IN CONVERSATION WITH URS STAHEL

Umbrico will talk about her recent photo-based work which utilizes an archive of roughly 28,000 photographs of used objects for sale that she has collected over the past 10 years from consumer-to-consumer web platforms such as eBay, Alibaba, Craigslist and office liquidation warehouses. As an archive of this moment, the sheer volume of images render visible the monumentality of our Post-Internet consumer habits, and their effects on our environment.

Penelope Umbrico is an American artist. Her installations, video, and digital media works utilize search engines and web platforms as an expansive archive to explore the production and consumption of images. Umbrico’s work has been exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, NY; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Benaki Museum, Athens; Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; Rencontres d’Arles, France among the others. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

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A civil oration, a lucid account of the collective life of the last twenty years, an intense portrait of the problems of the contemporary world reread in the light of psychoanalysis.

"What world are we passing on as a legacy to the new generations?"

In this book, Massimo Recalcati reveals himself as a lucid and original commentator on our collective life of the last twenty years: the transformations of the family, the discomfort of youth, the irreversible decline of paternal authority, the widespread recourse to violence, scientism as a new form of religion, the hypermodern cult of the healthy body and well-being, the medicalisation of life, the narcissistic screen of social media, isolation and the melancholic urge to die in a world dominated by consumption and the celebration of the image, the economic crisis and the precariousness of work, the trauma of the pandemic and its impact on our existences, the horror of war and the patriarchal repression of the ayatollahs against women are just some of the themes tackled, along with the more directly political ones that concern the psychoanalytical portraits of the major protagonists of national and international politics of the last twenty years such as Berlusconi, Grillo, Renzi, Salvini, Mattarella, Draghi, Trump and Putin. In these pages, Recalcati offers the reader a passionate anthropological portrait of our country and the problems of the contemporary world.

Massimo Recalcati, one of the best-known psychoanalysts in Italy, is the Scientific Director of IRPA (Institute for Applied Psychoanalysis Research). In 2003, he founded the Jonas non-profit organization (Center for Clinical Psychoanalysis for New Symptoms). He writes for "la Repubblica" and teaches the Psychopathology of eating behavior at the University of Pavia and Psychoanalysis and Human Sciences at the University of Verona. He has published numerous books, translated into several languages, including: Portraits of Desire (2012), Jacques Lacan. Desiderio, godimento e soggettivazione (2012), Non è più come prima (2014), L'ora di lezione (2014) and Contro il sacrificio (2017). With Feltrinelli he has published: Il complesso di Telemaco (2013), Le mani della madre (2015), Il mistero delle cose (2016), Il segreto del figlio (2017), A libro aperto (2018), Mantieni il bacio. Lezioni brevi sull’amore (2019), La tentazione del muro. Lezioni brevi per un lessico civile (2020) and Pasolini. Il fantasma dell’origine (2022).

In collaboration with Coop Alleanza 3.0

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IN CONVERSATION WITH URS STAHEL

After being one of the featured artists in the exhibition Industry, Now in 2015 and a speaker in the talk 'Geography of Communications and Surveillance', Trevor Paglen returns to MAST to illustrate and explore the hidden mechanisms in the technologies that precede the development of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision, and will recount unknown episodes in AI research.

From a Cold War AI expert employed by the CIA to pioneer facial recognition, to a series heart-wrenching experiments on kittens that gave rise to a strange theory of vision, and the controversial university initiative that sought to categorize all objects but inadvertently spiraled into a cruel nightmare, the stories illustrate the multifaceted impacts of these advancements. Through this journey, we will ask a series of fundamental questions: In an age of AI, what constitutes an image? How do we, and our technological counterparts, interpret it? And crucially, how do these technological shifts influence the fabric of our culture, politics, and everyday life?

Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. He has exhibited at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna, and participated in group exhibitions at the MET, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed to research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created a radioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. In 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. 

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