July 15 – Sept 17, 2020

»Transformation – Unfolding the Future«

Online lecture and workshop by Nishant Shah

Date: July 15, 2020, 19:00 Uhr

Duration: July 15 – Sept 17, 2020

Transformation - Unfolding the future, Dr. Nishant Shah, Design: Stegmeyer Fischer Creative Studio

Online lecture and workshop series »Transformation – Unfolding the Future«

Akademie Schloss Solitude is delighted to present its new online lecture and workshop series »Transformation – Unfolding the Future«.

The series brings together international scientists and artists who make significant contributions on the question of how we want to shape our society and our coexistence. In their research, they raise questions on new concepts for social transformations, political invention and solidarity. The role that artists and artistic production plays in the unfolding of the future is at the core of the lecture and workshop series.

The novel digital format is a response both to the global health pandemic and climate crisis, thinking through accessibility and affordances of participation without travel.

It was developed by Nishant Shah, vice-president Research at ArtEZ University of the Arts, The Netherlands, together with Akademie Schloss Solitude. It offers an option of radically rethinking a performance lecture to engage with the distributed and global communities of Akademie Schloss Solitude.

The series consists of a thesis lecture, which will be released online for six weeks. During this time questions, suggestions and feedback can be shared. A moderator from Akademie Schloss Solitude gathers the questions and synthesizes some of the key aspects. In the next step, they will be discussed with the speaker in an online live event. The recordings feed into a growing archive, which will be made permanently accessible on our website.

We invite you to join us on Wednesday, July 15, 2020, to listen to the thesis lecture by Dr. Nishant Shah at Akademie Schloss Solitude and discuss it afterwards.
Please bring a mobile device with you.

If you are interested, please register in advance: anmeldung@akademie-solitude.de
You can certainly also join the lecture online from every other place in the world. The following link (currently still password protected) will be activated from Wednesday, 7 pm:

https://vimeo.com/showcase/unfolding-the-future

Nishant Shah: »The Quantified Future Was Always Scarce: Constant Catastrophization & Computational Counting«

Thesis lecture: from July 15, 2020, 7 pm (CET)
Online-workshop: July 15–August 27, 2020, hosted by Mary Maggic
Live event: September 17, 2020, 7 pm (CET)

In the inaugural lecture feminist, humanist, and technologist Nishant Shah speaks about how scarcity of the future has emerged as one of the biggest global anxieties of our times. In his talk, Shah will suggest that the future that is in crisis is a quantified future, and it has some characteristics that it takes from computational counting technologies. He will argue that the scarcity of futures is something that has been experienced by a large precarious global community for a long time and it has learned to both navigate and cope with this scarcity. Shah examines how the computation of a scarce future is a result of digital shifts and needs to be understood as a form of future while exploring other forms of making sense. Drawing from digital cultures, artificial intelligence developments, social justice movements, feminist epistemology of science and technology, and postcolonial theory, he will attempt to denaturalize the impulses of constant catastrophization enabled by the quantified future, and suggest a new orientation for transformations away from the rhetoric of a scarce quantified future.