WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS

Spring 2020 // “Lockdown Savoir-Vivre”.
Conception Seminar ( BA / UdK Berlin _ GWK ).

Never before had the world “stopped” in such apparent synchronicity. In the course of a few weeks, we were all to discover an unsettling urban silence, endure disciplinary confinement and scrutinise calls for compliance. The virus took lives, destroyed livelihoods and revealed pre-existing social inequalities with such brutality, that hopes for a global systemic transformation broke out, soon to be cooled off by fears of an authoritarian take over.

The seminar “Lockdown savoir-vivre” took place in Spring 2020 and dealt with the narrative examination of personal coping strategies. What kind of daily rituals do individuals and communities develop to negotiate this unknown situation? What kind of spatial and temporal arrangements do compensate the loss of mobility and social contact? What kind of interactions with a suddenly contagious material environment? Engaging with the situation in an exploratory manner, participants reflected on their own covid narratives and developed a teaching format designed to disseminate their learnings.

Autumn 2017 // “ Metaphorschung ”
Research Seminar ( MA / UdK Berlin _ GWK ).

The “human mind” is said to process the world through analogies… Differences, similarities (or “repetitions”)…constructing worlds as a dynamic web of resonance, and inviting us to read one thing through another… “Metaphors we live by”, as Lakoff & Johnson´s famously formulated, changed the way we understand analogical thinking, speaking, imaging. Conveyed in words, gestures and visuals of all sorts, metaphors arguably make up a relational universe both powerfully immersive and creatively transformable. What does it take to change the game?

This research seminar proposed to engage with the “metaphoring mind” as an investigative space possibly yielding precious insights on the way “we” make this world intersubjectively, - and “inter-metaphorically”. Participants picked metaphors to research and research with . They generated creative interventions and analysed how other people’s metaphors shape perceptions and strategies. Can “sticky” metaphors be “upcycled” to generate new ones? What kind of transformative potential can metaphors have, and how should it be assessed? Finally, is there a way to use metaphors to research social phenomena and if, how? What does this all imply for political communication and strategy?

This MA research seminar was initiated and developed in collaboration with GWK Master students and Prof.Dr. Maren Hartmann in Autumn 2017.

Summer 2016 // “DinDong”.
Research Seminar (MA / UdK Berlin _ GWK).

Intersecting actor-network theories with first-hand observations on “beeping things” , this seminar proposed to develop a variety of excursions using a.v. narratives and phenomenological safaris to reveal dynamic interactions between our embodied lives and the stuff surrounding us.

Combining Martin Heidegger´s Krug with Jaques Tati´s slapstick routines, Phil Jackon’s triangular offence, Michael Serres’s “Balle” and Bruno Latour´s hotel keys, we explored human beings´ multiple entanglement with “things”, and theirs with “us”. How do we take part in the spaces and material arrangements orcherstrating our motion, our interactions, our intentions?

How can these “things” be explored narratively? Examining our involvement in the material world and ever deepening immersion in the internet-of-thingness, this seminar provided multiple opportunities to explore interactions between human, non-human or more-than-human worlds.

“Dingdong” was initiated and developed in collaboration with GWK Master Students and Prof. Dr. Thomas Düllo.

“ Cracking Open (the cultural teleology) ”

Winter 2021 // “Cracking Open (the cultural teleology) : Animation as experimental pedagogy to encounter the life of things”.
Studium Generale / UdK .

Drawing back on Walter Benjamin´s mysterious and exhilarating take on Mickey Mouse, the workshop explored post-humanist readings of early modern cartoons and their child-like anarchy. Staging the world as a place of playful chaos, early Mickey Mouse cartoons picture a cosmoslogy where no one knows who ´s moving what and what ´s moving who.

If “everything alive” is arguably in motion, not everything moving is arguably alive. Celebrating the living universe, we went on to ask with Benjamin: what kind of life do we see in things, and what do they move in us as we attempt to animate them? Participants explored their own sense of entangled agency with the world, engaging with Benjamin´s fascinations for child-like perceptions to unlock their own creativee juices. Finally, Looking back at these early modern animation films and their celebration of "crazy motions", participants designed their own post-human cartoon character and pitched it as if it was to be scheduled in a “saturday morning cartoon” program.

“ Planetary gore ”

Summer 2020 // “Panetary Gore” (BA / UdK Berlin _ GWK).

This seminar took the cataclysmic, dystopian visual language of the climate crisis as a departure point to question apocalyptical aesthetics, the threat of an impeding ecological collapse and its speculated impact on social systems around the world.

What kind of collapse imaginaries and narratives are haunting tv serials, artworks, novels and social media feeds ?

Between morbid voyeurism and anxiety management, how do we approach them and what can they tell us about ourselves? What can we learn about these tropes and what do they reveal about the ambiant values of late capitalism? The seminar proposed to engage critically with dystopian imageries and "collapse porn" to develop new practices and visions out of the bits and pieces deconstructed along the way.

“ Fiction fan ”

Summer 2022 // “Fiction Fan”. (BA / UdK Berlin _ GWK)

Every piece of content released by the entertainment industry potentially becomes part of someone's reality, sometimes fanatically so. Music, Games, Novels or Movies are produced and experienced as prismatic meaning-making engines and socio-cultural magnets attracting adoring fans of all size and ages, could they be niche audiences or immense crowds. In the digital age, Fans are no common "creative audience". Some may still organize their life ( or someone else’s) around what they love, but they’re no longer waiting for creators to deliver the next season, - they Do-it-yourself or Do-it-together.

