Following a recently published text in e-flux journal issue 98 (March 2019), Tyler Coburn joins Contributing Editor Elvia Wilk to discuss the project Ergonomic Futures.     Coburn's Ergonomic Futures asks questions about contemporary “fitness” through the lens of speculative evolution. The multi-part project includes furniture designed with Bureau V and a website of stories designed with Luke Gould and Afonso Martins.      Tyler Coburn is an artist and writer based in New York. His most recent book, Richard Roe, was published by Sternberg Press in March 2019. –Watch a performance delivered at e-flux in 2016 as part of Ergonomic Futures on  e-flux Video & Film.  –Read "Ergonomic Futures," published in e-flux journal issue 98 (March 2019). 

Ergonomic Futures: Tyler Coburn and Elvia Wilk

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Hallie Ayres talks to artist Nolan Oswald Dennis. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. In his para-disciplinary artistic practice,  Nolan Oswald Dennis explores “a Black consciousness of space”—the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization—questioning spacetime histories through system-specific interventions, sculptures, and drawings. Black Liberation Zodiac: Khunuseti focuses on a group of stars known in isiZulu as isiLimela (in English, the Pleiades) whose appearance over the southern hemisphere horizon in June signals the beginning of the season of planting, rites of adulthood, and other cyclical transitions. As these stars appear in the southern hemisphere they simultaneously disappear in the northern hemisphere. Their path across the equator reveals a condition of common difference which echoes planetary geopolitical relations.  This work is part of the “Black Liberation Zodiac” (2017 - ∞ ) series which remaps the night sky across the ecliptic plane as a set of star charts based on the IAU celestial-coordinate system. This series replaces the hegemonic constellation system derived from Eurasian mythological history with imagery drawn from the archive of black liberation iconography. Taking cues from circumpolar and seasonal constellations which are visible exclusively in either the northern or southern hemisphere, Dennis works on the premise that there are always, at a minimum, two night skies. This series explores the poetics of a multi-celestial world through iterative installations referencing planetarium displays, science museums, and southern Afri-indigenous cosmologies.

Cosmos Cinema conversation: Nolan Oswald Dennis

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Thotti. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham. Thotti works at the frontier between trance and nothingness, the image and its oblivion, motion and remembrance, cinema and its expansion. As he puts it: “South Atlantic dissolved in the world’s skies.”  Read more about his installation for the Shanghai Biennale, (Mo) Crossing to the End and the Beginning Again, via the Institute of the Cosmos website.

Cosmos Cinema conversation: Thotti

Ben Eastham talks to artist Lucile Desamory. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham.   Lucile Desamory works at the frontiers of perception and cognition, with a special interest in what the Berlin-based artist refers to as the “too-much, the falsified, and spurned narratives.” The breadth of her pursuit is reflected in the diversity of her approach, which uses film, painting, embroidery, photography, and her voice. Often working in collaboration, her oeuvre extends to theatrical works, feature-length films, and a television show currently in production.

Cosmos Cinema conversation: Lucile Desamory

Hallie Ayres talks to artist Heidi Lau. This episode is part of a series produced in conjunction with the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art (November 2023–March 2024), curated by Anton Vidokle, Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, Lukas Brasiskis, and Ben Eastham.  Heidi Lau’s luminous ceramics evoke architectural ruins, funerary vessels, and mythological creatures. Channeling the artist’s personal history, the syncretic cultures of her native Macau, and the diasporic experience, Lau transforms Taoist ritual tokens of mourning and remembrance into what Kang Kang describes as “oblique monuments for an impossible ancestry.”   Intro sound: excerpt from Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), COSMOS (Soundtrack for 14th Shanghai Biennale), 2023. 14 tracks, overall 117:30 minutes.

Cosmos Cinema conversation: Heidi Lau

   Andreas Petrossiants talks to author  Ciarán Finlayson about his book, Perpetual Slavery, published by Floating Opera Press in 2023.    In Perpetual Slavery, Ciarán Finlayson investigates the relationship of art to freedom in the work of Cameron Rowland and Ralph Lemon, who both utilize imagery of labor haunted and structured by the historical experience of slavery. Finlayson suggests that these two artists’ work overcomes the dichotomy between the recording of history and its interpretation by making both the object of artistic experience, thereby providing a space to grasp the continuing effects of slavery.        Ciarán Finlayson is an editor from Houston, Texas. He is Senior Editor at Triple Canopy. Finlayson is on the core faculty of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York, and has taught aesthetics and social theory at Columbia University, New York, and the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, and at socialist night schools hosted by the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America.

Ergonomic Futures: Tyler Coburn and Elvia Wilk

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