bio
aaron inker is a visual artist, educator and cultural practitioner. He works with diverse media including installation, audio/video and socially engaged art, to develop practices and experiences related to creative ecologies and to the relationships between human and ‘other’, at the intersection of art, science and technology.
His work as an educator has led his research towards a relational approach, focused on the connection between the practice and the community, environment and context in which it takes place. On this basis he co-founded and facilitates Spazio Hydro, an independent cultural centre in Biella working on the design, development and experimentation of new forms of cultural experience. For Hydro he co-curates Fluviale, a public programme on the human/non-human relationship and the nature-culture dialectic.
His visual research extends to his work as a vj, curating the visual impact of clubs, events and international festivals and performing alongside renowned artists.
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novara and in the Visual Arts Design and Production course at IUAV University of Venice.
statement
Starting from my interest in science and science fiction, my research has developed around theory-fiction, understood as the capacity of artistic and cultural products (and processes) to fuse or mix theoretical elements [philosophy, academic texts, scientific data, …] and narrative/aesthetic elements [speculative fiction, science fiction, worldbuilding, …].
Theory-fiction, similarly to artistic practice, is a tool that attempts to narrate the complexity of the contemporary world, to reconnect people to the time and space they are living in, counteracting the distortions of a system of thinking based on the extraction of resources and data and the post-truth drift of storytelling. A model — an ontology — that leads to a fragmented and individualistic society where neither the natural sciences nor the humanities are able to explain reality, to connect with people and include them in a shared space.
The potential of art, in this theory-fiction context, is to suspend ontology: to liberate the possibility of building new worlds and new thoughts, to liberate even external, alien points of view, to define a new relationship between human and non-human. To negotiate a better balance between the various agents that inhabit, modify and define an environment.
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we do, and that we could just as easily do differently.”— David Graeber