Territories of the In/Human

Matilde Cassani / Michael Guggenheim (english)

Matilde Cassani (architect/artist, Mailand)
Sacred Interiors in Profane Buildings + Spiritual Devices

For her project, Spiritual Devices, Matilde Cassani spearheaded a comprehensive investigation of the pivotal needs for prayer rituals of four world religions in regards to space, furnishings, and other objects. The artist’s orientation here was particularly geared toward the provisional, sometimes unofficial, prayer rooms of religious minorities in European cities, to pursue the questions: what is the impact of religious pluralism on contemporary cities and what are the new places in which religious pluralism manifests itself?

Michael Guggenheim (sociologist, London/Zurich)
(In-)Human Laws in (In-)Human Territories. Zoning Laws, Assisted Suicide, and Minarets

In his sociological survey, Michael Guggenheim explores the relation of religious practices to spaces and buildings, and what happens if the zoning law is used to include, exclude, and change different practices. With the help of zoning laws, the state of Switzerland tried to ban assisted suicide and minarets. The right of a state to define its territory and to regulate how people are allowed to build is mostly in conflict with foreign citizens and their desire for self-determination and the freedom of their beliefs.

Nomeda und Gediminas Urbonas / Michel Verlaine (english)

Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas (artists, Vilnius/Cambridge)
Druzba

The multimedia installation Druzba (meaning “friendship” in English) by Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas thematically takes up the homonymous oil pipeline stretching from the Urals into Eastern Germany and its resulting political entanglements. The currently privatized pipeline previously served the entire “Eastern Bloc” in the past and was a symbol, both of solidarity among the socialist states and of their independence vis-à-vis Western markets.

Michel Verlaine (economist, Nancy)
Rationality and Finance

In his lecture, Michel Verlaine analyses the rational assumptions behind capitalist finance models of Western markets and how the strong belief in the objective knowledge of the decision maker presumably caused the current financial crisis. The role of the subject in decision processes, often being determined by uncertain elements in the financial system, is a known parameter in finance. At the same time, the subject remains the unknown entity.

Christine Meisner / Ricardo Tamayo (german)

Christine Meisner (artist, Berlin)
The Present—…, “Can you turn back?”

Through drawings, videos, and a narrative, The Present explores the historical relations between Europe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The focus is on different perspectives, in most cases linked to an individual and his/her specific memory, that depict, next to the meaning of historical places, the discrepancy between institutional and individual reappraisals of the past. In her lecture, Christine Meisner will report on her work and present several sections of the video …, “Can you turn back?”.

Ricardo Tamayo (psychologist, Barranquilla/Berlin)
Erinnerung: Das Labyrinth der Identität (Memory: The Labyrinth of Identity)

Identity is intimately related to memory: a coherent depiction of our self relies on the psychological continuity provided by the recollection of our previous actions and the constant reconstruction of our beliefs. According to current theories in cognitive neuroscience, human beings have at least two different forms of memory, an explicit and an implicit form. Ricardo Tamayo will talk about the consequences of this multi-system view in the formation of personal and cultural identity and link it to classic texts by Octavio Paz and Aristotle.
 

Björn Franke / Frieder Nake (german)

Björn Franke (artist, London)
Von menschlichen zu posthumanen Zukunftsszenarien (From Human Futures to Post-human Futures)

Technological developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, human/machine interfaces and implant technology further blur the boundaries between the human and non-human. These changes, Björn Franke addresses in his study, challenge moral and ethical concepts of human identity and may gradually transform the human into what might be called the post-human.

Frieder Nake (computer scientist, Bremen)
Semiotisches Tier. Semiotische Maschine – Die Maschinisierung der Arbeit des Kopfes: Ein Fest des inhuman Humanen (Semiotic Animal. Semiotic Machine—The Mechanization of the Heas’s Work: a Feast of the Inhuman Human)

The mathematician Felix Hausdorff characterizes the human being as a semiotic animal. Soon after, information scientists mapped the semiotic animal on a machine, the computer—thus a space developed around the semiotic animal and the semiotic machine. According to Frieder Nake, an escape out of this relation is no longer possible—and this is the inhuman. But human beings are not what they seem to be: they are the ever-becoming …