In Terms of Media…

With its 2024 symposium, the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures continues its ongoing examination of the logics of digital cultures. The symposium takes on current debates and integrates them with(in) other fields of research, cultural practices, and the arts.

Our present is heavily influenced by machine learning processes, technological infrastructures, newly emerging data worlds as well as their material paradigms. In turn, this urges us to rethink the agency we are afforded as we navigate these techno-social systems and ecologies.

What are the conditions, potentials, and limits defining media environments and digital cultures today? What are the current conditions that technological agents produce and are produced by? And how do they relate to concepts such as data materialism, techno aesthetics and poetics, infrastructures of conflict, and planetary interfaces?
With a commitment to ongoing discourse, social and environmental matters, our discussions will explore how digital cultures are evolving beyond the limitations of current data-centric paradigms.

In line with the ‘Terms of Media’-project organised by Leuphana University & Brown University, the symposium aims to re-examine fundamental questions in media theory and history while integrating them in the interdisciplinary research conducted at the Weibel Institute.

Speakers: Asia Bazdyrieva, DeForrest Brown Jr, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Steve Goodman/Kode9, Orit Halpern, Thomas Lamarre, Lukás Likavčan, Margarida Mendes, Elisa Giardina Papa, Luciana Parisi, Alex Quicho, Patricia Reed. Moderators: Clemens Apprich, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Sophie Publig, Lisa Stuckey

Symposium Program:
21–22 Nov, 15:00–19:00

Wednesday
18:00 Welcome Speech w/ Clemens Apprich
19:00—19:30 Ghost in the Cog w/ Kenneth Constance Loe/Moritz Nahold (Subletvis)
20:00—21:00 EXTC w/ Joanna Coleman/Martina Moro

Thursday
15:00—16:30 Techno-Poetics
15:00—15:15 Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
15:15—15:30 DeForrest Brown Jr.
15:30—15:45 Margarida Mendes
15:45—16:30 Q&A moderated by Nelly Y. Pinkrah
17:00—18:30 Data Materialism
17:00—17:15 Orit Halpern
17:15—17:30 Elisa Giardina Papa
17:30—17:45 Luciana Parisi
17:45—18:30 Q&A moderated by Clemens Apprich
19:30—20:30 Performance w/ Speaker Music

Friday
15:00—16:30 Planetary Interfaces
15:00—15:15 Thomas Lamarre
15:15—15:30 Patricia Reed
15:30—15:45 Lukáš Likavčan
15:45—16:30 Q&A moderated by Sophie Publig
17:00—18:30 Atmospheres of Conflict
17:00—17:15 Alex Quicho
17:15—17:30 Steve Goodman
17:30—17:45 Asia Bazdyrieva
17:45—18:30 Q&A moderated by Lisa Stuckey