The Brain Without Organs: Planetarity, Plasticity,
and Eco-cosmotechnics in Cognitive Capitalism
SFSIA 2024 | Paris

in collaboration with Maison Suger and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’homme
September 30 – October 5

Faculty Bios

Gabriel Alonso is an artist and researcher based in Madrid. Through various formats such as installation, sculpture, photography, and video, he investigates the contemporary relations between fiction and materiality, to blur the binomials between the real and the imagined, between the human and the artificial, and between the natural and the cultural. In 2020 he founded the Institute for Postnatural Studies, a center for artistic experimentation from which to explore and problematize postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. Conceived as a platform for critical thinking, IPS is a network that brings together artists and researchers concerned about the issues of the global ecological crisis through experimental formats of exchange and the production of open knowledge. Represented by Pradiauto Gallery (MAD), his work has been exhibited in different galleries and international exhibitions, such as Podium Oslo (Oslo, 2024), Fundazione Sandretto (Madrid, 2023), Pradiauto (Madrid, 2023), and Nordés Galería (Santiago de Compostela, 2022), among others. In 2020, he received the Creation Grant from Madrid City Council. He has recently published his last book, La condición Postnatural: Glosario de Ecologías para otros mundos posibles.

Nicolas Bourriaud is a curator and writer. He is Artistic director of Gwangju Biennale 2024 and funded Radicants, a curatorial cooperative producing exhibitions worldwide. He was the Director of the MO.CO-Montpellier Contemporain, founder and co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (1999-2006), and Gulbenkian Curator for Contemporary Art at Tate Britain in London (2007/2010). In 2010, he headed the studies department at the Ministry of Culture in France, then became Director of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-arts de Paris (2011-2015). As an independent curator, he was part of the curatorial team of Aperto 1993 at the Venice Biennial and has organized many international exhibitions including Traffic (Capc Bordeaux, 1996), Estratos (Murcia, Spain, 2008), Altermodern (Tate Britain, 2009), Wirikuta/Mexican Time Slip (Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2016), and Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime (Venice, 2022). He also curated several biennials including Lyon (2005), Moscou (2005 and 2007), Monodrome (Athens, 2011), The Great Acceleration (Taipei Biennial 2014), Threads (Kaunas Biennial, Lituania, 2015), and The 7th Continent (Istanbul Biennial 2019). His theoretical publications include Relational Aesthetics (1998), Postproduction (2002), Radicant (2009), The Exform (2015) and Inclusions. Aesthetics of the Capitalocene (2021/Sternberg Press, 2022).

Yves Citton is professor in Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, member of the Institut de France and co-editor of the journal Multitudes. He recently co-directed with Enrico Campo the volume Politics of Curiosity. Alternatives to the Attention Economy (Routledge, 2024), after having published Altermodernités des Lumières (Seuil, 2022), Faire avec. Conflits, coalitions, contagions (Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021), Générations collapsonautes (Seuil, 2020, in collaboration with Jacopo Rasmi), Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019), Contre-courants politiques (Fayard, 2018), and The Ecology of Attention (Polity Press, 2016). His articles are in open access on his website www.yvescitton.net.

Emanuele Coccia is the author of The Life of Plants (2018), Metamorphosis (2021) and Philosophy of the Home (2024). He recently published a photo-theory book with Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen (Modern Alchemy 2022), a philosophical epistolary on light with photographer Paolo Roversi (Lettres sur la lumières, 2024) and a book on the relationship between fashion and philosophy with Valentino’s creative director Alessandro Michele (The Life of forms. Philosophy or Re-enchantment, 2024). He co-curated an exhibition on fashion (The Many Lives of a Garment with Olivier Saillard).

Igor Galligo is an entrepreneur and researcher in aesthetics and media philosophy. From 2013 to 2015, he directed three international seminars with Bernard Stiegler at Centre Pompidou in Paris on the transformation of attentional capacities in a digital milieu and participated in the creation of the chair of contributory research on the territory of Plaine Commune. In 2018, he founded NOODESIGN, a think tank on the design of mind operations. In 2022, he founded AUTOMEDIAS.ORG, a platform that brings together researchers, software developers, and political actors from the automedia world, notably from the Gilets Jaunes movement. From August 2022 to July 2023, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), sponsored by the Networking Ecologically Smart Territories program. Attached to the Rhetoric department and under the supervision of professor David Bates, he developed his reflection on automedia and the contribution of critical digital rhetoric to elaborate different approaches from surveillance capitalism to the problems of the so-called “Post-Truth”. Since March 2024, he has been a guest researcher in “The Disruptive Condition” program at the University of Leuphana, in Germany, under the direction of professor Erich Horl.

