DFG-Graduiertenkolleg “Knowledge in the Arts”
Tuning into Worlds. More-Than-Human Aesthetics in the Arts
Lecture Series AND Seminar, English, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Concept: Maximilian Haas, Irina Raskin, Fritz Schlüter
Organisation: Christina Deloglu-Kahlert and Büro Studium Generale
Support: Sarah Hampel, Xin Wang
Design: Jenny Baese

Lectures Series, Mondays, 18-20 h, bi-weekly, 7 Dates: 28.10., 11.11., 25.11., 9.12.2019, 6.1., 20.1., 3.2.2020 as well as
Seminar, Mondays, 18-21 h, 4 Dates: 21.10., 18.11., 16.12.2019, 10.2.2020,
each in Grunewaldstr. 2-5, Aula

Artistic practices engage with the natural and technological worlds in which we are embedded. How do animal, plant, geological, or machinic forms of perception, knowledge, and being come to bear in aesthetic processes?
The lecture series focuses on the capacities of the arts to cross, question, and reconfigure human measures, action, and sensing. The question of a more-than-human aesthetics that results from these capacities leads in two directions: How to account for non-human aspects, scales, and perspectives within anthropocentric conceptions of art production and reception? And where do we have to acknowledge forms of aesthetic expression and perception, poiesis and aisthesis, beyond the human?

The perspective of more-than-human aesthetics aims to disclose practices and concepts to historicize and criticize the entanglement between the arts and their technological and natural environments. How can artistic practices alter these entanglements and test other modes of relation? And what material articulations and narratives, what artistic methods does this propose or demand? What worlds appear and emerge if we focus on more-than-human aesthetics in the arts?

The lecture series is complemented by a seminar in order to prepare the topics addressed. Together we will survey and read relevant literature and develop a theoretical framework to further the discussion. With its interdisciplinary approach, the seminar will touch upon concepts such as new materialism, posthumanism, computational/algorithmic studies, anthropocene, ecology and aesthetics.

Lecture Series:
28.10.2019: Astrid Schrader: Haunted Microbes between Science and Arts
11.11.2019: Monika Bakke: Mineral Companionships of Evolving Environments
25.11.2019: Pinar Yoldas: Trapped in our Umwelt. Expanding Ecological Empathy through Art and Design
09.12.2019: Beatrice Fazi: Aesthetics and the Computational Outside
06.01.2020: Christoph Cox: Against Subjectalism. Materialism, Posthumanism, and the Sonic Arts
20.01.2020: Mette Ingvartsen: Expanded Choreography. Encounters between Human and Non-Human Agency in Dance
03.02.2020: Jussi Parikka & Geocinema (Asia Bazdyrieva, Solveig Suess): Art from Large-Scale Systems: Operational Images and Geocinema

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credit: The requirements include the written elaboration of a question to one of the speakers or a short presentation in the seminar as well as the regular active participation in the lecture series AND the seminar.

Schwerpunkte:
Ausrichtung der Veranstaltung: interkulturell, politisch
Kompetenz/Aktivität der Teilnehmenden: reflektieren/denken, aneignen

The DFG Research Training Group 1759 "Knowledge in the Arts" is an academic research group funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). PhD students conduct research in this group within the framework of a coordinated, interdisciplinary program.
In the context of ongoing discussions about what is often called the society of knowledge, the graduate research group is exploring the conditions, effects, and critical possibilities of a specifically artistic generation of knowledge. The guiding hypothesis is that the arts represent a genuine site for producing, storing, and disseminating knowledge that exists in a relationship of vital exchange with other areas of knowledge in society. Our work is motivated by the observation that concepts of knowledge employed in the justification, self-conception, and practices of the arts are of elementary significance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and that the arts play a decisive part in the genesis and dissemination of technological, political, economic, and natural-scientific forms of knowledge. In order to examine these interdependencies, the research group cooperates with other disciplines including art history, cultural studies, theater studies, media studies, philosophy, engineering, or pedagogy. More information on www.udk-berlin.de/forschung/temporaere-forschungseinrichtungen/dfg-graduiertenkolleg-das-wissen-der-kuenste/.