Qatipana

Individuation processes on the relationship between Art, Machine and Natural Systems

About project
How does mono-technology and computerization of cultural techniques influence the nature of knowledge and the affection of being with others (people, things, nature)?

The work revolves around the concepts and processes of Becoming and Individuation through a hybrid ecosystem whose architecture is called Qatipana (Quechua word that means flow, sequence, transmission), is an hybrid ecosystem of information flow which, even though not the kind of dispositive systems theory was designed to read, offers some valuable empirical insights to test some key aspects of Simondon’s information processing systems; this research aims to observe a algorithmic cycle performed by the cognitive system of an Artificial Intelligence agent observing a living ecosystem.

Relational Creativity

This project considers cybernetization processes as a generalized ecology concerned with life and the production, exchange and consumption of meaning. We therefore believes that cybernetization can lay the foundation for an ecological explanation that examines how signs are communicated and how meaning is produced and experienced within ecological systems. This third-order cybernetics extends beyond the original reach of living organisms and their environments to ecologies of ideas, power, institutions, media, etc. In this sense, cybernetization would be radically environmental, since it postulates the primacy of relationships over fixed terms, binary oppositions, and linear logics.

Hybrid Ecology

We use the term hybrid ecologies to critically evaluate the historical and political dimensions of a "universality" of technology in the Latin American context and suggests that a homeotechnological conversion of the human noosphere and technosphere around the Earth, and thus of the institution of a co-operative and co-productive relation of both anthropospheres with the biosphere, might eventually lead to the explication or unconcealing – here meant in the quasi-Heideggerian sense of the term – of a “hybrid-Earth” that is capable of much more than we can now imagine from our still allotechnologically programmed perspective, i.e., a homeotechnologized Earth whose capacities might very well be multiplied to an unimaginable extent (Pieter Lemmens and Yuk Hui 2017).

Enactive autonomy in computational systems

In the artificial agent Qatipana, phenomenological observation at the bottom-up level is a fundamental relational coordination for the construction of the Umwelt of each organism at a given moment, as well as the tunnel formed by the sum of its successive vital moments, what Uexküll calls tunnel of life, is fixed and is not subject to change. Understood as an alternative to this ontogenetic explanation, the concept of the symbiotic body in Qatipana can be seen as the transduction of the organism and the machinic environment, this symbiosis provides a better original (technical) complementary model for the precise reason that it invests in the creativity of the incarnation.

"Machinic creativity not as the attribute of a technical individual, but as an operation of regulation of the technical assemblage", Gilbert Simondon.

Algorithmic Policies

We argue that while digital and network technologies initially seemed to offer new hope for the reorganization of work - exemplified by the free software movement - the subsequent rise of smartphones and social media appears to have turned these hopes into lost illusions: network effects and algorithmic platforms are hegemonic. Unless something completely unlikely happens, this dystopian trend seems set to continue.

Algorithmic Individuation

Qatipana shows as a form of creative and technological individuation (Simondon, 1958), in turn, that the concept of nature must be integrated together with the process of a dynamic world by which everything arises: technology, living beings, individuals, groups and thoughts.

Art and Cosmotechnics

Therefore, instead of assuming that technical and living evolution face each other extrinsically, Qatipana bets everything on the intrinsic correlation of the that the concept of technology must be integrated together with the concepts of Cosmopolitics and Cosmotechnics (Hui, On Cosmotechnics. 2017) as a reconciliation between the universal and the particular; between nature, politics and technique.

General Organology

Qatipana is a work of art that intersects with the biological organic and the mechanical organic, and thus falls into this new classification of “hybrid ecology”. This notion resonates with Stiegler's understanding that humans and machines are interdependent organs of a larger evolutionary process, the overall change of which has resulted in the separation of human evolution from biological bias and an attachment to the technical and furthermore, that the technique itself has undergone a process of evolution. The work tries to recreate and integrate the spaces of relations between technological time and living time as a current ecological constitution.

Thinking the living being in the Technical Milieu and as a medium
In this work, we would like to qualify the technological by placing its ecological conception —or as the transductive conception— of the "technological body" in the context of recent theoretical debates on life and its correlation with the concept of nature. Doing so, will demonstrate that the understanding of the relationship between technical media reveals that the incarnation "of the living" is more sophisticated than we previously realized and consequently that it is deeply rooted in an integral theory of the living. This work is designed to be projected on 3 screens where the 3 mentioned ecological conditions are observed (The Organic, The Organic/Inorganic and The Culturally Calculable).
Team Members
Sponsoring Institutions

Institutions and people collaborating
with this project

Contact Us

Leave your message, if you have any questions or you want to collaborate in this project, please write us...

Address: Santiago de Chile, Chile

Phone: +56 9-9425-1191

Email: qatipana@gmail.com