The Horizontal Reading Group with guest lectures

The Horizontal Reading Group is part of the Ecosystems of Knowledge platform, which was created in 2020 by Akademie Schloss Solitude as a new format for collective engagement. This initiative is a rhizome of Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s residency at the Akademie. The Horizontal Reading Group invites to meet online during these lockdown times to discuss a series of texts and ideas around a wide range of subjects that are of interest to its members. The goal is to create knowledge from different perspectives, along an underlying exploration of non-hierarchical ways of existence; a safe and inclusive space for everybody.

The Horizontal Reading Group takes place every Sunday, find more information here.

Gabriella Torres-Ferrer’s work is interested in the societal transformations implied in the development of modern cybernetics; our digital reality and how this is redefining nature, vis à vis; understanding how old power structures are sustained, and acquire new forms. Their trans-media practice seeks to challenge hegemonic narratives, interfaces, modes of viewership and materialities, often pondering potential for transformation. Connecting internet culture, post-colonial psycho-social landscapes, ecologies and globalization, they are interested in thinking through art and different modes of knowledge. Much of their work deals with the implications of existence within the flows of production and exchange in this globalized networked society; what it means to be a body in this datafied world.

The Horizontal Reading Group has also invited guest speakers: Mandy Harris Williams on May 6, Tatiana Bazzicelli on May 12, Karen An-hwei Lee on June 2, and Tiziana Terranova on July 8, 2021.

July 8, 2021, 7 pm: Tiziana Terranova

»Network Culture: 15 years later«

To register for the event, please click here.

Tiziana Terranova’s online workshop discusses the thesis proposed in Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004), one of the first books to propose that digital networks required a significant shift in modes and categories of analysis of culture, especially those which had been shaped by the paradigm of mass media and communications. Foregrounding ideas such as information, digital labor, soft control, and communications’ biopower, the book provided a new set of concepts to understand how culture was transformed by the digital internetworking of social life. The author discusses what seems to have changed in the very intense 15 years since the book’s publication, and the kind of new analyses and concepts needed when thinking about today’s technosocial mega-network.

Tiziana Terranova is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Digital Media in the Department of Human and Social Sciences at the University of Naples »L’Orientale,« Naples/Italy. She has written and lectured extensively on the political implications of digital networks and information technologies. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004), and the forthcoming The Technosocial Question (Minnesota University Press), and Mega-Network: Technology, Subjectivity and Economy after the End of the Internet (Semiotexte). She has been part of many groups involved in the task of collectively thinking about the politics of technology, including the Italian collectives Uninomade 2.0 and Euronomade, Robin Hood Minor Asset Management, the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies at the University of Naples, and the Technoculture Research Unit (www.technoculture.it).

The session will be moderated by Gabriella Torres-Ferrer and Mara-Johanna Kölmel.

June 2, 2021, 7 pm: Karen An-hwei Lee

»The Maze of Transparencies: Digital Apocalypse« – A short lecture, discussion, and writing exercise

To register for this event, please click here.

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo 2012), Ardor (Tupelo 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. She authored two novels, Sonata in K (Ellipsis 2017) and The Maze of Transparencies (Ellipsis 2019). Lee’s translations of Li Qingzhao’s writing, Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose of Li Qingzhao, is the first volume in English to collect Li’s work in both genres (Singing Bone 2018).  Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. Currently, she serves in the administration at Wheaton College in greater Chicago.

Suggested reading material:
Karen An-hwei Lee: The Maze of Transparencies
Thomas Aquinas: »The Treatise on Happiness«, from: Summa Theologica, available free in the public domain

The session will be moderated by Gabriella Torres-Ferrer and Mara-Johanna Kölmel.

May 12, 2021, 7 pm: Tatiana Bazzichelli

»Tactics of Disruption: Between Art, Hacktivism & Whistleblowing«

To register for this event, please click here.

This seminar presents and investigates new possible routes of social and political action within the framework of hacktivism, digital culture and whistleblowing, focusing on the disruptive potential of artistic practices. How is disruption developed in the framework of art and culture? How can researchers and cultural producers foster a critical debate on society, generating experimental ways of thinking? How can we analyse the effects of whistleblowing on culture, empowering both experts and non-experts? At the core of Bazzichelli’s curatorial and research analysis is the refection on practices that work within social, political and technological systems, questioning such systems themselves. Disruption is a term that comes from business, and it means to generate innovations able to create new markets and new values. Bazzichelli transfers the ideas of disruption into the field of art, hacking and whistleblowing, to expose systems of power and injustice. Her theoretical investigation started in the framework of her book Networked Disruption: Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking, published in 2013 by the Digital Aesthetic Research Centre of Aarhus University in Denmark. This work was followed by a traveling exhibition in various European venues: Networked Disruption. Since 2014, Bazzichelli connects art, activism and whistleblowing running the Disruption Network Lab program, a series of events at Kunstquartier Bethanien in Berlin. Following a practice-oriented research approach, this seminar will bring these experiences together, analysing possible changes in art, politics, technology, and the society at large.

 

Tatiana Bazzichelli is the founder and artistic director of the Disruption Network Lab, a Berlin-based organisation examining the intersection of politics, technology and society through on-going conferences and a community programme. Since 2019, she is a jury member for the Hauptstadtkulturfonds in Berlin. Former programme curator at transmediale festival from 2011 to 2014, she was post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University of Lüneburg. In 2011 she received a PhD degree in Information and Media Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Aarhus University in Denmark. She is currently working on an anthology about the effects of whistleblowing on culture and society, forthcoming in November for transcript Verlag.

Twitter: @t_bazz

May 6, 2021, 7 pm: Mandy Harris Williams

»On Representing and/or Being the Intellectual: From Hashtag to Praxis«

To register for this event, please click here.

For this specific session, we have the great pleasure to present an input by Mandy Harris Williams, who is a critical theorist, writer, multimedia conceptual artist, performer, Brown Up Your Feed Radio Hour host on NTS radio, educator and internet/community academic. She will speak about the book Representations of the Intellectual by the Palestinian literary theorist Edward Said. She is especially curious about the role of the intellectual of today, critical in that so many people are beginning to consider what is the materiality between hashtag and praxis. Or, more specifically, what is »doing the work« versus representation of »doing the work?« How does social media work to shift and change our behavior so that intellectualism is more or less desirable or important? She is looking forward to discussing this work in the context of the current technological era, among fellow intellectual leaning individuals who are also considering participation within these platforms. What is the nature of the intellectual community on social media? And how does the nature of the platforms in and of themselves contribute to or detract from intellectualism? The session will be moderated by Gabriella Torres-Ferrer and Aouefa Amoussouvi.

The inaugural session of the Horizontal Reading Group will take place within the framework of the Solitude ON-line event.  Another program highlight will be the opening of the exhibition ON-line. For more information click here.