Potential Spaces
16. – 18. 02. 2017
HfG & ZKM | Karlsruhe
In Europe, the heavy-pillared academies of the past centuries still dominate when it comes to teaching and research in the fields of art and design. Yet actors of the artistic and design practice are organising themselves into collaborative groups that are networked world-wide, reaching far across the borders of national states. The light and open architectures of China and Japan have a chance to rebuild their academic landscapes anew. In South America, public temporary solutions of bricolage co-exist with private prestigious buildings of the rich elites for the purpose of art and design studies. In Africa, self-organised groups and individuals are stepping in where there is a lack of institutionalised infrastructure. Such initiatives have the potential to act as a model for finding new ways of critical research and learning in art and design. Can the arts – applied as well as fine, experimental arts – offer a potential space (Winnicott) where new forms of relations can be developed beyond institutions and other borders? For a discussion of the boldest ideas, researchers, artists, and activists from all over the world will gather in Karlsruhe in February. more

Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) in collaboration with ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
Format


Panels and round-table situation – keynote speeches, followed by debates, artistic interventions
Conference language: English
Opening Night
18:
00
HfG, Big Studio

Introductions:
Tsong-Zung Chang, Siegfried Zielinski and Peter Weibel

Opening Lecture:
Hans Belting (conference chair)
“Looking at Art History Today – A Critical Re-Examination of E.H. Gombrich”

Followed by a short talk between Hans Belting ans Siegfried Zielinski

Entr'actes:
Deep Time Machine I: Echo Ho plays on her Slow Qin
16.02.17
Introduction
10:
00
-
11:
00
ZKM, Atrium 8 & 9

“Thinking in models”
in the exhibition “Frei Otto. Denken in Modellen” and discussion with the curator Georg Vrachliotis at ZKM
11:
00
-
13:
15
ZKM, Cube
Moderation: Johan F. Hartle

Gao Shiming chn
“Let’s Write a Belated Manifesto for the 20th Century”

Irit Rogoff gb
“The Way We Work Now”

Tsong-Zung Chang chn in conversation with Johan F. Hartle in conversation with Irit Rogoff, Gao Shiming and Tsong-Zung Chang
14:
30
-
18:
00
ZKM, Cube
Moderation: Andrea Buddensieg

Yvette Mutumba
and Julia Grosse
deu
“‘Not African, but contemporary...’ How to create global contexts and discourses through a digital art magazine”

Jacqueline Nsiah ghn
“Returning from Exile” – in conversation with Andrea Buddensieg

Stephanie Njerenga ken/uga/bdi
Moderation: Daniel Irrgang
“Foondi Workshops”
Evening
19:
00
HfG, Big Studio

“TX/RX (Transmit/Receive)” – performance lecture by Julian Oliver
Moderation: Daniel Irrgang
Doubling as both intervention and lecture, Julian will lead the audience through an unbridled exploration of the radio infrastructure on which we depend: GSM, analog radio and WiFi. In doing so, he will read signal domains as techno-political territories, opening up questions of public ownership, creative mobility and control.
17.02.17
10:
00
-
13:
00
ZKM, Cube
Moderation: Anja Dorn

Angela Harutyunyan lbn
“Critical Pedagogy as a Practice of Cognitive Mapping”

Kamal Aljafari palestine/isr/deu
Screening (first 20 minutes) of Kamal Aljafari’s film Recollection (2016) and discussion.

Nikos Papastergiadis aus
“Does philosophy contribute to an invasion complex, and can art institute convivial spaces?”

Julian Murphet aus
“Containerization and Aesthetics”
14:
30
-
16:
30
ZKM, Cube
Moderation: Matteo Pasquinelli

Ebadur Rahman bgd/usa
“A naive pre-history of pluripotent prajna(knowledge)”

Rakhee Balaram ind/usa/fra
“‘Critical Unfoldings’: Reconfiguring Spaces of Art and Pedagogy in South Asia”

Miklós Peternák hun
“The two decades of Intermedia & C3 Foundation. Parallel strategies or social schizophrenia?”
17:
00
-
18:
30
ZKM, Cube
Moderation: Siegfried Zielinski

Karla Jasso mex
“Increasingly Skeptical”

Andrés Burbano col
“Fieldwork, Play and Autonomy”

Marcello Mercado arg
Presentation of fragments of his work “Das Kapital Teil 1” (1999–2009) in conversation with Siegfried Zielinski
Evening
19:
30
HfG, Big Studio

Deep Time Machine II: Screening of “Konfuzius Rites” and conversation between Tsong-Zung Chang, Jeffrey Shaw, Li Zenhua and Siegfried Zielinski
18.02.17
17.02.17
11:00 -
13:15
Session 1


