To be an artist in a transformed world
Online discussion - FICEP Foreign Cultures Week
October 01st, 2021 15:00 - 16:30
As part of the 20th edition of the FICEP’s Foreign Cultures Week, the Canadian Cultural Centre invites you to attend an online discussion on Friday, October 1st at 3pm on the theme: “To be an artist in a transformed world”.
Taking as a starting point the play To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) from the essay by Irish writer Mark O’Connell (Granta), this online discussion will address the question of immortality and the accelerated transformation of the world by technology.
Canadian directors and choreographers Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zigg, founders of Toronto’s Opera Atelier, will participate in the roundtable alongside Polish artist Agnieszka Kurant and Irish writer Mark O’Connell.
The conference will be held in English and moderated by journalist Sophie Gorman.
Artist speakers:
(Canada) Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zigg are the founders of Opera Atelier, a Toronto-based opera and ballet company. Their productions, drawn from the baroque and classical repertoire, are always accompanied by the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra – one of the finest period instrument ensembles in the world.
(Poland) Agnieszka Kurant is currently presenting an exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź, (Muzeum Sztuki), where she addresses the role of artificial intelligence and collective intelligence in artistic processes, through the use of GPT3 and GPT2 algorithms. She lives and works in New York.
(Ireland) Mark O’Connell is an Irish author and journalist. His first book, To Be A Machine, was published in 2017, followed by Notes From an Apocalypse in 2020. He writes regularly for the press (The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian…) and studies in particular the phenomenon of transhumanism: this quest for immortality through technology.