Victor Artiga
Rodriguez

Bio/CV
News
Contact
Selected Works

- Thoughts on Fluid Assemblages
- Aguacero/Downpour
- Paradoxical Myth
- Bodies of Resonance
- Between Crevices


- Comasagua Stories of Resilience
- Cuerpos Masas
- Landscapes of Otherness
- Beloved Spaces for a Revolution
- Link to sound pieces (via soundcloud)


Teaching/Collective Practice
View Teaching Seminars
Performance Collective
 Tremenda Corporea
Curatorial Experience
Circa 106 / in:halt

As part of my intention to share my knowledge and experience with somatic performance practices with students, the seminars usually start with short body activation exercises. They resemble the format of a workshop, emphasizing the possibilities of experimental ways of sharing, including group exercises, debates, or collective reading scenarios as well as on-site visits to places that hold particular relevance to the topics of the seminar.  

Current Seminar:
"Nature" and (digital) Technology. Infrastructures of Matter. 
(for example: Water, Gold, Plastic), teaching in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick
A theorethical reflection on the Infrastructures - the associated chemical processes, quantities, material qualities, and the methods of extraction and production - determine the relationship between the so-called nature and technology.   This seminar proposes a critical perspective on the processes of entanglement between matter, nature, and (digital) technology. In this context, infrastructures are defined as material, phenomena and physical networks, immaterial relations and symbolic actions. The entanglement of social actors, institutions, platforms, and as well economic, technological, and ecological systems constitute the infrastructures and require critical perspectives.

Image by: Daniel Niehaus

Too much to Measure? Data Accumulation in Techno-capitalism - Summer 2024

Short description:
The rapidly expanding availability and proliferation of cheap measurement devices has opened up the possibility to everyone of collecting data from our natural environment. Together with the convenient access to existing and expanding vast open source databases containing all kinds of data archives, ranging from precise climate measurements, variations in river flows, virus spread statistics etc, has led to data itself becoming a concrete working material for artists from different fields. How has this availability of information influenced our perception and understanding of the physical world?  What have been different approaches from artists to exploring and transforming these materials in ways that go past or push the boundaries of representation? We will also look at cases where data collection and measurements have been used by climate activists and collectives as tools to fight cases against the contamination of water sources.
 




Collectivity in Action: Practices T o g e t h e r in (Digital) Media, Art, Design and Theory -  Winter 2023-24
teaching in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick

Short description:
Everywhere, people are creating and making things together. That’s how the internet was built. That is what shapes the trans- and para-disciplinary production of knowledge, but it also forms the backbone of social movements, too.

Collectivity is not the same as collaboration, cooperation, collectivism, and commons or teamwork. All include methods of sharing, distribution techniques, and learning to experiment—often with and through technical objects. This kind of collectivity and its techniques are responsive to changing conditions. Collectives are constantly in the making and accommodate disorientation. But what are the specifics of collectivity? This will be discussed, read, experimented with, and shared in the seminar. 

The Contaminated Bodies under Techno-capitalism, Double-edge Promises of “Development - Summer 2023
Short description:
This seminar takes the format of an artistic research on the contradictions, but also the possibilities of technology in the scheme of our necessary societal changes.  We will read and discuss together different definitions of the term “development”, by questioning the modernist imperative of continual growth and capital accumulation. The reading list for the seminar include: “The Open Veins of Latin America” - Eduardo Galeano, “Pluriverse: a post-development dictionary” - Ashish Kothari et.al, “Zwischen Körpern / Among Bodies” - kleine Humboldt Galerie, The Promise of Total Automation - Anne Faucheret, David Jourdans (Eds.), Posthuman Ecologies - Rosi Braidotti, among others. Furthermore, we will focus extensively on reflecting on the historical impact that the extractivist mindset has had on water and resources of communities on a planetary scale





Politics of (Digital) Body Relations - Winter 2022-2023
teaching in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick

With the advent of modernism by the latest, Western culture’s impulse to optimize everything had expanded to include the body, as can be found in Foucault’s writings on “biopower” and “biopolitics.” In the fields of science and economy, as well as in the areas of health or sports, numbers have also played a decisive role for a long time (the “data driven life”). Today’s inflationary self-tracking—meaning, the collection, collation, and analysis of data on all conceivable characteristics and functions of the body, or the permanent recording of data done by smart wearables or smart clothing—enables practices that involve comprehensively measuring the body in the areas of health and sports. Add to this all of the processes of so-called biohacking, or “do it yourself biology.” These processes have also been included in artistic projects. Control and self-determination, it appears, are delegated to technological devices. 

What kinds of critical possibilities for dealing with these things also undermine our traditional concept of the body (body/mind)? How can the body’s own experiences and memories be used to thwart or transform the Westernized mania for optimization?

Victor Artiga Rodriguez
©2025