Gao Shiming chn
“Let’s Write a Belated Manifesto for the 20th Century”

Under the dual structure of empire and nation state, the entanglement of the history of colonialism and the Cold war, and the globalized network of production and consumption, the international body of people are fragmented, dispersed, and realigned. The fate of the people, is “global imprisonment, local exile”.
After evolution during the 20th century, capitalism has gone through multiple generations and presented an updated version: from exploitation to dispossession, from oppression to substitution, from occupation to domination.
From software to hardware, from coding to governing, the new governance of capitalism dictates our daily life, and infiltrates through social fabrics, shaping the form of our behaviors, habits, and dreams. With a series of artificial limbs for politics, ethics, sense and sensibility, contemporary art, folk art, as well as many institutionalized form of knowledge and even the academy itself, are precisely parts of the new governing.
In this situation, how can intellectuals and artists create a strategic space to overcome this new governance of “message-spectacle-capital”?


Irit Rogoff gb
“The Way We Work Now”

Contemporary research no longer recognises the structure of an informing discipline or the limitations of an interpretative audience. We have moved on from working from inherited knowledges to working from the conditions of our lives. It is in fact our work, no longer distanced by illusions of objectivity, that has capacities to change those conditions through forms of direct engagement, both intellectual and cultural. The way we work now, refracted through a set of contemporary conditions and informed by a new vocabulary that goes beyond the critical, is a form of performative enactment.
This presentation will unpack some of the emergent terms of our working practices and look at one example of working in this manner by the freethought collective: the ‘Infrastructure’ project at the Bergen assembly 2016.


Tsong-Zung Chang chn in conversation with Johan F. Hartle and Gao Shiming
14:30 -
18:00
Session 2


Yvette Mutumba and Julia Grosse deu
“‘Not African, but contemporary...’ How to create global contexts and discourses through a digital art magazine”

There is a growing ”Hype“ around so called ”Global Art“, a notion which often mainly refers to art production from non-European and non-US-American contexts. The perception of contemporary art from African perspectives is part of that phenomenon. While this is without a doubt interesting, it also shows the still inherent hierarchies between “the Center“ and “the Periphery“. With the art magazine Contemporary And (C&) – Platform for International Art from African Perspectives we are creating a dynamic space where issues and information on international art from Africa and the Diaspora are reflected and connected. In their presentation Julia Grosse and Yvette Mutumba will talk about their work with C& discussing methodes, definitions and challenges of the dedication to strengthen the visibility of and discourse around contemporary art from African Perspectives. 


Jacqueline Nsiah ghn
“Returning from Exile” – in conversation with Andrea Buddensieg

In the last decade many Ghanaians born in the diaspora decided to (re)locate to Ghana, their parents’ home country. Europe’s economic crisis, the media’s changing rhetoric when reporting about Africa, and the Ghanaian government’s incentives luring Ghanaian professionals to return all had an immense impact on this home-coming phenomenon. Part auto-ethnographic – I myself (re)located to Ghana whilst doing my research – this research is an attempt to capture this historically poignant moment of large numbers of Ghanaian diaspora returning 'home'. Casting a light into the Ghanaian migratory experience and through first-hand interviews with diaspora returnees, this study establishes the different stages of migration and serves as a registry of a turning point in Ghana’s recent history.


Stephanie Njerenga ken/uga/bdi
“Foondi Workshop”

Foondi Workshops is an African product design and technology company that uses collaborative design workshops with the aim of capacity building and skills sharing. Foondi creates a platform for problem setting, design thinking, and prototyping entrepreneurial-based ventures. In this way, young innovators in Africa are nurtured in skills development and encouraged to build solutions that target emerging markets and under-served communities in Africa.

Foondi's work expands across Kenya, Uganda and Burundi where we have engaged over 300 young Africans on the use of design and technology to develop innovative solutions. Our workshops have led to multiple products, including off-grid solutions such as a bicycle-powered blender, solar charging solutions and mobile phone charges that run off motorcycle taxis. For urban African cities, we have worked on smart devices for healthcare, home automation, weather monitoring and home security.
18.02.17
10:00 -
13:00
Session 3



Angela Harutyunyan lbn
“Critical Pedagogy as a Practice of Cognitive Mapping”

With neoliberal capitalism’s expansion on a global scale in the post-1989 world and with the triumph of liberalism, models of North American education were exponentially exported to territories hitherto under different educational regimes and pedagogic practices. This new wave of expansion coincides with the proliferation of postcolonial and culturalist discourses that “give voice” to the other and are concerned with the politics of representation. However, the seemingly contradictory discursive demand for the other to “speak” for itself and the structural subsumption of education in the logic of market relations are the sides of the same coin. Vis-à-vis these discourses and the increasing neoliberalization of academia, the paper argues for a critical pedagogy embedded in a universal conception of class struggle, and for “cognitive mapping” (borrowing from Fredric Jameson) as necessary tools to combat the total subsumption of education in late capitalism. The paper takes Beirut as a site where the above contradictions are made visible in their sharpest contours.


