Join us at e-flux on Thursday, March 23 at 7pm for a conversation between philosopher Yuk Hui and art critic Barry Schwabsky.

In light of current discourses on AI and robotics, what do the various experiences of art contribute to the rethinking of technology today?

In his recent book Art and Cosmotechnics (e-flux Books and University of Minnesota Press, 2021), Yuk Hui addresses the challenge of technology to the existence of art and traditional thought. Thinking art and cosmotechnics together is an attempt to ask what various experiences of art might contribute to the rethinking of technology today. Charting a course through Greek tragic thought, cybernetic logic, and the aesthetics of Chinese landscape painting (山水, shanshui—mountain and water painting), and departing from Hegel’s thesis on the end of art and Heidegger’s assertion of the end of philosophy, Art and Cosmotechnics travels an unfamiliar trajectory of thought to arrive at a new relation between art and technology.

Yuk Hui obtained his PhD from Goldsmiths College London and his Habilitation in philosophy from Leuphana University Lüneburg. Hui is author of several monographs that have been translated into a dozen languages, including On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (2016), Recursivity and Contingency (2019), and Art and Cosmotechnics (2021). Hui is the convenor of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology and sits as a juror of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture since 2020. He is currently a professor of philosophy of technology and media at the City University of Hong Kong.

Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation. He also writes regularly for such publications as New Left Review and Artforum. He has taught at Maryland Institute College of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, and Goldsmiths College (University of London), among others. His recent books include two collections of poetry, Feelings of And (Black Square Editions, 2022) and Water from Another Source (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). In 2016, Verso published The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present, a selection of Schwabsky’s art criticism from The Nation.