Agnieszka Kurant is a conceptual artist investigating collective and nonhuman intelligences and the exploitations present in digital capitalism. She is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award and 2019 Frontier Art Prize. Her solo shows include Mudam Luxembourg (2024), Castello di Rivoli (2021-2022), Hannover Kunstverein (2023) and Sculpture Center (2013). In 2015 she was commissioned for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum, and in 2021-22 a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge. Her works have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Biennale of Sydney, Istanbul Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, Milano Triennale, and Dhaka Art Summit; as well as SFMOMA, Kunsthalle Wien, Witte de With, Whitechapel Art Gallery, De Young Museum, Nottingham Contemporary, Moderna Museet, Bonner Kunstverein, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Frieze Projects, London and Performa Biennial. In 2010 she co-authored the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (with A. Wasilkowska). Kurant’s monograph Collective Intelligence, co-edited by Stefanie Hessler and Jenny Jaskey, was published by Sternberg Press/MIT Press in September 2024. Kurant was an artist in residence at the Berggruen Institute (2019-2021), a visiting artist at MIT CAST (2017-2020), and held a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute (2018).

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is a professor of cultural studies and a founding director of the Centre for Technology in Humanities at Kyung Hee University, Korea. He is also a visiting professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton (UK) and Graduate School at The University of Santo Tomas (Philippines). He served as an academic advisor for Gwangju Biennale in 2017 and as a program manager for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2021. He edited the third volume of The Idea of Communism (2016) and Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (2023), and his forthcoming monograph, Communism After Deleuze is scheduled for publication in 2025.

Anna Longo is a doctor of aesthetic philosophy, program director at the Collège international de philosophie. She is an instructor at the institute Mines Télécom Business School and she teaches the philosophy of technology. Among her recent publications: Le jeu de l’induction. Automatisation de la production de connaissance et réflexion philosophique (éditions Mimesis 2022) and Deleuze. Une philosophie de la multiplicité (Ellipses 2024).

Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organization after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018), Sad by Design (2019) and Stuck on the Platform (2022). He studied political science at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and received his PhD from the University of Melbourne. In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures (www.networkcultures.org) at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His centre organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the arts. From 2007-2018 he was a media theory professor at the European Graduate School. In December 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the UvA Art History Department. The Chair (one day a week) is supported by the HvA. Since early 2022 he has been involved in support campaigns for Ukrainian artists, in particular UKRAiNATV, a streaming art studio network, operating out of Krakow.

Antonia Majaca is a theorist and curator based in Venice and Berlin. She is the editor of the forthcoming ‘Incomputable Earth:Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis’ (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the curator of the current Croatian pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennial. She was one of the curators involved in the long-term project ‘Kanon Fragen’ (initiated by Anselm Franke), at the HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, where she co-curated ‘Parapolitics – Cultural Freedom and the Cold War’. Majaca’s ongoing collaborative investigation ‘Feminist Takes’ considers the relation between the Non-Western avant-garde cinema and feminist theory. Her book ‘Feminist Takes – Early Works’ (co-edited with Jelena Vesic and Rachel O’Reilly) was published by Sternberg Press (2021). Her current research considers the notion of Planetary healing in the Anthropocene through the lens of microbial ecologies.

Dr. Amna Malik is an art historian based in London. She has published widely on the politics of exile, with a focus on marginalised histories, examining subaltern feminism from a variety of perspectives in the global south. This research is drawn from an engagement with the transnational networks of power, understood as an attention to the long history of globalisation, in which she positions contemporary and historic art practices, to engage with the cross-cultural dimensions of concepts such as the avant-garde, post-modernism and the post-colonial. Her latest project is a book- length study with a working title of Exile and Postcolonial Time: Inter-textuality and the Archive after 9/11.

Yann Moulier Boutang was trained in France and Brazil with studies in Humanities, Philosophy, Japanese, Sociology, Demography, and Economics. He is an alumnus of the Ecole Normale supérieure de la rue d’Ulm Philosophy (1970-1976), Graduate in Philosophy on M. Eckart (University Paris I) Master in Sociology of work (University of Paris VII, Master in applied Economics (Demography) (IEP), Agrégation de Sciences Sociales (1980) Phd on the origin of wage labour and modern slavery (1997), and Agrégation des Universités en Sciences économiques (1998). He is a Lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Assistant professor at the IEP of Paris, Professor at the University of South Britain (UBS) Vannes (2005-2024), Professor of Economics at UTC (2001-2015), Associated Professor at (ESADSE) Ecole Supérieure d’Art et Design de Saint-Etienne (2008-2016), Associated Professor at (ENSCI) École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle; Associated Professor at STRATE, Ecole de Design (Meudon) (2016-2020), Associated Professor to the Plateforme Ecole Offshore of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art et Design de Nancy in Shanghai with SIVA (Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts) Fudan University (2013-2023), invited Professor at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris Malaquais Emeritus Professor of Economics at Alliance Sorbonne Université-University of Technology of Compiègne, France; and Associated Professor at UTSEUS (Sino-European College of Technology of (SHU) Shanghai University, Shanghai since 2010.

