Feeding its own cells. Where questions of human’s hubris materialize

A seminar in the context of Episode 4: Liveration. Prometheus delivered from The Future Of Demonstration | Season 1.

Microperformative art forms allow for both aesthetic and epistemic potentials to think biopolitics and bioeconomics in times of capitalist and ecological crises in a materially tangible way, rather than from the safe haven of supposedly critical distance of abstract discourse. Such art of transformation in vivo and in vitro shifts its focus, on the one hand, to the scales of molecules, cells, enzymes, etc. On the other, it enables the staging of a life-continuum that complements human actions with animal and plant agencies, and thereby contrasts micro and macro perspectives.

Taking as its point of departure Thomas Feuerstein’s biotechnical Prometheus installations and Liveration performances, where questions of human’s hubris materialize, and where the body itself becomes a homeostat to feed exclusively on its own cells, this session of The Future of Demonstration debates and stages scenarios in which bodies become, proverbially, ‘living money.’

Inspired by Pierre Klossowski’s essay La Monnaie Vivante, as well as by biocosmist positions in Russian philosophy, media theorist Jens Hauser invites philosophers Wladimir Velminski and Walter Seitter to sketch out the assets’ material and tangible currencies. In parallel, Klaus Spiess & Lucie Strecker’s performance Metabolic Currencies III enacts a physiological and collective creation of an experimental currency.

Metabolic Currencies III* by Klaus Spiess and Lucie Strecker
(with contributions by Julius Deutschbauer and Ann Liv Young) refers to the discovery of blood circulation in the 17th century. For the first time in history, money economies could now be conceived of in a state of flux, as a circular exchange process, and ‘political anxatomy and physiology’ turned the bloodstream into a model of the political space. How can we today extend on these forms of modeling? Can hidden body fluids regulate currencies and in doing so change our understanding of ecological resources? And which role would the biomedium assume as a technology of illusion?

With
Wladimir Velminski, Walter Seitter, Jens Hauser,

21:00 open bar / music

*Project contributions by Mark Rinnerthaler, Amrito Geiser (Division of Genetics in the Dept. of Cell Biology, University of Salzburg), Joseph Knierzinger (media design).