Daniel Belasco Rogers
Machines of Loving Grace: Transforming Relationships to our Technologies
Blockseminar/Workshop (English/Deutsch), 2 SWS, 2 LP
Samstag/Sonntag, jeweils 10-18 Uhr am 7./8.11., 14./15.11.2015, Hardenbergstr. 33, Raum 004

The technology we use everyday is a product of late 1960s counterculture as evidenced by Richard Brautigan's 1967 poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”. His vision is of idyllic coexistence of nature, technology and humans liberated from work. As we wake up in what Halberstam describes as a state of 'zombie humanism', we should ask ourselves whether we are in charge of our technology or whether it is enslaving us.
This workshop will examine our current relationship to technology with special emphasis on the computers that are an increasing part of our daily work whatever we do and introduce and develop some strategies of analysis, resistance and change. The methodology of the workshop will be a number of different formats from group discussions of the technology currently in use by the participants, city explorations searching for uses of controlling technology in our urban environment, introductory lectures on free and open operating systems and software, introductions to practices of resistance such as encryption and onion routing and open discussion / individual research encouraging the participants to invent their own strategies to begin to empower their use of their technology.
Students are expected to have a good understanding of English but German is also understood. They should be willing to examine their own relationship to technology and interested in participating in a more self-determining way with it.

Leistungsanforderungen für den unbenoteten Studium-Generale-Schein: Regular attendance and active participation in discussions / discursive formats.

Daniel Belasco Rogers was born in London in 1966. After an art foundation at St Martin’s College of Art in London, he studied Theatre Design in Nottingham between 1986-89. In 2001, after nearly twelve years working in experimental theatre in the UK, he started making solo lecture performances that investigate personal history through accidents and the process of the projection of one city onto another. In 2002 he formed plan b with his partner, Sophia New. Together they have made performances, gallery installations, locative media and audio pieces in the UK, USA, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium. Since April 2003 he has collected every journey he has made with a GPS, exhibiting maps and animations of the resulting drawings and making performance lectures about this activity. In 2007 Sophia New joined him in this practice. Daniel Belasco Rogers was artist in residence at the Mixed Reality Lab in Nottingham University and has taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the US, Germany and the UK. He has given workshops on locative media and GPS in Germany, UK, Canada and Brazil.