The Absurd

The absurd is an expression of a feeling, and not a philosophy, although it points at problems in longstanding belief structures that no longer apply in the new world. While absurdism does not provide answers or solutions or hope, it is not a philosophy of inaction by any means. Absurdist acts offer experiences that provoke, that speculate, that undermine known values and authorities, that point and prod to keep momentum going. Artists are in a privileged position outside disciplinary borders in their ability to engage the absurd as a means of questioning and prodding contemporary social practices and beliefs. In this panel, Carla Gannis, Foreground Design Agency, Janks Archive, and Adam Zaretsky discuss how they adopt the absurd to pry apart static ways of thinking about climate change, urban spaces, artificial intelligence, genetics, gender, among others disciplinary categories.

SPEAKERS Aroussiak Gabrielian is a speculative designer working with biological materials, natural systems, and atmospheric phenomena. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts Practice from the School of Cinematic Arts at USC and a dual masters in Architecture and Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Her design work aims to torque our imaginaries to help us re-think our interactions with both human and non-human agents on this planet. Aroussiak is co-founder and Design Director of foreground design agency, a critical design practice based in Los Angeles.

Carla Gannis is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She produces virtual and physical works that are darkly comical in their contemplation of human, earthly and cosmological conditions. Fascinated by digital semiotics and the lineage of hybrid identity, Gannis takes a horror vacui approach to her artistic practice, culling inspiration from networked communication, art and literary history, emerging technologies and speculative fiction. Gannis’s work has appeared in exhibitions, screenings and internet projects across the globe. Recent projects include “Portraits in Landscape,” Midnight Moment, Times Square Arts, NY and “Sunrise/Sunset,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Artport.

Katherine Guinness is a theorist and historian of contemporary art. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Art History in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs and the author of Schizogenesis: The Art of Rosemarie Trockel (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). She is the academic director of the downtown Gallery of Contemporary Art in Colorado Springs and co-founder of the Female Emerging Artist Residency Series (FEARS).

Charlotte Kent is the Assistant Professor of Visual Culture and Program Director for Art History and Visual Studies at Montclair State University. With a background in aesthetics and the history of ideas, as well as deconstruction and narrative theory, she analyzes the power structures surrounding the discourse of art, with current research on how contemporary artists and speculative designers working in the digital sphere adopt the absurd. She has contributed to both academic and general audience resources, including Word and Image, Journal of Visual Culture, Harvard Design Magazine, and Brooklyn Rail and writes a monthly column on the Business of Art for Artist’s Magazine.

Janks Archive is a collective research project which investigates traditions of insult humor in cultures from around the world. This multifaceted study documents this tradition through field recording, and presents the collection through an online archive, public events, exhibitions, publications, and a podcast. Since 2012 they have travelled to 16 cities in 9 countries, talking to residents, and learning about local variations of this type of humor. Janks Archive was founded in 2012 by artists Jerstin Crosby (1979, USA), Ben Kinsley (1982, USA), and Jessica Langley (1981, USA).

Zaretsky is a Wet-Lab Art Practitioner mixing Ecology, Biotechnology, Non-human Relations, Body Performance and Gastronomy. Zaretsky stages lively, hands-on bioart production labs based on topics such as: foreign species invasion (pure/impure), radical food science (edible/inedible), jazz bioinformatics (code/flesh), tissue culture (undead/semi-alive), transgenic design issues (traits/desires), interactive ethology (person/machine/non-human) and physiology (performance/stress). A former researcher at the MIT department of biology, for the past decade Zaretsky has been teaching an experimental bioart class called VivoArts at: San Francisco State University (SFSU), SymbioticA (UWA), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), University of Leiden’s The Arts and Genomic Centre (TAGC) and with the Waag Society. He has also taught DIY-IGM (Do-It-Yourself Inherited Genetic Modification of the Human Genome) at New York University (NYU) and Carnegie Melon University (CMU).