How, one hundred years after the founding of the Bauhaus, can culture be rethought as a social project? And how does the design school continue to inspire visionary practices and discourses today? The curators of bauhaus imaginista Marion von Osten and Grant Watson discuss with art historian Mona Schieren the Bauhaus’s transnational relationships, correspondences, and migration stories, and its relevance for an art, design, and education of the future. To article...
What does it sound like when trees communicate? In the Berlin premiere of Conference of Trees, Hendrik Weber aka Pantha du Prince transforms the scientifically proven cellular-biological communication of forests and trees into an audiovisual composition between avant-garde music and electronic club sounds, visual poetry and speculative science. In discussion with the philosopher Melanie Sehgal, he describes his working method, reveals his sources of inspiration in nature, shamanism and historical and contemporary literature, and explains how one can become a tree. To article in German...
Around 100 years ago radio began to change our listening habits and revolutionize the cultural technique of transmitting and receiving. The term “radiophonic” refers to the emerging constellation of transmitted sound and ambient noise. For Radiophonic Spaces Nathalie Singer, Professor for Experimental Radio, has curated a walk-in archive, a listening room within which visitors can move through several decades of radio history and works from over 200 radio artists. Together with sound artist Jacob Eriksen, who will explore the archive with students of the UdK Sound Studies, she discusses the transformation of the medium, the new timelessness of the digital, and Samuel Beckett. To article...
In 1957 the artist Guy Debord, together with other left-wing European intellectuals, founded the Situationist International (S.I.). The movement understood itself as a “revolutionary front within culture”, critiquing the spectacle of the commodity society of the time using the methods of play and the so-called communication guerrilla. In an age in which the principles of the market economy now exercise an even more pervasive influence on life, the exhibition project The Most Dangerous Game at HKW initiates a reassessment of the Situationist critique. In discussion with HKW director Bernd Scherer, the curators Wolfgang Scheppe and Roberto Ohrt explore how the S.I. understood the sublation of art, while its members nevertheless perceived themselves as professional revolutionaries in the field of art, demonstrating intellectual flexibility within this dichotomy. To article in German...
Who benefits from ideas of ownership, control, and exploitation of music? And what could alternatives look like? The legal ethnographer and DJ Larisa Kingston Mann talks with Jan Kedves about Dub, dancehall traditions and sound systems, about collective authorship, oral tradition strategies, and the reproduction of colonial relationships in the global music industry. To article...
Home office, sleeping rooms in the schools, and android teachers: These are just some of the things that students of all grades in German schools, at home and abroad, would like to see according to the results of the ideas competition Our School! The pedagogue Robert Pfützner, scientific advisor to HKW’s project Schools of Tomorrow, in discussion with Elisabeth Wellershaus. Talking about young people and their idea of a school of the future without heteronomy and the pressure to perform according to global standards – around one hundred years after John and Evelyn Dewey’s publication Schools of To-Morrow and other early reform pedagogy movements. To article in German...
It seems that one of the defining features of the technosphere is activity around a threshold between the “real” and digital realms. In a conversation with musician and writer Annie Gårlid about his latest full-length album Hesaitix Producer James Whipple (aka M.E.S.H.) elaborates on sonic world-building, commons, and ambiguous territories. To article...
They were difficult times when Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein met in 1981. Shortly after the Front National won their first important election, the themes of “race”, “nation”, and “class” assumed a new urgency throughout France. The sociologist and the philosopher seized the opportunity to discuss all three social constructs and their interdependencies with their students in a long since legendary series of lectures. The later book Race, Nation, Class: Ambivalent Identities (1988, published in English in 1991) summarizes Balibar and Wallerstein’s research and reflects on the connection between racist structures and now newly established global class systems, both past and present. The Cultural studies scholar Manuela Bojadžijev spoke with both authors about the book and why it continues to be relevant. To article...
What connections are there between art forms and political systems? Rabih Mroué’s works revolve around the social situation in Lebanon and the Eastern Mediterranean. For “Why Are We Here Now?” he examines, together with representatives from the post-civil war art scene, Lebanese concepts of identity and the special role of the lecture performance. To article...
What form of theater can reflect changed realities? The journalist Katja Petrowskaja and the artist and playwright Mohammad Al Attar discuss Noam Chomsky and the international left, migration and military conflicts as lived experience, and theater as a political tool. To article...
