Thursday, July 1
7 p.m. lecture Autonomia e Sistemas de Jogos [Autonomy and Game Systems] with Murray Campbell
The relation between the game of chess and computers began a long time before the invention of the first digital device. But it was only in 1997, with the defeat of Garry Kasparov – one of the greatest chess players in history – by IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue, that the experiments became widely known. Currently, the technology is being applied to other games, such as “question and answer” television game shows.
Murray Campbell is a senior manager with the Department of Mathematical Sciences of IBM, in Yorktown Heights, New York, United States. He was a member of the teams involved in the construction of machines to play chess, culminating in the development of the aforementioned Deep Blue.
Friday, July 2
7 p.m. lecture Arte evolucionária [Evolutionary art]
with Jon McCormack
The process of evolution by natural selection explains how the species change and adapt in the absence of explicit goals or external help. Evolution is a fact. It shows how systems of complex life arise in an autonomous way, from low to high, without there being a central planner or controlling demiurge. In the field of art, methods and processes elaborated with computer codes precisely simulate this principle.
Jon McCormack is one of Australia’s most representative new-media artists, whose work has been shown throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. He is codirector of the Center for Electronic Media Art of Monash University, in Melbourne, where he also serves as a senior professor of computer science.
Saturday, July 3
4 p.m. roundtable Autonomia e Pós-Humanismo [Autonomy and Post-Humanism]
with Lucia Santaella and Stelarc
A debate on the question of post-humanism, but from the standpoint of a non-anthropocentric humanism. Currently, a certain illusion circulates which holds that with the advent of biotechnology the “self” can finally be freed from the flesh, ignoring its material dimension. Science fiction apart, the priority now is to find ways to meet the challenges of the information era without losing sight of the condition of subjectivity and the human body.
Lucia Santaella is a researcher and professor at PUC/SP, where she earned her doctorate in literary theory and founded CS Games, a group for research into games and semiotics. She also serves as a professor at the School of Economics in São Paulo at Fundação Getulio Vargas (EESP/FGV), in the areas of new technologies and grammars for sound, relations between the verbal, visual and audio elements in multimedia, and the biocognitive foundations of communication.
Stelarc is an artist interested in the evolutionary architecture of the body and in possible ways of redesigning the human, enhanced by implants and exoskeletons. Head of the Department of Performance Art at Brunel University, England, he is an invited senior researcher at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.
7 p.m. lecture Interação, emergência e autonomia [Interaction, emergence and autonomy]
with Paul Pangaro
A reflection on the themes dealt with in each of the editions of the cybernetic trilogy of Emoção Art.ficial – interface, emergence and autonomy – gives rise to the proposal of a second trilogy: conversation, links and autopoiesis. And these three concepts, in turn, point toward another possible triad: conscience, meaning and the human being.
Paul Pangaro studied computer science at MIT and earned his doctorate in cybernetics at Brunel University. He worked with scientist Jerry Lettvin in the field of neural models, with Nicholas Negroponte – one of the founders of the Media Lab at MIT – in the area of animation systems, and with Gordon Pask in the cybernetics of learning. His company, Pangaro Inc., founded in 1981, provides consulting services to corporations such as Sun Microsystems, General Motors and Xerox.