Conversation
It’s a Match!
Itziar Barrio and Jill H. Casid on Material Aesthetics
Organized by Virginia Marano and the Lise Meitner Group "Coded Objects"
This session of “It’s a Match!” brings together artist-theorist and historian Jill H. Casid with multidisciplinary artist Itziar Barrio to explore material aesthetics and cosmography (Casid)—a material method that moves across video, robotics, performance, sculpture, and installation. Casid and Barrio will discuss ways of challenging the limits imposed on material imagination by reworking and unbinding what was once cinema.
The conversation will focus largely on Barrio’s Material Trilogy, examining how we may transform what Casid theorizes as our “scene of projection.” They will consider especially how material aesthetics and cosmography offers ways of revaluing and working with our interdependence with other bodies and with the technology that, in making and sustaining us, is us.
The dialogue will also explore Barrio’s collaboration with design researcher Dr. Laura Forlano, turning data from an insulin-injecting device into artistic “artefacts” that crip ableist and capitalist systems to honor our intimacy with the little machines that keep us going and the labors of care that sustain us. They will also consider robotics and AI as tools for connection, speculation and material imagination. Rather than rivals or replacements, robotics and AI may also be rescripted and retooled to offer ways of embracing our shared, non-heroic, chronic, soft interdependency.
Rather than lectures, the event series “It’s a Match!” is a staged conversation, clash or celebration of two people with two distinct positions. Sometimes a blind date, sometimes a fierce competition, sometimes a surprising counterpart, or the perfect fit, in these matches the two speakers will first each present their perspective on a given theme or project, to then discuss divergences or conflations with the audience. From fiery disagreements to harmonious affirmations, the conversation series organized by the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” aims to refract perspectives on historical narratives as well as reconstruct creative processes.
The conversation will be accompanied by a screening of two films by Itziar Barrio.
Screenings
16 December 2024, 18:00 CET, Casa Zuccari, Sala terrena
and Dan and (when some small metal is spun)
Itziar Barrio 4K, 15 min 24 sec, 2022
and Dan and (when some small metal is spun) (2022) is a video based project by Itziar Barrio involving the creation of a narrative using artificial-intelligence. This piece uses now legacy technology, GPT-2, a form of generative large-language Transformer model that was a predecessor to ChatGPT, to remind us of the importance and nuance of meaning. This video explores the idea of meaning - or the lack there of - between the interplay of the AI model, the script, and performer Candystore's interpretation. The resulting grammar is a glitched, a subverted and at times incorrect one. The language of poetry prevails in the final text resisting logic and opening future horizons. The script was generated in collaboration with creative technologist Jared Katzman, by using an algorithm that mimicked an amalgamation of texts across three datasets: a collection of texts from the Cyberfeminism Index; a subset of Poetry books from Project Gutenberg; and a manuscript of poetry from the performer Candystore.
ROBOTA MML
Itziar Barrio , 4K, 62 min, 2023
ROBOTA MML (2023) is a film looking at the many valences of work and traces the etymological origins of “robot.” Coined by Czech writer Karel Capek in his science-fiction play R.U.R. (1920), which is set in a factory where robots are built to free humans from work, the term derives from the word robota, meaning forced labor. Barrio relocates R.U.R.’s characters to a contemporary setting sensitive to biopower, class consciousness, identity, and gender fluidity. In Barrio’s interpretation, the agent capable of affecting the human psyche appears in physical form as smoke. Barrio complicates the narrative through a nonlinear narrative structure as well as aesthetic references to Géricault’s painting Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) and queer night clubs. Continuous with the rest of Barrio’s Material trilogy, this film involves collaborations with different experts including a robotics engineer and a professional bodybuilder.
Installation view of ROBOTA MML, Video and robotic sculptures, “Let Us Go Back to the Beginning,” Itziar Barrio, Salt Galata, Istanbul 2024.
Book cover of Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Biographical Notes
Itziar Barrio is an interdisciplinary artist producing long-term research-based projects that involve different agents and collaborators. Her survey exhibition was curated by Johanna Burton in 2018, and her monograph was published by SKIRA in 2023. Barrio has recently been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2024 NYFA/NYSCA Artist Fellow, among other recognitions. Barrio’s work has been presented internationally at the 14th Shanghai Biennale, Salt Istanbul, and elsewhere. She is a member of the New Museum’s incubator, NEW INC, and her work has been written about in the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, and other publications. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts and Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
https://www.itziarbarrio.com/
IG: @itziar_barrio
Jill H. Casid is an artist-theorist and historian who holds the appointment of Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a senior fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Casid is bringing to completion Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene and the last in a trilogy of films. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005), Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022), and the co-edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in Documenta Fifteen.
http://jillhcasid.net/
IG: @jillhcasid
16. Dezember 2024, 15:00 Uhr
This event will be hybrid and take place in person at Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai. There is no need to formally register to participate in person.
For online participation please register in advance: https://eu02web.zoom-x.de/meeting/register/u50vcuqtqT8tGtc_XvBRBdxHYz6AzC0WyZmN
Weitere Informationen
Hinweis
Diese Veranstaltung wird durch Fotografien und/oder Videoaufnahmen dokumentiert. Falls es nicht Ihre Zustimmung findet, dass das Kunsthistorische Institut in Florenz Aufnahmen, auf denen Sie erkennbar abgebildet sein könnten, für die Veranstaltungsdokumentation und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit (z.B. Social Media) verwendet, bitten wir um eine entsprechende Rückmeldung.