Institutional Presentation Statement
CCCB Auditorium, June 15th. Session: Practice-based artistic research
Keywords: Alterscience, new political subjects, science criticism, philosophy of contemporary science
The concept of Alterscience presents a new interdisciplinary paradigm that recognizes human beings in their complexity and plurality, as subjects of new knowledge, rather than objects. Highlighting Mind and Spirit, as primordial realities, reintegrating them into the cosmological fabric, seeking to understand what materialist theories cannot elucidate.
The limitations of scientific thought, restricted to rigid paradigms, prevent new proposals from being conceived, devised, or absorbed.
Alterscience designates a confluence of philosophical perspectives, aesthetic, spiritual, moral, and physical; it combines emerging theories, such as ecology, feminism, decolonialism, class struggle, negritude, anti-racism, and anti-speciesism, resituating the science in a process of theoretical, experimental, philosophical, moral and paradigmatic reconstruction, breaking with its ideological territories and unquestionable epistemologies.
It aims at an investigative stance open to a different knowledge construct, with continuous reflection, sociopolitical engagement and consequential pedagogical practices. It institutes a paradigmatic revision, intending to interweave logic, philosophy and spiritual traditions, current and potential modes of intelligence.
Alterscience is proposed as a science that respects life implying the acceptance that living beings, whether human or non-human, are sacred and therefore have inalienable rights. This vision creates an inevitable confrontation with the foundations of the dominant science, historically governed by positivism, determinism and technological rationalism and mechanisms of colonization and control that allowed the subjugation of a multitude of beings, the manipulation of animals, plants, and the planet itself.
This behavioral logic of exploitation of life, implicitly validated by science, is insidiously extended to the treatment of human beings, tacitly considered as machines, devoid of sacredness, without rights to life, dignity, respect, and therefore available to be controlled, experimented, exploited and exhausted. The proposal stimulates a broad reflection on Sciences and Alterciences, for identify new topics of knowledge, alternative objectives, modalities or methods of knowing; to unveil other objects and dimensions; to experiment with different languages, agencies, instruments, modalities; to conceive multi- and inter- visualities and dimensionalities; to examine new forms for knowledge legitimation, to implement non-proprietary processes of information dissemination, application and transformation; to absorb additional subjects of knowledge and to reach and augment the beneficiaries of science. https://www.facebook.com/Atarisvort
- Artur Matuck is teacher at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, since 1984. He has a been a scholar, writer, artist, mediasopher, lecturing worldwide on Literary Theory, Media History, Digital Writing and Science Studies. He is an artivist for animal rights and liberation, for society’s unrestricted access to information, software, technology and medications. The Alterscience, a present research, project purports a Science based on compassion and planetary consciousness.
- Daniela Ernst is Biologist, Master in Science Teaching, Postgraduate in Biotechnology. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Postgraduate Program in Humanities, Rights and Other Legitimacies/PPGHDL/Diversitas, University of São Paulo, Brazil.
- Adriana Bobilho is Psychologist, Art therapist, and women’s group facilitator. Member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Studies: Alterscience and Intercomunication – Diversitas, University of São Paulo, Brazil.
- Antônio Rodrigues is Visual Artist and Researcher, PhD candidate at the Interunits Program in Aesthetics and Art History – PGEHA – University of São Paulo, Brazil.