event

Digital Matters
December 1 – 3, 2021 at Siegen University and online

Organizers: Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee & Siegen University), Valérie Schafer (University of Luxembourg), Axel Volmar (Siegen University) & Sebastian Giessmann (Siegen University). This event is part of projects A01 and A02 of the SFB 1187: Media of Cooperation.

Theme: In popular discussion digitality is increasingly equated with networked immateriality: disembodied algorithms float rhetorically in an ethereal cloud of big data. Think, for example, of the “digital edition” of the PlayStation 5 console, so called because it has no optical drive to read games, which must instead be downloaded. The implication is that the regular PS5 console is somehow not digital because its storage medium is visible to the unaided human eye. This presupposition of digital immateriality is not just a misconception to be corrected, but a productive site for interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry into media and data practices. In Digital Matters, historians, media theorists and information scholars come together for three days to examine the socio-material constituents of digital systems and artifacts. How and why did people come to deny the materiality of the digital? What can we learn by recovering it? What if we rethink digital materialities as ongoing cooperative accomplishments?

Venue: This is a hybrid event. Most speakers will be online, but several speakers and three of the organizers will be sitting together in Siegen during the conference. To allow for participation from North America each day’s sessions start after lunch.

Algorithmic Controversies. Dialogues towards an unveiling of architectural agency

PhD Symposium
Architectural Association School of Architecture
Friday, 26 November 2021

09:30 – Introduction
Pier Vittorio Aureli
Aylin Tarlan

Biopolitic of data
Introduction by Claudia Nitschze
10:00 - Georg Vrachliotis
10:40 - George Jepson
11:20 - Aylin Tarlan
Round Table

13:00 - Lunch break

Technologies of production
Introduction by George Jepson
14:00 - Mollie Claypool & Gilles Retsin
14:50 - Alessandro Bava
Round Table

16:00 - Coffee break

Digital infrastructures
Introduction by Mathilde Redouté
16:15 - Felix Stalder
17:20 - Evgeny Morozov
Round Table

Governmentality, an expression originally formulated by the 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault, combines the terms ‘government” and “rationality”. Government in this sense refers to an activity meant to shape, guide, or affect the conduct of people. In architecture, its early practical application can already be found in Ildefons Cerdà’s 1860 proposal for the redevelopment of Barcelona, a work grounded in an in-depth socio-statistical study transforming population in numbers. Here the possibility emerges to define a given social reality as a calculable, measurable object, thus transforming the paradigm of town-planning into a series of mathematical actions, no longer based on ‘natural’ life but on numbers, measurements, and calculated predictions.

ELEPHANT JUICE, SIMONE C NIQUILLE, 2020

Arbeitskultur im Wandel. Eine Online-Vortragsreihe

Die Arbeitswelt unterliegt einem stetigen Wandel. Wo früher mit Schreibmaschinen gearbeitet wurde, stehen nun Computer. Wo früher Berechnungen von Hand vorgenommen wurden, erledigt dies heute Software. Doch nicht nur Technik und Methoden haben sich im Laufe der Jahrzehnte geändert, sondern auch das Miteinander in Arbeitskontexten und unsere Haltung zur Arbeit an sich.

Die VHS Hannover wagt einen Blick in die Zukunft und beschäftigt sich daher im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe „Arbeitskultur im Wandel“ mit den Themen:

The Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3), the UOC's research institute specializing in the study of the internet and the effects of interactions between digital technologies and human activity, is celebrating 20 years since its founding.

The event to mark this will coincide with the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Manuel Castells' The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Castells, Professor of Sociology at the UOC and the current Spanish Minister for Universities, was formerly director of the IN3 and will take part in the event.

The key part of the event will be a talk by Castells himself: “The Network Society in the age of pandemics”.

There will then be a round table discussion moderated by philosopher and member of the UOC's Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Marina Garcés. The members of the panel will analyse Castells' work and the implications for today. The panel will include Diana Roig Sanz, ERC grant holder and ICREA Research Professor at the IN3; John Thompson, Professor of Sociology and Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge; Fernando Calderón, Professor at Argentina's Universidad Nacional San Martín (UNSAM) and Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO); Ida Susser, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center; Felix Stalder, Professor of Digital Culture at Zurich University of the Arts, and Hana Jalloul, lecturer of International Relations at Univeristy Carlos III (Madrid).

Najbliższe spotkanie: Prof. Felix Stalder "The digital city as laboratory for the more-than-human society."

Spotkanie odbędzie się 13 maja 2021 o godzinie 18:00 na MS Teams (kliknij TUTAJ, aby przejść do seminarium)

Abstract
This talk starts from three assumptions. First, digital media have contributed to social diversity and polarization by leading people into ever more self-enclosed worlds, some of which are constructive, while others are destructive. Commercial social media have amplified the destructive ones for their own interests. Second, digitization and the informational economy are a driver of the “great acceleration” pushing the earth system beyond the relatively steady-state during which human civilization has so far existed. Third, digital infrastructures are necessary to manage the sharply increased complexity of the “post-industrial” society. From this, a major challenge emerges: how to use new digital infrastructures to bring people together, establish new forms of participation in the res publica, that is, the things that are shared by and affect, everyone. This is a daunting task because the institutions of the res publica cannot simply extend participation by citizens, as important as this is, but they need to account for the massively extended range of actors – technical as well as biological and even geological – that make up the dynamic system in which we live. I will look at the city-scale for practical examples of new social institutions.

Tuesday, 11. Mai, 19.00 @ Depot Vienna -- online (Zoom Link)
Digital Unconscious
Book Launch

With:
Franco Berardi "Bifo", philopher, activist, Bologna
Cécilia Calheiros, writer, Paris
Steve Kurz, Critical Art Ensemble, USA
Katja Mayer, sociologist, University Vienna
hosted by Felix Stalder and Konrad Becker (eds.), World Information Institute, Vienna