Neurolivestock certainly enjoy an existence more comfortable than serfs or millworkers, but they do not easily escape their destiny as the self-regulating raw material of a market as predictable and as homogeneous as a perfect gas, a matter counted in atoms of distress, stripped of all powers of negotiation, renting out their mental space, brain by brain.

– Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs

You are invited to join us next Tuesday in London for a roundtable discussion convened by Urbanomic:

Tuesday 3 March 2015, 7-8.30 pm

at Thomas Dane Gallery,

3 Duke Street St. James's,

London SW1Y 6BN

Participants:

Robin Mackay, Director of Urbanomic, translator of To Live and Think Like Pigs

Jay Owens, researcher in social media at global strategic insight agency FACE

Benedict Singleton, design strategist

Adam Kleinman, writer and curator

Matthew Fuller, Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London

— in the context of the exhibition of JOHN GERRARD: FARM

In early 2014, following his denial of access by Google Inc., artist John Gerrard hired a helicopter and produced a detailed photographic survey of one the key physical sites of the internet – a Google data farm in Oklahoma. This survey was the starting point of his new work entitled Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma), 2015.

The work features a simulated 'twin' of the squat building flanked by diesel generators and powerful cooling towers.

This new work is currently showing at Thomas Dane Gallery, London.

What dislocations of the subject, what disruptions of the process of individuation are administered by a global system of 'self-organization' piloted from blank, inaccessible facilities such as the one modelled in Farm? What new species of virtual subject is being reared in massive data centres whose processes operate well below the threshold of human perception?

Setting out from Gilles Châtelet's prescient dystopian tract To Live and Think Like Pigs, this discussion seeks to understand the relation between cognitive and spatial dislocation in the contemporary digital-cognitive control system,and the algorithmic channelling of desire that binds us to the invisible processing centres of a 'future neurocracy'; and to ask, in the wake of 'post-internet art': What does the Internet look like?

NB: Space is limited. Please email saskia[at]thomasdane.com to register for the event.