Call for transmediale workshop participants: Towards a planetary cultural landscape

Image: András Cséfalvay, Unknown Asteroid. 2017, video, 4 minutes and 19 seconds

The More-than-Planet Working Group organises a workshop at transmediale. The workshop takes place in Berlin on Thursday 2 February 2023, from 13:30 until 16:00 hrs.

Registration deadline: 27 January 12:00 PM Berlin time.

With Adonis Leboho, Chris Julien, Klára Peloušková, Lukáš Likavčan and Solveig Qu Suess.

The planetary scale of ecological collapse demands the expansion of vocabularies largely determined by Western science. To move beyond the limits of contemporary planetary frameworks means to widen disciplinary perspectives involved in these conceptual undertakings, and to critically rethink what notions of scale hinder or enable the much-needed discursive transitions.

Conceptualising new cultural landscapes of the planetary also presents various challenges to conventional forms of terrestrial humannes. Habits of embodiment and forms of social reproduction developed under formerly secure terrestrial conditions are revealed as inadequate models for a changing planetary and cosmic context.

What to expect?

By addressing these urgencies, this workshop responds to the questions that lay at the core of the More-than-Planet Working Group’s agenda: How to think about the planet as a cultural object? How can cultural work engage cosmic research, geosciences, and astronautics to productively shape their discourses?

To answer these questions, selected participants will engage in conceptual mapping exercises facilitated by the members of the Working Group, and identify what ways of mattering emerge on the interface between culture and planetary or cosmic sciences. Through open, collaborative discussion and shared expertise, participants will contribute to the development of the more-than-planetary cultural realities.

Call for workshop participants: More-than-Planet Working Group

In collaboration with transmediale and Waag Futurelab, More-than-Planet Working Group (Chris Julien, Adonis Leboho, Lukáš Likavčan, Klára Peloušková, Solveig Qu Suess) is seeking up to 5 participants that will join the members of the group and their guests for a session dedicated to the conceptual mapping of the planetary landscape on the intersection of humanities, astronomy and culture. The participants are expected to share their specific expertise and points of view, in order to contribute to the development of the big picture of the more-than-planetary cultural realities.

Who are we looking for?
Cultural practitioners and scholars focused on topics from environmental studies and cosmic research, with time capacity to join a 2.5 hours workshop session on February 2nd, 2023 at Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

What do we offer?
Knowledge exchange and collective brainstorming on urgent issues in the group of young scholars, with a handful of external guests.

How to apply?
In order to apply, please prepare your short bio (~150 words) and a paragraph (~150 words) answering the question: Why is there today, according to you, an urgency for collaboration between the cultural sector and space research?

Timeline
Registration is due January 27 (2023), 12:00 PM Berlin time. Selected participants will be notified with further details about the workshop.

More-than-Planet Working Group

Lukáš Likavčan is Global Perspective on Society Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai, and research affiliate at NYU Shanghai’s Center for AI & Culture. His research areas cover philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy. He is an author of Introduction to Comparative Planetology (2019).

Solveig Qu Suess works within the fields of documentary film, art and research. Her practice has been investigating the optics of an increasingly unpredictable world, using filmmaking as means to research and connect registers of the intimate and geopolitical.

Klára Peloušková is a lecturer, writer, editor and PhD candidate at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She works as a Methodologist in the Department of Design and as a Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Theory at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. As a PhD candidate she focuses on the political implications of strategic design methodologies.

Chris Julien is senior research fellow at Waag Futurelab. Next to that, he is doing a PhD at Utrecht University titled ‘Ecological Governance: Deep Adaptation Machines’. He is also active for Extinction Rebellion in the Netherlands.

Adonis Leboho is part of a coterie of Beat enthusiasts, the Dead Beats, based at the University of Sheffield. His research interests focus on the musicality of Beat prose and poetics as well as the influence and pursuit of ‘it’. Alongside his studies he co-runs the Dead Beats Literary Journal, a burgeoning hub of new literary potential inspired by the Beat Poets.

About transmediale

Transmediale is an annual festival in Berlin that brings together international artists, researchers, activists, and thinkers with the goal of developing new outlooks on our technological era through the entanglement of different genres and curatorial approaches. In the course of its history, transmediale has grown from its beginnings as VideoFilmFest to one of the most important events for art and digital culture worldwide.

The 36th edition of transmediale takes place at Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, and across the city of Berlin from 1 to 5 February. a model, a map, a fiction explores how scale reconfigures relations, politics, and affects. Alongside the festival, transmediale presents the free citywide exhibition Out of Scale distributed and embedded within the networks and infrastructures of Berlin.