Gunalan Nadarajan: Dressing Animals, Governing Files, Mana

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Play, download and edit the free video Gunalan Nadarajan: Dressing Animals, Governing Files, Managing Traffic: Habits of Automation.

Dressing Animals, Governing Files, Managing Traffic: Habits of Automation

Speaker: Gunalan Nadarajan

Recorded: 22 October 2021

Historical and contemporary discussions of automation have been overly focused on its technological instantiations, specifically on its mechanical and industrial instances at the expense of the ways in which automation is embedded in and programmed into practices, discourses and materialities that are seemingly ‘non-technological’. It is proposed that automation should be (re)conceived in an expanded way as a constellation of elements through which cultures are produced and structured to predispose specific behaviors and material effects; specifically, as structures and programs for the deferral of decisions and actions – deferral to other things, other occasions, and other people. Thus, automation is framed as spatio-temporal and socio-technical programming rather than as referring simply and only to its mechanical instances and outcomes. It will be argued that automation historically emerged from and continues to evolve amidst the shifting mobilizations and disarticulations of the biomachinic interface; the different and culturally-specific technological devices, industrial machinations and technical discourses that have come to be associated with automation; the efforts of organizations to simultaneously and sometimes counterproductively appropriate and substitute labor power in the guises of productivity, efficiency, welfare and duty; the changing philosophical, neurological, psychological, legal, and ethical conceptions of intentionality and action including notions of free will, autonomy, intelligence and habit; and the governmental and infrastructural programs that regulate conduct. My research seeks to excavate this expanded notion of automation drawing on and reframing a range of disparate historical and contemporary examples. It is suggested that this revised notion of automation enables a more productive perspective to critically retool and creatively reimagine its possibilities and problems.

Gunalan Nadarajan, an art theorist and curator working at the intersections of art, science and technology, is Dean and Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. His publications include Ambulations (2000), Construction Site (edited; 2004) and Contemporary Art in Singapore (co-authored; 2007), Place Studies in Art, Media, Science and Technology: Historical Investigations on the Sites and Migration of Knowledge (co-edited; 2009), The Handbook of Visual Culture (co-edited; 2012) and over 100 book chapters, catalogue essays, academic articles and reviews. His writings have also been translated into 16 languages. He is on the editorial board of the book series, Technicities, Edinburgh University Press and the journal, Cultural Politics (Duke University Press). He has curated many international exhibitions including Ambulations(Singapore, 1999), 180KG (Jogjakarta, 2002), media_city (Seoul, 2002), Negotiating Spaces (Auckland, 2004) and DenseLocal (Mexico City, 2009) and Displacements (Beijing, 2014). He was contributing curator for Documenta XI (Kassel, Germany, 2002) and the Singapore Biennale (2006) and served on the jury of a number of international exhibitions, like ISEA2004 (Helsinki / Talinn), transmediale 05 (Berlin), ISEA2006 (San Jose) andFutureEverything Festival (Manchester, 2009). He was Artistic Co-Director of the Ogaki Biennale 2006, Japan and Artistic Director of ISEA2008 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Singapore. In 2004, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Art.

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