Kamal Aljafari palestine/isr/deu
Screening (first 30 minutes) of Kamal Aljafari’s film Recollection (2016) and discussion.


Nikos Papastergiadis aus
“Does philosophy contribute to an invasion complex, and can art institute convivial spaces?”

This lecture will explore the anxiety over cultural difference and global mobility that has been expressed in the media and by a number of prominent philosophers such as Peter Sloterdijk. It will contrast the normative claims about the links between identity and territory, with the aesthetic practices of interest in others. Examples of living with difference will be drawn from the peri-suburbs of Melbourne, and the bold European experiment, L Internationale: a confederation among six museums that is instituting the commons.


Julian Murphet aus
“Containerization and Aesthetics”

The logistical revolution has transformed the global economy and completely altered the logics of production and distribution over the last 25 years; not least has the domain of the arts been challenged and reimagined by the newly circumnavigating supply chains and ‘just-in-time’ production protocols of the twenty-first century. This paper asks how radical the transformation has truly been, and is likely to be, by interrogating the material basis of the international ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions in containerized shipping and logistics, the international distribution of artistic goods and works, and the internalization of the logistical revolution as a new kind of ‘content’ in the arts of the present. It asks: how does the aesthetic contract change in the age of logistics, what new kinds of value are at stake, and where, in this new space of absolute immanence and immediacy, are there potentialities for distance, reflection, and critique?
14:30 -
16:30
Session 4


Ebadur Rahman bng/usa
“A naive pre-history of pluripotent prajna(knowledge)”

I attempt to disentangle resilient euro-eccentric models of arts platforms+practices: the knowledge-lineage of people without history, accessing a symbiotic subjectivity of (a)moral bodies and, its capacity to be contaminated by combustion, transmission, infiltration, mutation, virality, failure, interdependence; knowledge production as unfolding zones of contacts contra the Enlightenment-values, involuted, diverse and desperate enterprises to manage and, maintain “contemporary art’ as an “aesthetic project”; I would (de)historisize, and delimit a parable of affects to overlap with art-architecture-design as a living organism-- and not a philosophy-machine--that overtly mobilize a triangular interrogations:
  - What is an art-architecture-design which has to operate outside History or has to resist art-architecture-design as-an-aesthetic-project in order to being-in-the-world? 
- Can the "underdeveloped" subject from the position of a meta-historical outreach become art-architecture-design ?
- How "underdeveloped" subject  performs the ethical potential space?


Rakhee Balaram ind/usa/fra
“‘Critical Unfoldings’: Reconfiguring Spaces of Art and Pedagogy in South Asia”

How does South Asia, in particular India, confront a stagnant art market? The recent demonetization policy in India also continues to impact the way in which many in the country live and work. At the same time, new and existing modes of art production are continuing to flourish in spite of market and economic fluctuations. Looking at configurations such as SANA, or the South Asian Network for the Arts, the successful “Student Biennale” in Kochi, the rise of micro-biennials in India, and NGO initiatives, I propose thinking about diverse philosophical concepts of the pli, or the fold, to consider the multiplication of venues, spaces, practices, and markets and the way in which they fold, unfold and refold under the current conditions of capitalism. I employ this model to think about how alternate pedagogic models challenge and/or reinstate geographic and social/class boundaries in the region.


Miklós Peternák hun
“The two decades of Intermedia & C3 Foundation. Parallel strategies or social schizophrenia?”

The talk will be about my experiences with two institutions I was involved in during the past (more than) twenty years. The first is the Intermedia Department of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, founded in 1990 after the political changes in the region, a faculty which provides MA degree based on a five-year curriculum. The second – in chronological order – is C³: Center for Culture and Communication, raised as a three-year long, fully founded pilot project in 1996. After its success it became a new legal body, a foundation, in other words a non-profit NGO, without further permanent financial support. Which system is more adequate for facing the challenges of dealing with the complex field of (contemporary media) art? To act inside a state-supported university or to create the framework of an independent NGO? Is this an alternative or a fundamentally wrong question?
17:00 -
18:30
Session 5


Karla Jasso mex
“Increasingly Skeptical”

2017. Life in Mexico means to vanish. Day after day, reality is disturbed by unexpected turns of events. Time is occupied with nonsense reforms to no way out; and geography, like daily nature, is not only permanent but also hard to live with. Meanwhile, artistic domain is devoted to art market. Nonetheless, in a very paradoxical way, we face an ambiguous trade fair of MA, MAF, and PhD programs of every kind of “creative practices”. Universities offers is out of proportion while labor realities show the opposite: a high rate of unemployment. Do we understand the magnitude of social and cultural imbalance? Excess and absence, the problem we face however brutal and arbitrary, is actually a cultural experience of exclusion: you are overqualified. I will explore this current situation though Winnicott’s notion of “transitionality”.
 

