We are pleased to announce that Georgina Voss has been selected for the Vilém Flusser Residency Programme for Artistic Research 2022. Her project XXXL explores the erotics, emotions, and political economies of size and scale in technology and defence industries, and was selected by jury members Anita Jóri, Bettina Korintenberg, and Nora O Murchú.

XXXL explores how size, heft, and bulk set our expectations of technology: from infrastructural sublimes to the urge to seamlessly scale, to queer desire and the positions that we perceive the world from. The capability and capacity of technological systems is often seen as desirable and necessary for survival and success. However, as our technological systems scale up, they rely on the increasing extraction of material resources and the entrenchment of power hierarchies, and overlook their impact on affect and emotion. Drawing attention to how relationships of scale and their affect are established and felt, Georgina Voss will investigate how scale can engage and account for new material and cultural assemblages between humans and nonhumans, ecology, and technological infrastructure and systems.

During the residency Voss will develop a new multiscreen installation that brings together artistic understanding and engagement of the “sublime” with promotional material that hypes and speculates about the scaling of technologies. The work will connect to her ongoing research around ideas of scale and will address how protocols, assumptions, and affordances of large-scale technologies shape what can and cannot be seen when accessing the scales they make available. Instead of relying upon conventional understandings of scale to characterise relations between the human, the non-human, and technology, XXXL will explore how size, bulk, and spectacle in technological systems manifests, and open up ways of thinking about scale in terms of connectivity.

As Vilém Flusser writes in Size and greatness: “A crucial point for dialectics as a model for reality is that ‘jump’ by which quantity turns into quality. The point is crucial, because it somehow negates the whole structure of dialectics. It is as if a crack opened in dialectical discourse, through which the surprised observer can see, however vaguely, the 'mystery of creation'. Namely a background to dialectics by which dialectics is dialectically denied: 'Meta-dialectics'. Now this crucial point can be observed in various contexts. In science, in the arts, in revolutionary praxis, in pure speculation. But also in the immediate experience of the world.”

Connecting to contemporary issues of climate collapse and big data, Voss’s work will queer relations to complex systems and develop new scales of social and political assemblages.

The residency programme is a cooperation between the Vilém Flusser Archive at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and transmediale festival.

Georgina Voss is an artist, writer, and educator. Her work explores the presence and politics of large-scale technologies, heavy industry, and complex systems through performance, multi-media installations, writing, and long-term research projects. She has shown work at institutions including TAC Eindhoven, Tate, Auto Italia South East, STUK, Brighton Digital Festival, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Vienna Design Biennale, and London Design Festival; and held residencies with Lighthouse Arts (Brighton), Pier 9 – Autodesk (San Francisco), RAMLAB (Port of Rotterdam), and Somerset House Studios (London). Her essays, journalism, and fiction have been published in venues including The Atlantic, The Guardian, Harvard Design Magazine, and Science and Culture. Georgina is currently Reader in Systems and Deviance at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where she is co-director of Supra Systems Studio.