CREDITS AND REFERENCES
1. Photo credit: Tõnis Jürgens
1. Richard McGuire (2014) Here. London: Hamish Hamilton Penguin Group
2. Tim Ingold (2011) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Londond & New York: Routledge; Reissue edition
3. Otto Friedrich Bollnow (2011) Human Space Paperback. Trans. by Christine Shuttleworth. Joseph Kohlmaier (ed.) London: Hyphen Press
4. Rebecca Solnit (2004) River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Penguin Books; Reprint edition
5. Byung-Chul Han (2017) Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. London & New York: Verso
TÕNIS JÜRGENS, Estonia
artistic researcher
is a cinema projectionist, writer, and void enthusiast. He has a background in culture theory, anthropology, and new media. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate at the Estonian Academy of Arts.
In his artistic research Tõnis scrutinises the self-care industry as well as the digital measuring of sleep. In the face of neoliberal accelerationism, and the increasing quantification of everyday life via wearable tracking devices, could sleep – or surrendering as such, a negation of subjectivity – present a form of resistance? By quantifying one’s everyday habits and patterns into data, a selftracker unwittingly submits to a "digital panopticon," as proposed by Byung-Chul Han, thus transforming from "subject" into "project". But habitual self-surveillance and constant proximity to data create an illusory sense of control. Another aspect of this illusion seems to be the prevailing notion that data in itself is immaterial, while in actuality it’s a form of phantom waste, made explicit by ever-expanding data centres and satellite graveyards, the future ruins of our technological drives.
Working mainly with text, video, and spatial installations, Tõnis is interested in fusing his humanities-based background with artistic practices to amalgamate something both textual and tangible that an algorithm couldn't produce. To him, this means creating gaps of understanding – in which meaning would arise inadvertently, much like with half-remembered dreams, or apophenia. He tends to refer to this as poetic theory.