A series of artist talks around the Homo Sensorium theme, focusing on the blurring borders between the synthetic and organic, the real and the virtual, the human and machine, sense and perception. Artists Madeline Schwartzman, Sophia Bulgakova and Klara Ravat will talk about their practice and projects. How can you influence human perception and hack the human sensory apparatus?

Together with the audience we explore human perception and technology. Our senses determine the way we perceive the world around us, so what does it mean if we hack into these senses? Using technology to alter, hack, broaden, deepen them? How can we use these technologies to re-connect with nature, each-other, our environment and our own memories?

Madeline Schwartzman is a New York City writer, filmmaker and architect whose work explores human narratives and the human sensorium through social art, book writing, curating and experimental video making. Her book See Yourself Sensing (Black Dog Publishing, London, 2011) collects the work of artists, interaction designers, architects and scientists who speculate on the future of the human sensorium through wearables, devices, headgear and installations. Her new book See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded, was recently published by Black Dog Press and explores the future of the human head.

Most of Sophia Bulgakova’s recent works are created with the intention of exploring relationship between light and perception, particularly focusing on the individual abilities and ways of seeing. Creating spaces, situations or conditions for the audience to expand their perception and focus on their own personal unique experience inside the work itself.

Klara Ravat is an olfactory artist an experimental filmmaker based in Berlin. By opposing the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, Ravat absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice. By investigating the concept of landscape in an adventurous and exploratory way, she wants to amplify the wonderment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of alienation and recognition.