Building upon their past four year engagement with topics concerning estrangement, individuation, collectivity, art and politics, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art 2019 will launch their first New York City program with a focus on States of Consciousness in Cognitive Capitalism. As we have witnessed firsthand in the 2016 U.S. election, the political potential stored in the complex networked analytics of information and their neural analogues are now being fully engaged as apparatuses of control. Economies of attention and dis-attention, click bait, cloud analytics, memes, social media and fake news have now taken center stage in the process of subjectivation and the interiorization of domination. Could the spreading wave of Populism worldwide be the result of forms of embodied and extended cognition linked to contemporary neoliberal apparatuses? The central thesis of this year’s program posits that these are the initial constituents and first signs of an impending crisis that define a later stage of cognitive capitalism characterized by the subsumption of the information and knowledge economies by one that is neural or brain-based.

Technologies like brain-computer interfaces, artificial neural networks, artificial intelligence and cortical implants are just a few such technologies that may make human cognitive labor as we know obsolete. At this year’s symposium they will together attempt to understand what these transformations might mean for human consciousness and its various social, artistic and cultural expressions and permutations.

Program Schedule