Lecture SeriesTerritories of the In/Human

On each evening in this lecture series, an artist in the exhibition Territories of the In/Human will be in conversation with a guest speaker. In presentations and discussions, both will pick up and elaborate on different aspects of the topic. The lecture series is organized by the art, science & business program of Akademie Schloss Solitude.

– Thursday, July 29, 2010, 7 pm (in German)
On this day, the exhibition is open during the event.

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 Head’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 …