Western myths on the relationship between humans and technology generally present a tragic vision: on the one hand, humans constantly try to surpass themselves; on the other, they fear being dominated by the artificial. As technology advances, it alternates between scenarios of salvation and apocalypse, in an evolution that is both material and marked by political imaginaries based on ethnic, racial, or class criteria. The (post-)human debate, dramatised in various ways today, is the starting point for questioning new ways of representing bodies, subjectivities, and intelligences, which escape the historical definition of human. Culturgest and Contemporânea come together within the scope of the (Post-)human Mythologies and Technological Fictions program in a debate in two parts, Artistic Imaginaries and Historical-theoretical Imaginaries, with artists and thinkers, to reflect on the way current technologies challenge us to imagine other ways of conceiving humans and their subjectivity.

Lou Cantor
Project (de)MONSTRAS 
Artistic Imaginaries 

4:30pm | 2h
Moderation: Manuel Bogalheiro and Sofia Nunes

An encounter with two artistic and research projects around the imaginary of the human relationship with technology. The conversation with Kolja Glaeser, from the Berlin collective Lou Cantor, Affective Work and the Expanded Mind, part of the artistic project Spiritual Reality, which uses speculative fiction to explore human consciousness and subjectivity, in relation to new technologies such as ChatGPT. By questioning the dualism between human and machine, we investigate the relationship between key moments in the history of artificial intelligence and the dominant cultural images about behaviour, affection, work, identity, knowledge, intelligence, and spirituality, which persist in current digital imaginaries. The (de)MONSTRAS Project (Aida Castro, Ana Carolina Fiuza, Maria Mire, Catarina Braga) will present, in Imaginários, Corporalidades e Materialidades Anfíbias (Amphibious Imaginaries, Corporalities, and Materialities), figures of media bodies considered monstrous, prosthetic, cyborg, non-normative, complex, and hybrid.

Ana Teixeira Pinto
“The Mind of Man is an Unused Ovary” – Artificial Intelligence Before Information Technology 

7:00pm | 1h30
Moderation: Manuel Bogalheiro and Sofia Nunes

In the summer of 2023, many experts in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry gave interviews to the media, speculating that recent developments in artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity.

The fiction and personification of AI pre-exists information technologies (IT) and may have little to say about technology, science, or economics, but they have a lot to say about evolutionary fantasies, masculinity, or the frontier of the human and the quest of immortality.

Treating metaphysical conceptions of the mind as a prehistory of artificial intelligence, Ana Teixeira Pinto, writer, curator, guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute analyses cultural aspirations and anxieties that exceed what technology allows.