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Visual and Media Culture Colloquia: Between the Digital and the Political: New Ecologies of Mind

Thu, Oct 19, 2017, 4:00 pm
Location: 
DARC 108 (Dark Lab)

Roundtable Discussion with David Bates (UC Berkeley), Erich Hoerl and Yuk Hui (Center for Digital Cultures, Leuphana, Germany), Luciana Parisi (Goldsmiths College, London, UK), and Warren Sack (UC Santa Cruz) 

Title: Between the Digital and the Political: New Ecologies of Mind

Location: DARC 108 (Dark Lab)
Date and Time: Thursday, October 19, 2017 @ 4pm

Co-presented with DANM (Digital Arts and New Media)

Bios: 
David Bates is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley and former Director of the Center for New Media. His main research interests are the history of politics and legal thought, and the history of science, technology, mediam and cognition. He is particularly interested in the relationship between violence, law, and political foundation. Bates is currently working on a book that traces ideas of human "insight" in the era of modern science. The project aims to provide a critical history of "Artificial Intelligence" understood in the widest sense of the term.

Since 2014 Erich Hoerl is full professor of Media Culture at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. He is also a senior researcher at Leuphana’s Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL). Prior to this, he was professor of Media Technology and Media Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, where he was the head of the ‘Bochumer Kolloquium Medienwissenschaft’ (bkm). Currently, he is working on a general ecology of media and technology as well as on a critique of the processes of cybernetisation of every form of life and every mode of existence, focussing on a historical-systematic outlining of a technoecology of participation. 

Yuk Hui studied Computer Engineering, Cultural Theory and Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong and Goldsmiths College in London, with a focus on philosophy of technology. He is currently a research associate of the project "techno-ecologies of participation" at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, where he also teaches at the institute of philosophy; previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research and Innovation of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and a visiting scientist at the T-Labs Berlin. He is an editor (with Andreas Broeckmann) of 30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science and Theory (2015), and author of On the Existence of Digital Objects (U of Minnesota P, 2016).

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Theory, Chair of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research draws on continental philosophy to investigate ontological and epistemological transformations driven by the function of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire(Continuum Press). In 2013, she published Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (MIT Press). She is currently researching the history of automation and the philosophical consequences of logical thinking in machines.

Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Chair and Professor of Film + Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he teaches digital arts and digital studies. He has been a visiting professor in France at Sciences Po, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme, and Télécom ParisTech. His artwork has been exhibited by SFMOMA (San Francisco), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany).