featured in the 2010 documentary, 2012: Time for Change. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Wired, Artforum, and many other publications. His new book, When Plants Dream, with coauthor Sophia Rokhlin, comes out in September from Watkins. 

Florencia Portocarrero is a researcher, writer, and curator based in Lima. She received her BA in clinical psychology at the Catholic University of Peru, where she also earned an MA in psychoanalytical theory. From 2012–13 she participated in the De Appel Curatorial Program in Amsterdam and in 2015 completed an MA in contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. Portocarrero’s writings on art and culture regularly appear in contemporary art magazines such as Atlántica JournalArtishock, and Terremoto. In Lima she works as a public program curator at Proyecto AMIL, and is a co-founder of Bisagra, one of the few independent art spaces in the city. In 2017/2018 Portocarrero was awarded  with Curating Connectionsscholarship given by the DAAD artists-in-Berlin Program and KfW Stiftung. She recently edited Videos From This Woman: Performance Documentation 1997–2010, a monograph on the work of the artist Elena Tejada-Herrera. 

Barry Schwabsky is co-director of Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art. He is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books are Heretics of Language (Black Square, 2018), The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016), and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square, 2015). Forthcoming is The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg, 2019).

Martha Schwendener, Ph.D., is a Visiting Associate Professor at New York University, Steinhardt School of Art, and an art critic for The New York Times. Her criticism and essays have been published in Artforum, Bookforum, Afterimage, October, Art in America, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, Paper Monument, Flusser Studies, and other publications. She edited Flusser/Essays (São Paulo: Metaflux, 2017), and is working on a manuscript on Vilém Flusser’s philosophy and its relationship to art.

Sensorium is an experiential studio working at the intersection of art, commerce, and new media. It produces photographic, cinematic, and immersive content for a wide range of media platforms, exhibitions, and installations. Cofounded by Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald, their interdisciplinary process is grounded in technological innovation and the ability to integrate concepts across a wide spectrum of mediums. Their most recent work especially pushes the boundaries of virtual reality, augmented reality, and other new media. Recent works created by Sensorium include the social virtual reality project ZIKR: A SUFI REVIVAL, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in the 2018 New Frontier program, and the immersive theater project OBJECTS IN MIRROR AR CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in the 2018 Storyscapes program. Sensorium also works with the Museum of Modern Art, MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, Cyborg Foundation, and Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting to create original documentary and journalistic works and installations.

Roxane Silberman background is quantitative sociology with publications in the domain of labor market, migrations, ethnicity and discrimination based on the intensive use of official microdata and comparative approaches. She is Emeritus senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France and Honorary Professor at GENES (Groupe des Écoles Nationales d’Économie et de Statistique). Since the 90ies, she has played a major role in France in opening access to official and sensitive microdata, setting up the basis for a data policy for the social sciences in France. As the representative of researchers in economics and social sciences, she sits at the board of the National Council for Statistical Information (CNIS, Conseil National de l’Information Statistique), also serving in many committees, boards or expert groups involved in data issues as for instance the Scientific Advisory Board of the French epidemiological cohort CONSTANCES. Roxane is currently acting as Scientific Advisor for international activities at CASD (Secure Data Hub) the French Research Data Centre providing remote access to confidential data particularly in the domain of official and administrative data. At European level, Roxane has been the Principal Investigator of the FP7- funded European project Data without Boundaries (2011-2015)(GA No 262608, 2011-2015, see www.dwbproject.org) which strove to discuss with the national statistical offices, the data archives and the research communities from 14 EU countries the conditions for an integrated model for access across borders to secured data. In continuation, Roxane is now coordinating the IDAN (International Data Access Network) https://idan.network/ that has set up cooperation between 6 Research Data Centres from France, Germany, Netherlands and the UK (to be further extended to other countries) based on reciprocal provision of access points to confidential data.

Laura Wexler is the author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000), co–authored with photographer Sandra Matthews. Tender Violence was awarded the  Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history and/or feminist theory. She also co–edited, with Laura Frost, Amy Hungerford and John MacKay, the volume Interpretation and the Holocaust, as a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism. Professor Wexler’s many other publications on photography and American visual culture include recent studies of the writings of Frederic Douglass, and the photographs of La Toya Ruby Frazier. Her current research interests center on family photographs and national memory. Professor Wexler has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals including American Quarterly, Genders, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. She founded and directs the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale.  The courses she teaches at Yale University include: “The History of Photography,” “Visuality and Violence,” “Photography, History and Memory,” “Gender & Sexuality in Media & Popular Culture,” and “Digital Humanities.” Laura Wexler completed her undergraduate studies at Sarah Lawrence College and holds M.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in English and Comparative Literature. She has taught at Amherst College, Trinity College, Wesleyan University and Yale University. She served as Chair of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program from 2003–2007 and Co-chair of the Yale Women’s Faculty Forum from 2008-2011. She is a recipient of major research awards from the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.