Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

Coping with Uncertainty: Being Resilient

Resilience relates to systems in different fields of operation. It connects to systemic thinking and creates links between “security and urban planning, civil contingency measures, public health, financial institutions, corporate risks, and the environment.” It refers to “the ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a potentially hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner, including through ensuring the preservation, restoration, or improvement of its essential basic structures and functions.”

This paper critically analyses the concept of “resilience” in relation to both the Anthropocene condition and Neoliberalism, with respect to conditions of uncertainty. It relates to prediction practices that are substantial to resilience and discusses artistic speculations created in this frame of reference that present ethical and ideological stands which challenge a ‘non-circumstantial based reality’ derived from resilience practices. Following the diagnostic and therapeutic approaches of Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler towards the Anthropocene, this paper suggests rethinking resilience systems in order to enable the existence of a ‘healthy’ society in a sustainable planet. It will show the role of the resilience discourse towards the “naturalization” of technological systems in the context of the blurring borders between the natural and the artificial, and compare this strategy with the ‘objectivation’ of technological-based performance of ‘smart systems.’

This paper suggests perceiving the artistic act not only as a means of exposing the mechanisms used by the controlling organizations and institutions, and of the politics behind the algorithms that operate them (in the case of technological systems), but as a platform for restoring the moral and ideological discourse regarding these issues.