Dr. Baruch Bruce Edward Gottlieb

Baruch Gottlieb, trained as a filmmaker at Concordia University Montreal, holds a PhD in digital aesthetics from the University of the Arts Berlin. Gottlieb has a transdisciplinary art practice that encompasses film, video, radio, sound art, installation art, art in architecture, performance and digital methods. At the centre of his practice is a preoccupation with the materiality of media and data. Gottlieb also works as a curator at West Den Haag, an institution for contemporary art in The Hague, Netherlands, where he has produced three major touring exhibitions and initiated transdisciplinary summer schools, reading circles and symposia. His project "FEEDback Marshall McLuhan and the Arts", based on the work of technological change theorist Marshall McLuhan, has been presented in six editions in Europe and North America. He has been writing and interpreting the work of communication philosopher Vilém Flusser for over a decade and, together with Steffi Winkler, founded flusser.club, an association dedicated to his work. His latest book is Digital Materialism (Emerald 2018).

Baruch Gottlieb was funded at the UdK Berlin with a thesis on the generation of images on the physical level of chips and sensors. He writes about data aesthetics, data epistemology and digital materiality with a focus on transdisciplinarity. Gottlieb's practice has a strong social component that includes curation, workshops, artistic collaborations and other synthetic forms. He has published widely on technology, media and computation, his most recent book is "Digital Materialism" (Emerald 2018).

Prof Dual

Techno Aesthetics: Understanding and Using Data in a New Way

This is a transdisciplinary project that explores the socio-cultural and political ways in which data is technically produced, processed and presented. By bringing together insights and practices from philosophy, science and the arts, new critical methodologies and dialogic strategies are developed that are capable of understanding, engaging with and confronting rapidly changing and unstable circumstances.

Areas of practice

a. Data aesthetics: understanding how data is presented, represented and reproduced.
Project: The focus of the study is on how the aestheticisation of scientific data can help bring together people from different disciplinary and social backgrounds to understand complex problems together.

Example projects
LSS
Shadowgrowth

b. Network aesthetics: understanding the fluid aesthetics of networked communication, art and information, in which semantic content is subordinated to cybernetic programming.

Example projects
OCTO
Online Culture Wars

c. Data epistemology and data ethics: understanding data capture, how the world becomes data, what happens in the transformation and the social and political implications.

Example project
Gottlieb, B. & Cornet, M. (2021) 'Digital Materialism and Cyber-automation', in Wahal E. ed. Unboxing AI, Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milano, p.33.

d. New Institutionalities: Understanding the crises triggered by digitalisation in institutions traditionally at the core of social reproduction: Museum, art gallery, academy, court, parliament.

Example projects
West Summer School 2022 "Where We Are Right Now "
West Summer School 2021 "Deep Sustainability: dialogical action emerging institutionalities. "
West Summer School 2019 "Spinoza Passionate Action."

My tandem partner at University of Applied Sciences Potsdam is: Prof. Dr. habil. Ulrich Richtmeyer