 about love, cyborgs, art and open source and artistic approach on how to stay golden. And please give us, Big Aliou, a warm round of applause. Hello, everybody. I'm super happy you came to see my talk today. I think it's quite a special topic because I'm not a programmer. I'm not talking about much technology. I'm more talking about art, about a really special way to see the world and maybe even celebrating that way as a kind of weapon, as a kind of language. Yeah, first I would like to introduce myself. My name is Leo. I work as artist under the name Lou J.P. Musknuck. I'm an art student at the Art Academy in Munich, Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. In the class for digital and time-based media. I origin from the politically left wing direction which led me also to body modification. I wear an acet chip inside of my hand and I'm highly interested in all that field because I see it as a kind of merging between human and machine very soon. I guess you guys can imagine that and you're super open to the topic. And yeah, let's just jump through that thing. Well, I have a rough outline introduction. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my art, my personal work and my intention. Then I would like to try to talk about the definition of art which is not really easy. I would like to show you some artists. The talk right after me contains some, I'm a big fan of as well. I would like to talk about my personal autism theories. Leider viel noise auf dem Mikrofon, jetzt hat mich ein anderes. Okay. Hallo, oh, viel besser. Weich zu laut. So yeah, I would like to tell you more about my personal autism theories, that's how I call it. I would like to suggest some solutions to the actual social problems that I see as an artist and as a human basically. And then I would like to have a discussion with you if you guys are in. I would like to ask you to interrupt me anytime. You can just raise your hand if you wanna tell me something, if you wanna add any facts because I'm not super fact orientated. I'm more mindful and into consciousness, a little bit spiritual, but in a cyborg way as I say. So you can interrupt me anytime and I also want to point out that the movie I'm gonna show you is maybe nothing for kids. So if there's any kids or people that are lightheaded, I don't want you to faint so please maybe leave the room now if you don't wanna see that movie. Yeah, I think I'm gonna start with the movie that's a spontaneous, you know what I mean, decision, right? So we have some music and you see what I do, maybe that's easier. So I'm gonna stop here, I think you saw what I wanted to use for my introduction. I'm already 34 years old, I'm a carpenter, I'm a CPR like emergency worker and tattoo artist and I realized that a lot of people judge me for this work especially. I use it as my example because I can explain my kind of art best in this piece. The reason I did that was actually to try to perform a time jump in an artistic ideology. So I made a tattoo and three weeks later I decided to remove that tattoo, I put it in formaldehyde and I put it into an art gallery. This actually tells a lot to me. I got judged for that work. It's nothing about any psychiatric issues I have, I didn't enjoy it, actually was a real hard thing to do for me but to me was really important because as an artist you have a lot of pressure, you have to be present. If you guys know Marina Abramovich, she started stuff like that in the 60s already and yeah, I think she was on a similar road like me. If you see that a piece of my body physically is exhibited in a gallery that means the artist is present even if he or she is not present. So the piece of myself, it will not only be present in that moment I exhibited it but it also will be in the future. That means that I perform a time jump with my DNA ideology. I know it's not proper because I think the piece of skin the tattoo will not last very long. My DNA might be killed by the formaldehyde but in theory it shows that I, well part of me which is only a little square piece is already existing in the future. Maybe in some art collection, maybe not, maybe it's gonna land in the trash I don't know but the message is that it's important to understand that even a pixel three times three centimeter of a body of you, of a picture of cells of you represent all of you because if you heard about cell memory, you know that your body is defined out of all the mass of yourselves, right? So we are mainly water and we define ourselves through our minds sometimes. Some people do that even through their bodies but to me it's like a never-ending chain. My skin is renewing every night, every day. I lose a part of myself. Every breath I take is exchange. This process is really important to me. That's also why I show all those fast pictures because we are living in a world that adjusts processes. There's no products anymore that are to be important to me. I don't know if any one of you has read Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway. I really would like to suggest it to you. It's really feminist, that's what people say. I have my own opinion about it but I'm not here to discuss that. I just would like to recommend you to read it and build your own opinion about it as well as the German book Jäger Samlone Kritiker by Brecht. He's kind of like a pop philosophy guy. I like him, he has a good opinion but as always please build up your own opinion and check it out. This one is a fancy effect by Apple, I like it. This one is another work I did. As you can see my main topic is the overwhelming in this today's world. I built this ball out of monitors. It's 25 monitors, 26 Raspberry Pis and zeros as well and it's bound on there with the Shibari ropes. Those are Japanese ropes because I think in times where we have to question AI and humanity, collective intelligence, cloud uploads, you imagine what I mean. I think the most important question is what's going to happen about authority? I mean if I lose my leg and my leg is going to be reproduced, still I'm 75% roughly of myself if I see myself as a bunch of cells but the rest of it, it's going to be metal maybe or some