For its eighth annual theme the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies investigates excess as a distinctive feature of our neoliberal economic system, while also addressing positive aspects of boundary-expanding intemperance that can be understood as refusing the strategies of rational and economic exploitation. To inaugurate the new annual theme, an international lecture series brings together approaches from art, design and the sciences that deal with excessive processes and behavioural forms as well as their consequences. The contributions will discuss the excessive demands made on the individual by constant networking, the flood of information, and self-optimizing, examining the cultural problematic of administering things that have accumulated beyond moderation. In addition, they will analyse the complex relationship between affluence and scarcity, highlighting possible ways out of the excesses of growth as well as the potentials of ecstatic transgressions.

The excessive seems to be inherent to capitalism. It is famously based on growth, which is meant to be guaranteed by constantly promoting new desires and an increase in demand, with a tendency to chronic overproduction. The decadent proliferation of things and optimizing bodies for efficiency finds its counterpart in the current exponentially increasing circulation of information, data, and affects by means of digital communication technologies. In media excesses, messages compete for interpretive authority and for the attention of their recipients,and this struggle triggers an escalation of further subtle dynamics of always trying to outdo the other. As a consequence of such excesses, academics and artists have increasingly begun to diagnose states of physical and mental overload and exhaustion that are no longer related solely to the individual and the body, but that can by now be understood as a planetary phenomenon, in view of dwindling energy sources as well as the destruction and pollution of the Earth. In artistic and academic disciplines, however, the first exit strategies are also beginning to emerge. Some of these strategies seem not least to be examining the extent to which the possibility of resistance is inherent in the excessive itself.