Panel Discussion

Living With Machines: A Critical Approach to Technology in Art

2025-07-07 01:08:11

Living With Machines: A Critical Approach to Technology in Art

When

June 21, 2025    
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Bookings

Bookings closed

This series of talks brings together artists Manuel Beltran, Chinar Shah, Mithu Sen, and Anisha Baid, each exploring technology from a distinct vantage point. Ranging from bio-hacking to myth-making to acts of appropriation, their practices reflect diverse ways of living in — and thinking against — a hyper-technological world. The conversation will close with a discussion on the shifting landscape of art and tech today: What does it mean to make art about technology, and what does it take to make art through it?

Computer as Woman – Anisha Baid

This presentation will trace a body of work across performance, sculpture, and video that explores the feminized labor histories embedded in the computer interface. These works look at the computer as not simply a tool, but a surface of work haunted by histories of work, capital and habit. Through these works, I approach technology not as an inevitable outcome, but as a culturally and politically contingent reality—shaped by specific histories, decisions, and omissions – and one that, in turn, continues to shape us and mold us – how we sit, how we talk, and how we work.

Screenshots – Chinar Shah

In this talk, I reflect on my practice as a screenshot photographer through the intertwined histories of documentary photography and family albums. As I navigate my digital life by making images, I am drawn to visual practices that are on the peripheries of networked culture—images created to circulate as information but exceed their intended meaning. By situating screenshot photography within the documentary impulse, I explore how such images complicate established understandings of photographic indexicality, and how they contribute to evolving forms of image-making within the online space.

Hammers in the Server Room – Manuel Beltran

In this talk I will offer some thoughts about the Luddite movement to reflect upon how the current contestations we face in AI and Big Tech aren’t completely new, and how they connect with similar conditions that the Luddites were challenging during the Industrial Revolution. With this in mind, and through the lens of the project Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO), I will present questions about the role of AI in automation, and the exploitation of data as a form of invisible labour. The IoHO stages a series of installations and interventions that propose a different framework through which to reorganise our relationship with contemporary technologies.”

Digital Un-native – Mithu Sen

I navigate the digital world with deliberate discomfort—refusing fluency, embracing glitches, and reclaiming virtual space as a site of resistance, care, and feminist untranslatability.

Bookings

Bookings are closed for this event.

Final Upgrade, Anisha Baid, multimedia installation, 2023


Anisha Baid

Speaker/Moderator

Anisha Baid is an artist and writer from Kolkata, India. Through performances, guided meditations and static objects, her work attempts to poke at the flat-scapes of the computer screen to decode computer labour through the interface – a technological tool that has converted most spaces of work into image space.Her work has been shown at Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Technical Collections, Dresden (2020), GIBCA, Goteborg, Sweden and Landskrona Foto Museum, Sweden amongst others. She has been supported by various grants and awards including from the Frank Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry, Inlaks Foundation, the India Foundation for the Arts, the Goethe Institut, as well as the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and Bluecoat in the UK.

Chinar Shah

Speaker

Chinar Shah is an artist based in Bangalore whose work explores documentary practices through the screen—using it simultaneously as a tool and a site of photographic inquiry. She is the founder of Home Sweet Home Studio, a research and publication platform dedicated to investigating self-organized, artist-led, and curatorial projects across India. Shah is the co-editor of Photography in India: From Archives to Contemporary Practice (originally published by Bloomsbury, UK, 2018; now available through Taylor & Francis) and currently teaches as an Assistant Professor at Vidyashilp University, Bangalore

Manuel Beltrán

Speaker

Manuel Beltrán is an artist and researcher whose work critically examines the socio-political, cultural and economic contestations of technology. Through his practice, he exposes the hidden mechanisms and complexities of technological systems, focusing on the power dynamics that emerge from their entanglement with ideology, capital, and society.

His works primarily take the form of art installations, conceptual frameworks, interventions, networked infrastructure and experimental media. In recent years, his work has centered on the creation of technological artifacts that deconstruct and recontextualize the material and social relationships between humans and machines.

In 2015 he founded the Institute of Human Obsolescence, a project through which he explores the future of labor in the context of advances around artificial intelligence and automation, and the economic and governance systems surrounding the production of data. Alongside Nayantara Ranganathan, in 2019 he co-founded ad.watch, a project exploring methodological, aesthetic and discursive responses to understand the informational turn in propaganda and influence online.

Manuel regularly contributes to discourses about art, technology and media, and his projects have been featured in a wide range of international press. His work has been exhibited internationally in venues like CMU Art Center, esc medien kunst labor, Centro Cultural El Rojas, Khoj International Artists’ Association, TodaysArt International Festival for Digital Art, EAC Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, S.a.L.E. Docks, NRW Forum Wirtschaft und Kultur Museum and BAK Basis voor Actuele Kunst.

His work has been awarded with an Honorary Mention at the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica, and has been nominated for several awards, including The Index Project Award, Icarus Award, Young Masters Award Media Art Festival Leeuwarden, Young Talent Dutch Design Week and Blink Youngblood Award.

Since 2020 Manuel lives and works in Bangalore, where he pursues a PhD on Computational Advertising Transparency and the Public Sphere, while serving as a faculty member at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. 

Mithu Sen

Speaker

Mithu Sen is a conceptual, multidisciplinary artist whose practice dismantles norms of identity, language, and power through radical hospitality, irony, and “perpetual unbecoming.” Working across drawing, installation, performance, video, and digital media, she questions institutional authority, access, and authorship—often embodying a cyberfeminist position that embraces glitch, discomfort, and untranslatability. Sen has exhibited widely, including at the Sharjah Biennale 15 (2023), Sonsbeek (2021), APT9 Brisbane (2018), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2018), Guggenheim New York (2016), and Tate Modern Project Space (2013). In 2023, Sen had a major solo survey at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Melbourne . Recently sen had launched her 25-year monograph, Unmyth in 2025. She is the recipient of the Škoda Prize (2010) and the Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Asian Art in Drawing (2015) and the Performance Artist of the Year award by India Today in 2020, among numerous others.

Other Events