About
Memo Akten
Artist, researcher, curious, philomath working with computation as a medium and language to investigate the collisions between nature, science, technology, ethics, ritual, tradition and religion; thinking about the intersections of science and spirituality. Finishing a PhD at Goldsmiths UoL in artificial intelligence / machine learning and expressive human-machine interaction, to deepen collaborative creativity between humans and machines and augment human creative expression.
Medias
Conference
Waves & Gods: on rituals for the future
A personal compendium on life and meaning and purpose in an age of materialism, technological submission and "fairy tales of eternal economic growth"
An attempt to reconcile spirituality with science and technology; spanning magic, ritual, algorithms, empathy, artificality, intelligence, biology, love, life and death.
We see things not as they are, but as we are. And this makes empathy and compassion more difficult than we might realize, in turn making them even more valuable and essential. And in situations where we don’t have direct access to a desired mental or emotional state, we resort to ritual. Because ritual is an algorithm for the body and mind, to transform us mentally and emotionally to otherwise unattainable states. It helps us shift perspective, to see, understand, feel and embody new modes of being. Perhaps now, in times of political and ecological crisis, more urgent than ever.