Andrés Burbano col
“Fieldwork, Play and Autonomy”

Like a polyellipse, this presentation will spin around three foci. The first focal point is the notion of "laboratory," which will be discussed identifying its potentials and limitations in the contemporary technological culture and media arts education frameworks. I propose the concept of fieldwork as an alternative to question and complement the methods related to the Medialabs, Fablabs, etc.  The second focal point is ludic practice mediated by the computational media, identifying video games as a privileged arena for cultural manifestations, taking into account the notion of Cultural Code and the different embodiments of video games in various aspects of contemporary culture. This topic will be exemplified with video games in/from Latin America. Finally, attention will be paid to the recent work of anthropologist Arturo Escobar who, after having seriously questioned the notions of “Development” and “Globalization”, now turns his attention to Design as a tool with enormous potential to re-imagine our worlds both, the Global South and Global North, proposing the redefinition of the concept of Autonomy.

Marcello Mercado arg in conversation with Siegfried Zielinski
Location

Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe /
Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design
Lorenzstr. 15
76135 Karlsruhe
Germany

Contact: Daniel Irrgang
(dirrgang@hfg-karlsruhe.de, 0049 721 8203-2306)
More Info
The conference marks 25 years since Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design was founded. As with the founding of the school, the most important gesture is not retrospective, but prospective. We ask questions and set challenges for ourselves toward a possible future of studies and research in art and design, with a focus on the university and its connections to ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

The scope of the conference:

Due to the violence of political, economic, and geophysical relations, trusted territorial guidelines cease to operate. What do Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, Australia, or Oceania mean in a world increasingly characterised by synthetic identities? In the face of the current hate, violence and destruction in many regions, can such an utopian power like the one described by Édouard Glissant as Poetics of Relations still exist? What kind of navigation techniques must we learn in order to unfold a form of dialogue that recognises the other as a necessary requisite for our own strengths and aesthetics. Can the arts – applied as well as fine, experimental arts – offer a potential space where new forms of relations can be developed and tested as intersubjective and inter-objective pluralities, beyond their institutions and other borders?

In Europe, the heavy-pillared academies of the past centuries still dominate when it comes to teaching and research in the fields of art and design. Yet actors of the artistic and design practice are organising themselves into collaborative groups that are networked world-wide, reaching far across the borders of national states. Such borders become increasingly insignificant as geopolitical guides. The light and open architectures of China and Japan have a chance to rebuild their academic landscapes anew. In South America, public temporary solutions of bricolage co-exist with private prestigious buildings of the rich elites for the purpose of art and design studies. The universities of Syria or Lebanon have been, to a large extent, destroyed or made dysfunctional. In sub-Saharan Africa, self-organised groups and individuals are stepping in where there is a lack of institutionalised infrastructure. Such initiatives have the potential to act as a model for finding new ways of critical research and learning in art and design.

The age of technical (re)producibility has led to a sea of novel technical images and synthetic sounds of considerable capacity that can be communicated within seconds as small data packets world-wide. Visual, textual, acoustic information as results of individual or collaborative productions pervade our experiences. Physical objects are no longer built in connection to molecules and atoms of the living, rather they grow as hybrid beings of the techno-biological. What are the implications for research and education in art and design, if this “substantial link between creating and understanding” (Max Bense) turns ever further away from concrete objects and more towards processes?

The term potential spaces, coined by Donald Winnicott, seems appropriate in order to gauge as radically as possible with these free spaces of the future. It is neither our interest to establish a new institutional context, nor to rigidly define any programme. It is about thinking through the possibilities that art and design will bring to people all across the world in the decades to come, and how we can teach, study and research them. A re-thinking of the dispositif of art academies should find as much space here as thinking about the possibilities of open, networked collaborations.


The conference is conceived and organised by Siegfried Zielinski, Daniel Irrgang, Ali Gharib, and colleagues of the university and of ZKM. It is supported by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts as well as by the EU-founded project IMAGIT. The conference results will be published as an English reader.
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