Fragile Identities (2013/14)

Our identities are perpetually reinvented, (de)constructed, and narrated – yet they ultimately remain fragmentary and fragile. Specifically within our present age processes of identity formation are subjected to rapid changes and increasingly divergent challenges.

With its second yearly theme, the cx investigates the multifaceted and complex processes of identification we experience today from the perspective of different artistic and academic disciplines. A three-part symposium thematises fields and phenomena within which identities become fragile and unstable, and questions the limits of the pathological fragmentation of the self. Based on its conviction that identity issues play a significant role in reflecting their time, the cx investigates the fractures and adjacencies of contemporary identity construction with the intention of gaining insight into crises, periods of radical change, and the future potential of today’s world. The event is aimed at students and teachers at the academy, as well as the interested public.

The Present of the Future (2014/15)

The times of utopias seems to have passed. Already since the 1980s we constantly hear of the end of the ‛grand narratives’. The subsequent enthusiasm for heterogeneity and plurality meanwhile devolved into a condition of fatigue, which in all its repetitions and nostalgias blocks the view of the future. But what is the “present of the future” today?

The third annual theme of the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies asks, which means and strategies artists and scholars pursue today, to gain a radius of operation which rises from the conditions we are faced with – without falling into nostalgic utopianisms or apocalyptic sensationalisms. How do different disciplines create potentials for change, for the imagination of possible futures beyond modernistic idealisms and romanticist projections? How can they contend for new freedoms within the configuration of our tomorrows, beyond the present routines and determinations? Contemporary answers to those questions range from the openness of experimental systems and the inclusion of contingency into scientific proceedings to speculative and fictive approaches in philosophy, art and design.

Real Magic (2015/16)

“Today, the occult is ordinary”, British cultural scientist Christopher Partridge remarked in 2012, addressing the rising popularity of magic and other occult currents. Especially in Western societies a newly discovered and very lively interest in spirituality, mysticism and magical practices can be witnessed. But the magical or occult herein appears less in the form of a counter-cultural movement, as was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, but seems to evolve as a popular phenomenon that affects society as a whole and is distributed widely not least due to the pervasive digitization of contemporary life. This registers not only in the arts but is also intensely debated in academic and scientific contexts.

In the course of its fourth annual theme, “Real Magic”, the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies investigates the current realities of magic and its rediscovery in the arts, the sciences and in everyday culture. The lecture series of the winter term 2015/16 asks for the reasons for this newly found fascination with the occult, explores Western appearances and forms of magical practices, enquires into current potentials of magical knowledge, but also into the drawbacks of occultism and the limits and dangers of magical thinking in a globalised world determined by the ideal of an economized instrumental reason.

Hybrid Ecologies (2016/17)

The notion of ecology is currently in great demand: it not only figures centrally in political and environmental debates in the face of climate change, but also traverses contemporary discourses in the arts, the humanities, and the social and techno sciences, where it intersects with topics including the new materialism, the post-human and the Anthropocene. Ecology in this context can be understood as multi-layered and multi-dimensional nexus of reciprocities between living processes, technological and media practices, the natural and the artificial, information, things, and actants. The lecture series “Hybrid Ecologies” is conceived by the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies together with the Chair of Philosophy |Aesthetic Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

Given the current topicality of debates on ecology, it not only draws attention to the historical alliances of this notion with the concept of “milieu”, which genealogically prepare the entanglements of natural and artificial processes. It also examines the biopolitical reformatting of ecology, which frames these entanglements as power-political relations. In this sense, the lecture series considers ecology as a ‘polemical’ notion, whose multivalence opens up new fields of action and yet, thanks precisely to this openness and vast applicability, at the same time poses problems. Against this background the interdisciplinary contributions to the series seek to explore the political and social effects that a rethinking of community in ecological and thus also in biopolitical terms may provoke, and which consequences the contemporary notion of ecology might entail for artistic and design practices in particular.

