"Future Unhuman" is based on artistic research of alternative strategies of interactions with the world that disrupts anthropocentric model of history, the world that demands reformation of subject-object relations. Totality of a crisis in the age of growing anxiety of the subject reaches out to every domain of human life and appears as "hyper-object" — an object that is impossible to seize by human cognition. Caught on the hop by physical and intellectual superiority of the machine, human finds himself in the state of unrest and self-interrogation, bringing up not only the questions of the future of humanity, but of the being on the planetary scale.
More and more obvious failure of the humanist and anti-humanist projects forces theorists to search for alternative languages to describe human and the world. Posthumanism as a project of reinterpretation of subject's place and as a principle of establishing the network of interconnections that are no longer based on binary oppositions, lines up new relations between unhuman, natural, technical, between life and death themselves. New forms of being and strategies of existence that appear in the context of posthumanism demand other conceptualisation by methods, available to contemporary artist, who is sensitive to the shifts inside the system. Necessity of redefinition of Anthropos' place in the space constructed by European Ratio that suppress any possible display of the "other", finds itself in attempt to establish new flat ontology that would not only equalise in rights and capabilities human actors, but would include unhuman.
Post-technological era denies to perceive object as external element to the subject, instead constantly shifting our understanding of embodiment, identity and visuality. Objects possessing independence call for alternative models of co-existence.
Artists taking part in "Future Unhuman" project develop different optics answering to the situation when the subject is decentralised, meanwhile questioning the meaning and consequences of human's loss of his special privilege, his power struggle with artificial intelligence that claims the ascendant position in the unhuman world. Speculative representations of possible scenarios of the future that come from the present time and are determined by specifics of human-machine relations, signify the horizon of the glance, the Apocalypse launched back.
Current philosophy states that artists are closer than anyone to understanding of the essence of emancipated autonomous object: capable to comprehend object's being sidewise, through metaphor, which inner logics is opposed to reduction of the "thing" to a certain sum of qualities, instead perceiving it as inexhaustible field of swarming meanings. Future happens at the moment when we are trying to imagine it, and that future is unhuman.

Khristina Ots / Elena Chernavina

Artists:

art_11 (Russia)
Sid and Jim (United Kingdom)
Dmitry Kavka (Russia)
Sasha Kiim (Russia)
Moreshin Allayari and Daniel Rourke (Iran, United Kingdom)
Evgenia Emets (Russia)
Tale of Tales (Belgium)
Egor Kraft (Russia)
Lyubov Tuinova (Russia)
Piotr Krzymowski (Poland, UK)
Anton Bundanko (Russia)
Konstantin Grebnev (Russia)
Kate Robinson (UK)
Tuomas A. Laitinen (Finland)
Juha van Ingen (Finland)
Declan East (Australia)
Maria Moshchenskaya, Artem Revozian, Maxim Kolosov (Russia)
Ksenia Galkina (Russia)

Public program:

Lecture by Nikita Vasilenko, "Ecology, Technically Expanded"
Improvisational sound performance (bankistan)
Media performance "NADJA Hybrid" (Danita Pushkareva and Dmitry Shubin)
Lecture by Natalia Tikhonova, "The Phenomenon of the Online Gallery"
Lecture by Kristina Ots, "Post-Internet Art Against Anxiety About the Machine Universe"
Artist talk by Juha van Ingen (Finland)
Artist talk by Piotr Krzymowski (Poland, UK)
Artist talk by Anton Bundenko (Moscow)Vorozheya Art Group, Vova Unanyan, Polina Zinziver, 130.pdf