Contemporary Fans challenge intellectual property rights and established authorship to generate and share their own material, exploring new dimensions of collaborative authorship rapidly changing the mainstream or whatever may still be considered as such.

Passionately loving and hating their object of fascination, those who stalked creators and lived to the pace of new releases, now fill the gaps with their own creative contributions, expanding or “correcting” their beloved fictional worlds with all sorts of media materials. Reflecting on this phenomena, GWK Bachelor students shared what they love, mixed it up, invented their own franchise and generated their own participatory fan base.

They reflected in the process on “fan fictional”practices by making themselves “fictional fans”. This seminar was developed In collaboration with tov Spiekermann & the gwk medienlabor ( 2021).

“ SMASH THE PATRIARCHY
(with style etc.) ”

Summer 2022 // “Smash the Patriarchy-with style”. (BA / UdK Berlin _ GWK)

Cultivated in the once fringier intersectional academic scenes of the 60s, the phrase “ Smash the Patriarchy ” became a powerful meme circulating online as a rallying cry protesting sexist, racist and heteronormative discriminations further oppressing minorities in Germany and around the world.

Appropriated by the neoliberal marketing engines in the course the last decade, “smash the patriarchy” is now also part of the neoliberal playbook, - along with an very growing range of performative activism practices and identity-political nudges. The claim now also covers the shopfronts of flagship stores of Berlin Mitte and other capitals of the global north, along with BLM inspired words and images.

What lies behind this mainstream absorption, and what does it imply for the original claims of an emancipatory movement now also struggling to redefine its language and aesthetics in the wake of this all-out commercialisation. Engaging critically and creatively with the “smash”, the seminar addressed both the original claim and its current online reformulations, question performative activism and clicktivism and invited participants to create their own formats to reflect and expand their experience of patriarchal oppression : videos, poems, paintings, performances, were created and exhibited in a student led project and a show in November 2022 in the UDK Berlin´s Medienhaus (GWK Bachelor, fourth semester) .

“ Poliscyti ”

Winter 2021 // “Poliscity”. ( Research Seminar / MA / UdK Berlin _ GWK)

The end of the 2010´s saw a global wave of protests (FFF, extinction rebellion, etc.) apparently signalising a widespread support for a profound socio-ecological transformation. Despite this supportive atmosphere and apparent momentum, it would take western societies an extraordinary effort to navigate the social and economic challenges such transition necessitate.

If technological “solutions” designed to deploy mitigation and adaptation strategies seemed ready to roll out, their coordinated political implementation was bound to meet extraordinary obstacles, - and this despite the UN ´s colorfull SDGs. While global action remained hampered by geopolitical tensions, the city scale provides different governing tools to implement local change and make them work for all. As experiments around the world have shown, transforming cities with a focus on equity issues is possible, - even if it remains a democratic challenge and an administrative nightmare.

Transforming “at scale” would demand strong policy frameworks, and these rely on narrative framings capable to galvanise public support.

This research seminar explored how various communication strategies and co-design interventions could provide new tools to participate in the policymaking cycle and help prepare urban environments to meet the challenges of a changing climate.

With visiting contributions of Dr. Steffen Lorey and Dr. Sopia Becker.

“ U-turn 1 & 2 ”

Winter 2019 // Winter 2020 // UTURN 1 & 2. (Research Seminar _ MA / UdK Berlin _ GWK)

What kind of story is a University? What kind of mission is it intending to accomplish, and what is it saying about science, education and society? What kind of funding, governance structure, social and political contract does it rely on? Who speaks, who acts, who teaches, who learns? How does it look like, feel like, smell like? Stem? Vocational? Liberal arts? Humanities? …the Two Cultures? What kind of social experiment, what kind of architectural constraints, what kind of societal impact, which perspectives and future prospects…?

As Universities face the complexities of a new “Information Age” and its burgeoning “knowledge economies”, the pressures of digitisation, the rise of AI and the collaterals of the attention economy raise new question for an instution already struggling to redefine itself after hundreds of years of history.

In this two seminars, we´re exploring the platforming of higher education and what it implies for an institution tightly linked to the enlightenment ideals and the democratic model, a difficult humanist legacy and its critical re-exploration in the perspectives of feminist and decolonial epistemologies. How does it withstand the pluralisation of knowledge discourse.

Developed in collaboration with GWK master students, and conceived in collaboration with Dr.Benedikt Fecher and Bronwen Deacon.

“ Worlding the word ”

Sumer 2022 // “Worlding the word”. (Research Seminar _ MA / UdK Berlin _ GWK)

…So we’re performing our realities into being when we speak and write and think, with words and words and more words concatenating worlds into tangible experiences or things forgetting their debt to speech, to discourse, to metaphors, to etymologies .

What is slipping between the cracks when we look at things through the lens of our worlding words? What can we seek to capture, discover and weld into form, language and images when we venture in and out of vocabularies and taxonomies? What lies between the “Globe” and the “Earth”, how shall we speak of our life support systems if Gaia is a “tough bitch”; what if there is no planet but a critical zone to protest for or lobby against?

In this wide ranging "research seminar”, we went out of our ways to explore what worlds and words owe to each other, remembered Moby Dick and Rachel Carson to “think like a mountain”, zoomed out of our molecular clusters to find galaxies and nebulaes, met with urban gardeners and their open air apotheken and listen to each other´s attempt to read, write and think the pandemic away. With guest appearances from Dr.Andreas Weber and Dr. Daniel Irrgang, texts from Bruno Latour, Lynn Margoulis, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Lord Byron and many more….