Interdisciplinary Lecture Series

A cooperation between cx centre for interdisciplinary studies and the Chair of Philosophy l Aesthetic Theory

Room A.EG.15 (historische Aula), Akademiestr. 2

Time Thursday, 19.00h

03.11.2016: Dark Ecologies

Timothy Morton | Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University, Houston

Ursula Biemann | artist, writer, and video essayist, Zurich

16.11.2016: Queer Ecologies

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky | professor of media theory and gender studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Elly Clarke #Sergina | artist, Berlin

01.12.2016: Media Ecologies

Erich Hörl | professor of media culture, Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

BJ Nilsen | sound artist

15.12.2016: (Bio)political Ecologies

Ferhat Taylan | post-doc researcher in philosophy, Université de Liège

Simon Starling | artist, Berlin, Copenhagen

12.01.2017: Designing Ecologies

Betti Marenko | research leader in product, ceramic and industrial design programme, Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London

Martin Avila | design researcher and senior lecturer in industrial design, Konstfack, Stockholm

26.01.2017: Urban Ecologies

Maria Kaika | professor of urban, environmental and regional planning, University of Amsterdam

Godofredo Pereira | architect and tutor, ADS7 Studio, MA Architecture, Royal College of Art, London

Politics of Emotion/Power of Affect (2017/18)

“[P]olitics is always emotional”, as Lauren Berlant emphasizes. According to the American literary scholar and queer theorist, it is “a scene where structural antagonisms — genuinely conflicting interests — are described in rhetoric that intensifies fantasy”, or that attaches people to dreams of a better life. The relevance of affect and emotions in the realm of realpolitik, but also in societal power relations in general, has increasingly become the focus of scientific and artistic disciplines.

Approaches influenced by the field of affective neurosciences, for example, understand emotions no longer as the opposite of cognition; instead they seem to go ineluctably and necessarily hand in hand.

Particularly in recent political events emotions seem to be on the rise as a currency — in restitutive and reactionary efforts towards exclusion and isolation, for example. The cx centre for interdisciplinary studies takes this as a cue to once again address the theme of affect and emotions as a meaningful category for analyzing the social — almost two decades after the first proclamation of the “Affective Turn”. The sixth lecture series of the cx focuses on the contemporary relations of power and emotions, as in the emotionally saturated technologies of power that promise happiness, or in evocative scenarios of fear and rage, but also in the more positively evaluated power of empathy and move-ments of solidarity. The series investigates the influence of mediated emotions and affective attunements, potential new balances of power through the mechanization of affect, as well as current artistic and design-based reflections and deconstructions of emotional regimes. Following prominent voices of affect theory, like Brian Massumi, this lecture series differentiates between affect as a change of a body’s agency created by the encounter with other bodies, and emotion as a social phenomenon and psychological capture of affect. However, as these terms are multi-faceted and are interpreted and applied differently depending on discipline and theorist, each panel will define and discuss their dissimilarities and transitions anew.

Human after Man (2018/19)

In the face of the enormous challenges of the present moment, with its ecological and social crises, the Western ideal of white man as the universal representative of humanity has repeatedly been subject to critique. It is not only the transdisciplinary discourses of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism that attack this standardization of being human and deconstruct it together with the assumption that man must assume a uniquely elevated position among the earth’s diverse life forms. The arts, too, for which the image of the human has always been a matter of genuine interest, work intensively towards the abolition of long-established norms of being human, and project alternative forms of the humanity in radical and sometimes highly speculative ways.

With its seventh yearly theme, the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies turns to the question of how the notion of the human is currently being reconfigured in the arts and sciences. The title of the yearly theme refers to Sylvia Wynter’s formulation, “Towards Human after Man.” For several decades, the Jamaican author and philosopher has advocated a perspective rooted in the marginalized and liminal zones of the West’s dominant standardized and racialized configuration of the human, in order to think being human differently. In parallel with a number of other Black Studies theorists, she proposes a decolonial conception of the human, which often remains underexposed in contemporary posthumanist discourses. "Human after Man" makes a decisive attempt to put this decolonial perspective into contact with approaches that see the most pressing impetus for a redefinition of humanity above all in the phenomena of climate change, mass extinction (Ursula K. Heise), or in the ever-tighter fusion of the living and the technical, together with their associated mechanisms of capitalist exploitation (Rosi Braidotti). The lecture series adopts a critical distance from super- or transhumanism and its idea of the technical improvement or expansion of the human. Here, the “human” does not appear only as a biological, but rather as a multifaceted being, the forms of which are also shaped by diverse social and mythological-fictive narratives.