American multimedia conceptual artist Warren Neidich works between Berlin and New York City. His transdisciplinary works of the past thirty-five years have focused upon the exploration of forms of resistance through activities of play and reuse to embodied social, political, technical  medical apparatuses as they have interfaced with able bodiedness and neural normativity. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art since 2015. Selected one-person and group exhibitions include the Venice Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1 MOMA, Walker Art Center, MIT, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art (Washington D.C., US), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Villa Arson, Nice, Zentrum für Kunst and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, Germany). He is former tutor at Goldsmiths College, London, and professor of visual art at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin. He has been a visiting lecturer in the Departments of Art at GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, the Sorbonne in Paris, France, the University of Oxford and Cambridge University in the UK and many others. The fourth edition of his Glossary of Cognitive Activism has been released by Eris Press, UK in collaboration with Columbia University Press, NYC.

Sinziana Ravini is a Swedish, Romanian born writer and psychoanalyst living in Paris. She is also the editor-in-chief of the Swedish art journal Paletten. She has published Les Psychonautes in 2022 (PUF) and La diagonale du désir in 2018 (Editions Stock).

Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Sciences-Po Paris. He is the author of thirty award-winning books published into fifteen languages, covering issues from pornography and prostitution to law and logistics, drugs and anesthesia to piracy and police, Gilles Deleuze and William Burroughs to Jack Sparrow and Jean Eustache – all with a decidedly anarchist twist. Laurent also is the managing editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and the Perspectives Critiques series at Presses universitaires de France, a member of the International Board of the College International de Philosophie and an expert on wine and liquors. His “Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century” is forthcoming with Polity.

Jennifer Teets is a Houston, Texas born curator and writer based in Paris working at the intersection of poetics of science and technology, material culture, literature, and performance. She has curated numerous exhibitions and talks since the early 2000s with artists and thinkers worldwide. Her recent exhibition Intimate confession is a project was held at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston in the fall and winter of 2023/24. Aside from curating, she convenes and directs Matter in Flux (MiF), a mentorship circle tied to themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. MiF emerged as an activity connected to the late, self-led initiative The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO) that Teets co-directed between 2014-2019. She is editor of the essay and poetry collection Electric Brine, published by Archive Books in 2021. She has written extensively for art-agenda, Art + Education, Art Papers, frieze, Metropolis M, Mousse, Topical Cream, SPIKE, and Terremoto amongst others. She was recently the 2024 curator of Offspring: Underbelly at De Ateliers, Amsterdam where she also was a guest tutor. Teets is an external expert for the Swiss Arts Council, advising on art, science, and technology.

Tiziana Terranova is Professor of Cultural Studies and Digital Media at the Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, Italy. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press 2004); After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (Semiotext(e), 2022) and the forthcoming: Network Social: Technoliberalism and the Reconfiguration of the Social in the post-Digital Age. Her research on digital technologies operates at the intersection of cultural and media studies, post-workerist Marxism, and critical theory. She is a co-founder and member of the Technoculture Research Unit (www.technoculture.it), CRITT (Transnational Technocultures Research Centre), the Euronomade free university network (www.euronomade.info) and the Critical Computation Bureau (https://recursivecolonialism.com/).

Aline Wiame is Associate professor of Philosophy at Université Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France), and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France since October 2023. Her research focuses on the connections between philosophy and the arts as well as on the reinvention of the arts in front of ecological disasters. She explores those fields through contemporary French philosophy, American pragmatism, and ecological humanities. She is the author of two monographs (in French): Scènes de la défiguration (Les Presses du réel, 2016) and Revenir d’entre les morts. Deleuze et la croyance en ce monde au cinéma et dans les séries (Les Presses du réel, forthcoming in 2025). She frequently publishes journal articles in French and English.

Charles T. Wolfe is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy and co-director, ERRAPHIS at the Université de Toulouse. He works primarily in history and philosophy of the early modern life sciences, with a particular interest in materialism and vitalism. He is the author of Materialism: A Historico-Philosophical Introduction (2016), La philosophie de la biologie avant la biologie: une histoire du vitalisme (2019) and Lire le matérialisme (2020), and has edited or coedited volumes on monsters, organisms, brains, empiricism, epigenesis, the conceptual foundations of biology, mechanism and vitalism, Locke and Canguilhem, including (w. D. Jalobeanu) the Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (2022) and (w. J. Symons) The History and Philosophy of Materialism (2024). He is co-editor of the Springer book series ‘History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences’, editor of the series ‘Studies in History and Philosophy of Science’ and a founding member of the Verum Factum editorial collective. Papers available at https://univ-tlse2.academia.edu/CharlesWolfe.

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