high prosthetic device. How much of me is going to be still me? Since I believe in a cell memory, I think the question is which leg is going to win? I mean if the right one is not real, the left one is real and me and my brain is steering both of them. What if the right leg decides to go another way suddenly because it's maybe metal and not part of me or is my body going to adapt it? For example, I think the chip I have, it's kind of like collaborating in a weird way with my body because I'm weather sensitive. I bet a lot of you know that from themselves. If I have a scar, scar tissue, whatever, and it's going to start to rain, it's going to get itchy, it's going to feel funny, stuff like that. The same happens to me with the tissue around my microchip. Once I get close to magnets, I talk to many people and they told me they believe that could be possible because there's metal inside, right? That's logical. So if I imagine I had a whole leg or maybe even more, a whole torso, whatever, in the very far away future, I wouldn't really know what would happen in questions of authority, how much of myself is going to have control over the rest. And if I lose half of my brain, it's going to reproduce in a computer, what decisions are going to be made different? Yeah, the work over here is exactly discussing that through symbolism. Because you can see those ropes, they use in bondage, you maybe know that from the BDSM. And finish area. And I wanted to show that those videos all around the bar, which are half machines like war machines, war machines in the building, in the making by companies I don't have to mention. It shows a lot of holographic stuff. It shows technology about 70%. And the rest of it is nature. I mean, I put some videos of bees and stuff. I think it's really hard to describe art. You should step inside to understand, but I think the overwhelming of the actual world is a big problem, it's going to be a big problem. And I think you can also see the effects already on the kids. I have a son. And remember when he was five years old, I showed him a bunch of photographs, you know, like physical photographs. And what he did was that move. And the pictures flew away because he didn't understand it's not a tablet. And at that point, I tried, or I started to understand that haptical sensations and all that, it's gonna start to change. It's like the body hair changes because we're not in the blizzard and cold anymore. It's a lot of genetic and evolutionary stuff going on. And I think as an artist, my tool to try to give a sense of what's gonna happen in the future to people is make exhibitions, just talk to them through the language of art. Yeah. So what is art, especially conceptual art? I don't think you don't know what conceptual art is, but I felt the need to show this definition of the internet. It says an art form in which the artist's intent is to convey a concept rather than to create an art object. Sorry, it's just so hard. Well, I think that's a really easy definition. It's made easy, but it's not that easy because if you see this whole camp as a sculpture, as I do a social sculpture, you might be reminded of people like boys, but actually, sculptures like this, you cannot hang over your couch, you cannot sell them for millions, but they exist and they are the really, really important pieces of art. That's how I see it. It's relative, it's all relative. Of course, I would like to sell some crappy shit that somebody can put over the couch and get millions for it. So I can buy new artsy stuff and change the world in a naive way I do as an artist. But yeah, I mean, I think this definition is so broad and so wide that there's a lot of space for other disciplines as well. So I don't know if you guys know Stellark. He's a really cool artist. I'm in touch with him, actually. He used to do a lot of things. He had this ear in his arm. He's getting hooked, he's getting body suspensions. He's a great guy in starting the whole scene and actually, he got a body suspension in the Art Academy of Munich a long time ago. Also, Boyce is a very important person to me because especially not because he's a cool guy and he's super crazy and I admire him, but also he was the one starting off with all that social sculpture thing. I did several social sculptures but it's always hard to sell stuff like that so it's more like people smile at you, like, oh, nice, she's trying to do something. But as I said to me, that's the essential part of art. Of course, as you know, Moon Ribas and Neil Harbison, cool people, they are thinking about the, they founded the Cyborg Foundation. I think the talk is right after this so I'm really looking forward to it. Maybe you should listen at that one, too, if you're here. Neil is the guy with the antenna in his head who can basically hear colors, if I understood it right. I think it's really, really good that those guys start to raise awareness for all the personification thing of cyborgs. I mean, if you have a body part, that is not you but it's practically inside of you or implemented in some way. That still means it's a part of you so it should get rights as well. But that's a very long discussion so I reduce that to my power. Well, here's some nice pictures of those guys on the bottom right, Stellark with one of his super cool fancy devices he did. There's many videos, if you wanna research them, I promise you'll find a lot. Well, now here's my autism theories. As an artist, I like to play in my mind. Conceptual art is like, how do I say that? It's like a big playground for me to go all crazy. I can change my personalities, kind of like David Bowie did. I can play around, I can imagine things, I can talk about Schrödinger's cat, stuff like that. So in my opinion, autism, especially Asperger's and you know that Simon, what's his name? Cohen. Thingy about being autistic to me represents a strong sense of evolution. I researched a lot and it's hard to put that in words but I realized there's a lot of parallels in autistic people and evolution. In my, it's a slow evolution that's pointing into the direction that it's harder for the brain to process some things and at the same