Documentation of Dean Kenning‘s talk ‘Vitalism and the Machine’ at SVA on August 9th 2019, part of the Art, Ecology and Science Fiction series.
In the talk he discusses his kinetic sculpture works, social-body-mind maps, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, Sci-Fi, Horror, the Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin’s book What is Life?, Francois Jacob’s The Logic of Life, Descartes, animal automata, pain, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the death instinct, repetition compulsion, Jacques Lacan, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and melt movies.