What is the relationship between the October Revolution of 1917 and concepts such as “cosmos” and “immortality”? No one formulated this as clearly as Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903): In his “The Philosophy of the Common Task” (1906) he called for the abolition of death, the physical reconstruction of all the dead and – as a logical consequence – the expansion of mankind into the cosmos. Is it even possible to describe the entire soviet experiment as a form of applied Cosmism? With his exhibition at the HKW the media theorist and philosopher Boris Groys takes a look at one of this epoch’s rather neglected movements. A debate on the overcoming of death, revolutionary new beginnings, and the limitations of current body technologies. To article in German...
More than virtually any other place, the Syrian city of Aleppo is associated with war and destruction. The artist Mohammad Al Attar resists such media codifications. A talk on intimate narratives, cherished places, and resilient memory. To article...
By train from Berlin to Baghdad, from Damascus to Mecca: hard to imagine today – but this was not always the case. The writer and cultural researcher Adania Shibli on the history(ies) behind her program “After the Wildly Improbable”, on forbidden books, the utopia of travel, and rail tracks as witnesses. To article...
From the second half of the 19th century Russian Cosmism pursued the goal of physical immortality and resurrection through technological means. The Cosmists were pioneers of space travel and were committed to the human colonization of the universe. In the Journal the artist Anton Vidokle, and the artist and museologist Arseny Zhilyaev, speak about Bio-Cosmism, an art without death, and the museum as a potential site for a curated, transhistorical resurrection. To article...
History is often treated as a single, official narrative. In his works, the artist IM Heung-soon looks beneath the surface of such monolithic narratives and searches for the personal histories and unique experiences of the many individuals that lie at its basis. He speaks with Miki Kanai on the importance of interviews for his work, on stories that cannot be told with words, and the meaning of respect. To article...
For his installation in the exhibition “2 or 3 Tigers”, Chia-Wei Hsu, together with the frog god Marshall Tie Jia, reconstructed his temple in Wu-Yi that was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. In the journal interview the artist discusses the common features of spiritual and digital worlds, his process-driven work with local communities, and the valuation of multiple variants of history. To article...
The division of Korea has far-reaching consequences to this day – for the people both sides of the border in every imaginable area of life. The artist Minouk Lim speaks about how the traumata of the South Korean population has (not) been addressed in the media, about collective memories resulting from shared television experiences, and her own engagement with media technologies. To article...
Neurons living in a Petri dish perform duets with human musicians: Australian-based artist Guy Ben-Ary had his cells extracted and grown into a culture of 100,000 living neurons. Lined with electrodes, these neurons form output via an analog synthesizer, cellF, allowing them to “jam” with human musicians. Ben-Ary talks about the blending of art and science, joint ventures, and non-human consciousness. To article...
A hundred years ago educational reformers all over the world attempted to establish the foundations for new learning and teaching. In the long-term praxis project Schools of Tomorrow, which examines these past approaches from today’s perspective, artists, pedagogues, and scientists experiment with new learning formats in practice. The curator Silvia Fehrmann and Daniel Seitz from Jugend hackt discuss alternative approaches, the complexities of the daily life of the new generation, and independently minded children. To article in German...
Who has the sovereignty of interpretation over history? What new perspectives and approaches to it are possible? The artist, filmmaker, and theater creator Ho Tzu Nyen on the tiger as a metaphor for the historical entanglements between man, nature, and culture in Malaysia and Singapore, the meaning of language and song in his work, and the uncertainties generated by engaging with (colonial) history. To article...
How to develop a non-essentialist conception of identity? What strategies are conducive to decolonize the imagination? Anselm Franke and Hyunjin Kim, the curators of the exhibition 2 or 3 Tigers, discuss the colonial beginnings of worldwide surveillance, the dangers of nationalism in history and today, and the possibilities for emancipation from understandings of tradition in both East Asia and the West. To article...
In this interview the editors Katrin Klingan and Christoph Rosol discuss the contents of HKW’s online Technosphere Magazine. In a series of dossiers aimed at an international readership, artists, designers, and scientists explore the concept of the Technosphere, embracing the breakdown of the categorical divisions between man, technology, and nature. To article in German...
From “Freedom Now” to “White Zulu”: Writer Max Annas spent several years at the University of Fort Hare in East London, researching South African jazz. In this interview, he speaks about the political importance of jazz for the history of the country, from Freedom Now to White Zulu. To article in German...
