This is a performative lecture on predictive technologies, planetary sensing and media temporalities that will be accompanied by a live electronic sound set by an Oslo-based artist and musician Ørjan Amundsen. In this presentation, I will share my artistic research and practice within the fields of chronopolitics and visual culture. The title of the presentation comes from a video sculpture, which I am going to present at the Henie Onstad Museum, Oslo in April 2023 - "Sensing the Near Real Time" (SNRT). In this work, I explore how remote-sensing technologies impact our understanding of planetary times. The videos are based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR and inSAR) images captured by satellites where radar signals bounce off surfaces and the time it takes to return becomes etation, snow, or sand in near real-time to reveal what is underneath and are therefore highly efficient observation tools. Four screens display the melting glaciers at Spitsbergen; earthquakes in Turkey, Syria and Ethiopia; expanding nuclear capabilities in China; and nuclear terrorism in Ukraine.
Duration is weaponised: circulation of information in the context of a current war in Ukraine, speed and slowness as a method of resistance;
Planetary infrastructures and the role of a photographic image in it: SAR and inSAR satellite data;
Temporal resolutions and temporal scales, sensing instead of seeing: human versa machine, AI;
History is being looped: colonisation of the Future with data from the Past, pattern recognition and predictive technologies (through media archeological perspective).
Bio: Lesia Vasylchenko (b. 1990) is a Kyiv-born artist currently based in Oslo. She works across a range of media including video, photography and installation. In addition to her artistic practice, she is one of the curators at the exhibition space PODIUM in Oslo and the founder of STRUKTURA.Time, which is an interdisciplinary platform for artistic research, media archaeology, literature and philosophy. Vasylchenko has a master's degree from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo, a bachelor's degree in journalism from the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, as well as a master's degree from the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Vasylchenko has been shown among others at MUNCH Museum, Oslo; Louvre Museum, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; The Wrong New Digital Art Biennale. Her work is part of the collection of Museum of Contemporary Art KIASMA / Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki, Finland.