Smar-ting bodies – reflecting on the surface of fear

Evelina Rajca (Fellow at Rijksakademie Amsterdam and PhD candidate at Bauhaus University Weimar Media Study Department, based in Amsterdam The Netherlands)

evelina.rajca@email.de 

http://www.rijksakademie.nl/NL/resident/evelina-rajca

Rajca is interested in both low-tech and high-tech means of production. For example, her research concerning language and its limitation forms the starting point for `Speech sound and the direct meeting of minds´. Rajca experiments with the moment when noise becomes for instance intelligible information and vice versa, and possibilities to distinguish value systems within this shift in perception. She studies ways to influence states of concentration and the sensory adaptation of living, human and non-human beings, including artificial intelligence. She challenges their physical and mental resilience. For this she works with various types of so called Energy Harvesting and smart materials, currently focusing on glass and piezo electric ceramics. By experimenting with different recipes but also by cultivating her own crystals, she creates new instruments in order to elaborate on questions as What does is mean to be a living being in an era of planetary computation or When does a smart technology shift into a smarting ideology?By keeping ideas in mind as i.e.: ”The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else” (Eliezer Yudkowsky – 2006).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:

Evelina Rajca studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She was recently awarded a fellowship at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and at Bauhaus University in Weimar. Her practice is based in between intuitive embodied knowledge and different systems that construct processes of documenting these experiences and translating them into interventions, objects, maps, scores. She is interested in both low-tech and high-tech means of production. For example, her research concerning language and its limitation forms the starting point for Speech sound and the direct meeting of minds. Rajca experiments for instance with the moment when noise becomes intelligible information and vice versa, and possibilities to distinguish value systems within this shift in perception. She studies ways to influence states of concentration and the sensory adaptation of living, human and non-human beings, including artificial intelligence. She challenges their physical and mental resilience. Rajca has shown her work internationally and was recently awarded with a Giga-Hertz Prize for Sound Art by the ZKM, an artistic research grant by Stroom, Mondriaan Funds, Van Bijlevelt Fellowship in The Netherlands and the DAAD research Grant for the USA (Stanford University) and Austria (Art University Linz).