In an interview with Max Dax, the curators of the HKW’s Free! Music Program, Detlef Diederichsen and Björn Gottstein, discuss their selection of music and its capacity to express liberational impulses – both musical and political. From the music of Conlon Nancarrow and Harry Partch – pioneers who freed compositional music from the restrictions of traditional instruments and tonality – to the musical freedom fighters under South Africa’s Apartheid regime, by way of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison concert, Free! Music explores the diverse experiences of “freedom, emancipation, delimitation, resistance, and protest” in music. To article in German...
The writer Rana Dasgupta questions sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos about the state organizing its own erosion and the lack of alternatives to protect our societies from the consequences. To article...
A conversation with the curators of Now is the Time of Monsters and the writer and journalist Slavenka Drakulić about national narratives, international law, and the obstacles of “official history”. To article...
How is an artificial Intelligence being trained? Trevor Paglen fathoms systems of intelligence and control and challenges our understanding of the distance between us and them: he is making visible the obscure and restricted infrastructures of massively data-driven state surveillance through long-distance telephotography of military sites, scuba diving into the depth of the ocean to the sunken fiber optic cables of the internet and their NSA wiretaps, and discovering the social implications of image generators like Google’s DeepDream. Paul Feigelfeld met him in his Berlin studio. An extract from the new HKW publication “Nervöse Systeme.” To article...
What could be a contemporary definition of public benefit housing? For the 100 Years of Now. Journal, architectural historian Anne Kockelkorn explores central issues of social housing construction in West Germany. In an interview on the core question of the new publication “Wohnungsfrage,” she describes a paradigm shift from housing quantity to housing quality in the 1970s, and develops scenarios that could lead to an improvement of the living situation of many: away from housing as a commodity to an understanding of housing as a use-value. To article...
Die internationale Brisanz der Wohnungsfrage, Kulturtransfers und das Bauhaus – HKW-Intendant Bernd Scherer im Gespräch mit Claudia Perren und Franziska Eidner. To article...
Recording in Progress! is a sound installation by Julia Tieke that translates German-language media reports on migration and flight into the languages spoken by the people being reported on. It confronts the audience with the situation of not understanding on the one hand, but on the other, it also presents German-language commentary by the translators and speakers about the political background of misunderstanding language. The radio moderator and author Julia Tieke talks to Elisabeth Wellershaus in an interview about discoveries, pitfalls and newly created words in the complex field of translation. To article...
The migration scholar Nanna Heidenreich talks about her three-part project Soundtracks. Discussing the works by Constanze Fischbeck, Philip Scheffer, and Julia Tieke that make up this project, Nanna Heidenreich illustrates how listening is politicized, which narratives and voices are perceived in and by today’s media landscape and which are not, and how to avoid victimization and exploitation of projects “about,” but not “made by” immigrants and refugees. To article...
The dystopian video series “The Common Sense” is about “the patch.” Adhered to the palate, this prosthesis transfers the emotions and physical sensations of other people. Leaping through time and space, the video series reveals the far-reaching social changes that the gadget causes – from absolute surveillance at the workplace to a pornographic economy. In this interview artist Melanie Gilligan talks with Bert Rebhandl about devices, TV series and neurosciences. To article...
A conversation with the gramophone expert Ralf Schumacher about buried treasure and fascination with non-electric technology. To article in German...
Can we say that Technology as is exists today competes in its global impact with Nature and Society? Media theorist Erich Hörl and geoscientist Peter K. Haff discuss the Technosphere: how did technology turn into a semi-autonomous ecosystem? To article...
The connections between war and music are as diverse as they are many. One hundred years after the First World War, the festival program of Singing the War looks at the manifestations of these relationships since then, from technologies developed for use in war that would later take on a central role in music (radio, the loudspeaker, recording, etc.) to music as war propaganda, as a form of resistance, as a means of processing, etc. Singing the War draws an arc over the century to draw attention to just how close war is to Europe today. A Discussion with Bernd Scherer and the curators of the festival Detlef Diederichsen and Holger Schulze. To article...
The German version of this interview first appeared in September 2015 in a supplement issued with the newspaper taz for 100 Years of Now. On October 3, F.S.K. performed Ein Haufen Scheiss und ein zertrümmertes Klavier as part of the opening of 100 Years of Now. A multimedia documentation of the event can be found in the HKW Mediathek. The accompanying volume Krieg Singen is part of the book series 100 Years of Now Library. To article in German...
Documentary filmmaker Jihan El-Tahri takes a close look at modern Egyptian society in the shadow of the three “Pharaohs” Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak. A discussion about her planned trilogy. To article...