time do some other. But since we are in an anthropocene time age, it's gonna happen anyway. So of course if we use computers a lot, of course our kids start to import the haptical stuff but not only that, I even think that all those kids from engineers and IT managers that are autistic or on the spectrum as you would say it, they are basically the future because they are evolving into a world where it's easier to focus on yourself and maybe add social skills if you choose to. So I think the most important thing is to talk about solutions. So the most important point I have here on my little sheet is be interdisciplinary. I realize a lot of people just separate, they isolate the physicist hang out with the physicist, the artist do the art stuff, the hackers do the hack stuff but it's much more important to generate a fusion. In the same name festival you can see that and you can see it here as well, how good it works but I think we should spread that more in the world in general. To me it's really important to sharpen social skills. That's easy to say but it's not that easy actually. We start to move away from people. We don't respect each other that much anymore. That's what I can see on the internet sometimes. We try to anonymize ourselves and I don't think that's a good thing. What is worse actually is to steal data from people of course but if we have the power to change that now we should do that. Well communication is essential, that's true. If you are not able to communicate no matter if your language is art or design or Python, you're not able to do anything right? So you should try to listen to other people get back to the communication skills because they are super essential and then art can be a weapon or a language or switch. So as I said, Boyce is super right and he also said that everybody is an artist so if you code, even if you go to the toilet you can see everything you do as art if you do it in a positive way because every change starts in you. So of course you can always complain and say society sucks and I hate those politicians and we know people that talk like that, right? But change actually always begins in you so if you have this whole consciousness karma, positivity, discussion up, believe it. I think it's true. I mean it was that story that happened to me a couple of days ago where I paid this super nice guy a beer because he forgot his wallet at the tent and yeah, he came back the next day he gave me the money for the beer and he gave me an extra five and he told me, hey, you gave me this even if I might not have found you and stuff like that, here you get the... Sinsen, you get this five extra and then I shared it to the next person and of course this is the karma chain that will never stop. I think a lot of people still didn't understand that and it's not as unimportant as you think. Well, not you in certain, but society. And also one point I really observe in every social area knowledge has to be shared. Jealousy always returns. So even in the left wing where people share usually everywhere, people envy each other but it's idiotic to do that. If you're jealous about something somebody else reached it's gonna give you a bad feeling it's gonna fuck up your own shit in English. I think a lot of people still didn't understand that and it's really important. And yeah, here's Sophia, she's my starting point for any discussion because I think she's like, I don't know kind of like Trump, but in a technology way. So yeah, does anyone want to say something? Okay, so as always, if you have something to contribute we have two microphone angels because of the recording you need to speak into a microphone to be heard. So please line up behind the microphone angels all make yourself visible to them then they may also come to you. All right, there we go. On the stage left. Hey, I liked your talk and I agree with your premise a lot. And I think since we're talking about how we're already kind of cybernetic and how media and communication are all influencing each other and our ideas are living on, is there something really special you find about the way, about specifically body modification? Like what your own personal body has to do with that? If that question makes sense? Like is there some potency in the body? Yeah, well I see that really futuristic because I mean, of course we have wearables and we have smartphones, but to me a smartphone is already a bodily extension because it's a brain prosthetic. My iCloud, it's that shit I cannot store in my brain. Well, or whatever cloud, I don't wanna use it to Apple, but I have all those storages and all that stuff but it represents my memory in a technical way. So yeah, I think it's really important to use the body even, you know, like create some nano stuff that can be inside of you and morph because it's stupid, we're wasting the planet but I think by generating energy out of our own body out of ourselves, we could maybe stop that even if it's too late, maybe we could find ways to connect with machines to use AI to save voltage, to generate solar cells, to improve productivity in a way it's not gonna destroy things basically. Thanks. All right, any other questions or contributions? Otherwise maybe if someone could just volunteer to have a look at the stream, like at the ISC and Twitter to see if anyone else has a question that's not in the room. I don't think we have a signal angel officially but maybe someone can step up and become a signal angel temporarily. Otherwise, do you have anything else you want to say? No, that's all I wanted to say. I'm not really good in talking out, I'm more a connecting person so I'm gonna switch the yellow LED on my cardio on and if you wanna come up and talk to me face to face that's much more interesting I guess because I would like to collect all your opinions and kinda like put it into my art which is not only a narcissistic approach, it's more like collecting a social sculpture out of people like you because here's a lot of intelligent and skilled people and I'm really curious about your opinions about all the future stuff I tried to mention. Thanks for coming. Any anyone else? Okay, please.