Plastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, fordite, artificial grass, antenna trees, Sars-Covid-2, decapitated mountains, drone-fighting eagles, standardised bananas… each of these specimens are both symptomatic of the rapidly transforming “post-natural” era we live in. Often without us even noticing them, these creatures exponentially spread and co-exist with us.
BESTIARIO seeks to capture this precise moment when the biosphere and technosphere merge and mesh into one new hybrid body. What happens when technologies and their unintended consequences become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to define what is “natural” or not? What does it mean to live in a hybrid environment made of organic and synthetic matter? What new specimens are currently populating our planet at the beginning of the 21st century?
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Nicolas Nova is a researcher, consultant, speaker and educator. He is an anthropologist of technology active in the field of interaction design, futures research and digital cultures. His work is focused both on observing and documenting digital and new media practices, as well as being an active actor in the establishment of Design Fiction, an approach to anticipate and speculate on the near future use of digital technologies. Nicolas is both co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, a research agency based in Europe and California, and Associate Professor at the Geneva School of Arts and Design (HEAD – Genève).Nicolas holds a PhD in Social Sciences (University of Geneva), as well as a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Switzerland). He was previously visiting professor at ENSCI – Les Ateliers (Paris) and Politecnico di Milano, visiting researcher at the Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, CA), a researcher at the Media and Design Lab (EPFL, Switzerland) and co-founder/curator of the Lift Conferences, a series of international events about digital culture, design and innovation. He has given talks and exhibited his work on the intersections of design, technology and the near-future in venues such SXSW, EPIC, the AAAS conference, O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, PICNIC, NEXT, the design week in Milano, the Institute for the Future, and the MIT Medialab.DISNOVATION.ORG is a working group based in Paris, initiated by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. At the crossroads between contemporary art, research and hacking, the collective develops situations of disturbance, speculation, and debate, challenging the dominant ideology of technological innovation and stimulating the emergence of alternative narratives. Their research includes artworks, curation and publications.
Their work has been presented at numerous venues and festivals internationally such as Centre Pompidou (Paris), Transmediale (Berlin), the Museum of Art and Design (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), FILE (Sao Paulo), Strelka Institute (Moscow) and the Chaos Computer Congress (Hamburg)... Their work has been featured in Forbes, Vice, Wired, Motherboard, Libération, Die Zeit, Arte TV, Next Nature, Hyperallergic, Le Temps, Neural, Digicult, Gizmodo, Seattle Weekly, torrentfreak.com, and Filmmaker Magazine among others.
