Video: Carmen Aguilar y Wedge of Hyphen-Labs, Lecture (LOL)
On Monday, November 18, 2019 at 8pm, Plug In ICA presented the lecture Code, Corals, Capitalism and Curls by Carmen Aguilar y Wedge of Hyphen-Labs as part of Labour of Love: On Digital Economies in the Arts, a series of lectures, screenings, and workshops. Code, Corals, Capitalism and Curls looked at an international approach to tackling issues of the planet, marginalization, power structures, omnipresent technologies, and the end of sleep through capitalism.
Labour of Love or LOL took the “public course” as a platform for engagement, a program highlighting the various ways in which the digital is interrogated, explored, celebrated, pushed to its limit, reworked, re-invented by artists, scholars, curators, writers and others. LOL encompassed a full array of events, delving into such topics as coding, circuit bending, VR, AI and AR, gaming, scanning, and 3D printing. Divided into two streams, a lecture and screening series, and workshops, Labour of Love at its most general examined the relationship between the economics of labour and the digital arts as it contends with the conditions of racial capitalism. As a research platform, we aimed to build an understanding of the digital by presenting artists who invent new trajectories through various technologies.
Carmen Aguilar y Wedge is a Mexican-American structural engineer and artist synthesizing design and technology to develop immersive – transmedia experiences. Inspired by the translation of concepts to material expressions visualized through an aesthetic framework of science fiction, futurism, and surrealism, her work expands on the principles of planetary centered design. She is the co-founder and creative director at Hyphen-Labs along with an international studio blending themes of speculative design, digitalism, the environment, and social issues through the context of architecture, robotics, virtual reality, fashion, computation, new media, music, and smart materials.
Hyphen-Labs is an international collective working at the intersection of technology, art, science, and the future. Through their global vision and multi-disciplinary backgrounds they are driven to create engaging ways to explore planetary-centered design. In the process they challenge conventions and stimulate conversations, placing collective needs and experiences at of center of evolving narratives.
All lectures and screenings are free and open to the public.
Associated Programming:
Labour of Love: On Digital Economies in the Arts
This program was made possible through the Digital Strategy Fund: Digital and Intelligence by the Canada Council for the Arts.