Max Dovey

Biography

I am an artist exploring computation through live, performative and embodied practices. My practice frequently manifests as participatory, event based, performance led ‘scenarios’ that attempt to foster a critical embodiment towards media & technology. I am guided by feminist techno-science & post-human discourses on being and more than human subjectivity and working with performative and embodied modes of knowledge production.

My research explores the phenomena of ‘live’ and ‘liveness’ in human computer interaction and its relevance in interpreting non-human subjectivity. My interest in liveness is in the imagined ‘sparks of life’ that occur between human subjects and various representations of intelligence and sentience in the machinic other. This enquiry manifests through a performative practice that considers liveness as an integral condition for post-human ecologies and coexistence with more than human subjects.

My work has been shown internationally and at a number of European festivals such as Ars Electronica, Art Rotterdam and Neon Digital Arts Festival. In 2017 I co-led an artist investigation into the decentralized web with a curatorial group called ‘Agorama’. We were selected to be part of Raven Row’s artist in residence program where we hosted workshops, performances and artist residences exploring peer-to-peer technology. I am also the founder of the Secret Post Office, a free festival postal service that allows people to send and receive post within medium sized UK music festivals.

I have worked in collaboration with different media arts organizations such as The Patching Zone (NL) & Furtherfield (UK), and was a researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures (NL) where I produced 3 editions of a symposium on technology, art and finance called ‘MoneyLab’. My research into artists use of blockchain technology was published in a number of open access co-eds including ‘Artists Re-thinking the Blockchain’ (Torque & Furtherfield 2017), Flying Money (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, 2018) and State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art (Institute of Network Cultures, 2019)
I have given talks and workshops on Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Internet of Things, critical data studies and situated practice in UK and Europe. Recent guest workshops include FHNE academy of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland, Bergen School of Architecture and Royal College of Art.

I am currently developing an artist-led investigation into the geological materiality of technology and developing embodied modes of relating to minerals, elements and metals used in electronics and technology used in renewable energy.