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POEX 65 was a transdisciplinary experiment and event which took place in Copenhagen December 10-20, 1965. Short for ’POetry EXperiment’, POEX 65 was an exhibition event curated and created by Danish artist Knud Hvidberg (1948-91). It aimed at breaking the boundaries of artgenres, the false devision of professional and amateur, as well as the autonomy of the ‘work of art’ through the active use of technological and mediated platforms such as Flexowriters, Punch Paper Poetry, and Electronic Visual Music. As such, it was a very important event in Scandinavian media art history with more than 80 participants from 5 countries – from as different field as Conceptual Art, Electronic Music, Modern Jazz Poetry, Fluxus, Performance Art, Modern Dance, Concrete Poetry, Poesie Sonore etc... Nevertheless, POEX 65 somehow was forgotten – and almost erased from the academic memory and public archives. In 1990s POEX 65 was only hesitantly recognized as one of the most ambitious and original events of the 1960s in Denmark – but in short passages and footnotes. POEX 65 remained an enigma. The event itself has reached an almost total black-out 45 years later. The works themselves are not there anymore – or are but fragments. So why bother?This paper is about why it is extremely important to bother and care about the performative & collaborative media art practices like POEX 65. It is about the methodological and theoretical considerations put into the ongoing task conducted in the research project ‘The Unheard Avantgardes’ which is part of the LARM Infrastructure (focusing on sound in archives in Denmark and Northern Europa). But first and foremost, my paper will be about POEX 65 – the artists and their ideas, the art works, the contexts and the events; And the Paradigms of Post-Performative Media Art Practices at play in POEX 65.

In a state of ontological crisis, all boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, and the organic and inorganic have been severely blurred. These are times of curious contrivances, novel natures, inescapable automation, and posthuman performances – where human and nonhuman find themselves being entwined, meshed and muddled into new unwitting entanglements. But from biased machine-learning to surveillance capitalism and digital colonisation – what power-structures are implicitly and covertly being embedded into these technologies? In a demand for more transparency, multiple movements are making a turn toward democratising knowledge and technology. They are exploring the potentials of open data, software, hardware and wetware to battle concealed hierarchies and partisan paradigms – eliciting a practice of counter-coding in a proliferating politics of machines. Within the Politics of the Machines conference series – following Copenhagen (2018) and Beirut (2019), the third POM conference took place as a hybrid conference on the 14-17 of September 2021, hosted by the chair for Open Science at the Technische Universität Berlin / Einstein Center Digital Future and the Berlin University of the Arts / Weizenbaum Institute. The goal of this edition of POM was to debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science – what roles do academia, researchers, scientists, artists and designers have to take on in times of crisis, how must we re/position ourselves? What chances or challenges might the democratisation of technology and knowledge elicit, and what potential do practices such as critical making, community science, trans/feminist hacking or citizen forensics hold to bend the hierarchies of power – how can we work with active matter and technical turmoil to re/act? ‘POM Berlin – Rogue Research’ aimed to probe new methodological approaches from art, design and civic activism within the framework of academia in order to surface an inter- and transdisciplinary terrain that attempts to exceed the boundaries of theory and practice, academia and activism, and science and civil society. The POM Berlin conference emerged as a collaboration between the Technische Universität Berlin, the Berlin University of the Arts, Aalborg University, Aalto University, and the International University of Beirut. The conference took place over four days, comprising a series of tracks, interventions and a student exhibition. The conference brought together track chairs, speakers and interventions from 31 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, North and South America, representing critical perspectives on technology – decolonial, feminist and sustainable approaches, across disciplines, knowledge cultures and spaces. Taking place in times of a pandemic and geopolitical crisis, the editors, conference committee and organisational team would like to sincerely thank all of the track chairs, authors, intervening artists and designers, and students involved in this endeavour, for making both the conference and the resulting proceedings possible. It is the profound engagement of all parties, especially the ever-growing POM community, that has allowed this publication to arise.

Life in the era of biotechnology opens up opportunities but also poses challenges related to our values and questions regarding the way we want to see coexistence on our planet, which is inhabited by many species. The parasite is our case study and an interesting concept that we inherit from biology but which is also addressed in humanism and philosophy. As humans, we commonly understand the concept of a parasite as a negative one that suggests someone or something which benefits at our expense. Howev-er, French philosopher Michel Serres had a different view of the parasite. According to him, the parasite is based on relationships between different entities, and there is often noise in these relationships. Serres refers to biologist Henri Atlan, who has argued that said noise forces the system to reorganize itself in a way that incorporates the noise into the complex system. The idea of noise as an integrated part of the system is quite far from today’s thought processes with the develop-ment of bio/ technology that typically aims to be noiseless and error-free and have aesthetically attractive results. Therefore, although parasites are often associated with terms such as inhospitable, undesirable, and disgusting and are seen to be located outside of art and technology, in this paper, we argue that the concept of something parasitical is tightly inter-twined with our contemporary biotechnical lives. The article relates Serres’ parasitic thinking to an artistic mediation of the biological parasite: the tick.

Life in the era of biotechnology opens up opportunities but also poses challenges related to our values ​​and questions regarding the way we want to see coexistence on our planet, which is inhabited by many species. The parasite is our case study and an interesting concept that we inherit from biology but which is also addressed in humanism and philosophy. As humans, we commonly understand the concept of a parasite as a negative one that suggests someone or something which benefits at our expense. However, French philosopher Michel Serres had a different view of the parasite. According to him, the parasite is based on relationships between different entities, and there is often noise in these relationships. Serres refers to biologist Henri Atlan, who has argued that said noise forces the system to reorganize itself in a way that incorporates the noise into the complex system. The idea of ​​noise as an integrated part of the system is quite far from today’s thought processes with the development of bio/technology that typically aims to be noiseless and error-free and have aesthetically attractive results. Therefore, although parasites are often associated with terms such as inhospitable, undesirable, and disgusting and are seen to be located outside of art and technology, in this paper, we argue that the concept of something parasitical is tightly intertwined with our contemporary biotechnical lives. The article relates Serres’ parasitic thinking to an artistic mediation of the biological parasite: the tick.

What would it take for the museum to become a medium of the posthuman crisis? Is it possible to see the focus of the museum’s shift towards an innovative mode of possible better futures for the world in the face of accelerating and enframing technological mediation (Heidegger, Zizek, Kittler, Stiegler)? Or, alternatively, would it be possible to see the emergence of a new kind of museum whose invention was based on a different view of technology? One in which human agency and embodiment (Hansen, Serres) are brought into play in new and alternative ways? Based on the most recent writings by the French philosopher Michel Serres, I suggest that it is possible to see alternative prospects for the museum, wherein it operates beyond what can be revealed by the technological media, leading towards a method of meta-curating. Here, I argue, the inventive and moral obligations of the posthuman crisis that is threatening our planet may generate alternative histories of biotechnological ideas and experience.