Frankenstein Reanimated explores the monstrous products of our ‘advanced’ technological moment through the lens of contemporary art practice. Join co-editor, Marc Garrett, for an introduction to the book. This will be followed by a series of provocations from artists Mary Flanagan and Anna Dumitriu, both of whom feature in the book, and an audience Q+A moderated by Ruth Catlow.
“This collection shines a light on artists as critically engaged citizens providing a kaleidoscopic view on our unevenly distributed future. These are the Frankensteins we need!” –
Felix Stalder,
Professor of Digital Culture, Zurich University of the Arts
Order advance copies of the book here.
Mary Shelley’s classic gothic horror and science fiction novel, Frankenstein, has inspired millions since it was published in 1818. Today, we are witness to many different horrors and phantoms of our own creation. Chronic wealth and health inequalities, climate change, democratic collapse, and the spectre of nuclear apocalypse are among the diffuse, monstrous products of our “advanced” technological moment.
Frankenstein Reanimated: Creation & Technology in the 21st Century, edited by Marc Garrett and Yiannis Colakides, retraces and contextualises three international art exhibitions exploring themes within Frankenstein, and speculates on what Mary Shelley would think about the world today. The book offers a lens through which to look at our current situation, and how art practices shape, and are shaped by, contemporary society.
Frankenstein Reanimated presents a dynamic collection of artworks, essays, and conversations, addressing: surveillance, biohacking, viruses, colonialism, digital culture, and more with leading thinkers, artists and technologists, including: Alexia Achilleos, Zach Blas, Frances A. Chiu, Ami Clarke, Régine Debatty, Mary Flanagan, Carla Gannis, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Srecko Horvat, Salvatore Iaconesi, Olga Kopenkina, Marinos Koutsomichalis, Shu Lea Cheang, Gretta Louw, Joana Moll, Laura Netz, Eryk Salvaggio, Devon Schiller, Guido Segni, Gregory Sholette, Karolina Sobecka, Alan Sondheim, Michael Szpakowski, Eugenio Tisselli, Ruben Verwaal, Paul Vanouse.
Frankenstein Reanimated includes full-colour illustrations and is designed by Mark Simmonds. The book follows Furtherfield and Torque Editions previous collaborative publication Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain.
Marc Garrett
Dr Marc Garrett explores postdigital contexts as part of an intersectional enquiry. An artist, curator and researcher he co-founded Furtherfield and has curated over 50 contemporary media arts exhibitions and projects nationally and internationally. He has written many critical and cultural essays, articles, interviews, and contributed to books about art, technology and social change. He is co-editor of Artists Re:thinking Games and Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain.
Mary Flanagan
Mary Flanagan has a research-based practice that investigates and exploits the seams between technology, play, and human experience, exploring how data, computing practices, errors / glitches, and games reflect human psychology and the limitations of knowledge. Flanagan has exhibited internationally at venues such as The Guggenheim, the Whitney, Tate Britain, and cultural centres in Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Cyprus, China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and more.
Anna Dumitriu
Anna Dumitriu is an award-winning, internationally renowned British artist who works with BioArt, sculpture, installation, and digital media to explore our relationship to microbiology, synthetic biology, and emerging technologies. Exhibitions include ZKM, Ars Electronica, Künstlerhaus Wein, BOZAR, Picasso Museum, HeK Basel, MOCA Taipei, LABoral, and the 6th Guangzhou Triennial.
Ruth Catlow
Ruth Catlow is a recovering web utopian. An artist, curator and researcher of emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics, she is co-founding co-director of Furtherfield, and co-editor of Artists Re:thinking the Blockchain (2017) and Radical Friends – Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts.
Frankenstein Reanimated follows a collaboration with exhibition partners LaBoral, Gijon (ES), Furtherfield, London (UK) and NeMe, Limassol (CY) and made possible through support of NeMe and Furtherfield.
American ‘girl gamer’ artist and theorist, Mary Flanagan will be working as Artist in Residence at HTTP, Furtherfield’s Gallery and lab space in Spring 2006. As part of the residency HTTP Gallery has commissioned [giantJoystick] for the Game/Play exhibition, a national touring exhibition, in collaboration with Q-Arts (now Quad), Derby, which explores goal-orientated gaming and playful interaction in media arts practice.
[giantJoystick] offers a humorous reworking of the multi-player game. Visitors are invited to collectively play classic arcade games with a nine foot tall joystick modelled after the Atari 2600 one. The competitive goals of these classic arcade games are already familiar, however the dramatic change in scale of the joystick necessitates both an encounter of the whole body with the artwork and cooperation between a number of players in order to reach them.
Mary Flanagan is an artist, author, educator, and designer. Known for her theories on playculture, activist design, and critical play, Flanagan has achieved international acclaim for her novel interdisciplinary work, her commitment to a theory/practice dialogue, and contributions to social justice design arenas. Her research examines the boundaries between the personal and the public, perception, power, and what technology can teach people about themselves. Using the formal language of the computer program or game to create systems which interrogate seemingly mundane experiences such as writing email, using search engines, playing video games, or saving data to the hard drive, Flanagan reworks these activities to blur the line between the social uses of technology, and what these activities tell us about the technology user themselves. Her artwork ranges from game based systems to computer viruses, embodied interfaces to interactive texts; these works are exhibited internationally at venues including the Laboral Art Center, Whitney, SIGGRAPH, Beall Center, The Banff Centre, The Moving Image Center, Steirischer Herbst, Ars Electronica, Artist’s Space, Guggenheim, Incheon Digital Arts Festival, and and venues in Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia.
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