14 May 2025
19 30

Lecture

Deborah
Coen

The Scales of Influence in a World of Exhalations
Scientists and policy makers typically think about the consequences of climate change in terms of discrete local 'impacts' that are extrapolated from global models. Implicit is the assumption that change begins on the global level, setting the parameters to which local communities must reactively adapt.

14 15 May 2025
11 00 - 21:00

Symposium

Scales
of Life

From Basal Cognition to Planetary Intelligence
This symposium seeks to investigate how information processing, cognition, and other forms of sensing and making sense occur at different scales, and how the ways of understanding these scales inform and deform one another across the contemporary earth and life sciences.

15 May 2025
19 30

Lecture

Thomas
Moynihan

Bildungsroman for the Baby Noosphere
For centuries, people  — both misanthropes and humanists alike  —  have compared Earth's life a 'sludge' clinging to our planet’s crust. Stephen Hawking memorably called the human race 'chemical scum' clinging cravenly to a spinning rock.

19 May 2025
19 30

Book Presentation Discussion

Time and Desire
in Queer Post-Cinema

Queer Post-Cinema: Reinventing Resistance offers a novel perspective on the subject of queer cinema, highlighting the interplay between the cinematic dispositif and digital media in post-cinema.

21 May 2025
18 00

Lecture

Clare
Hemmings

From ‘Affective Dissonance’ to ‘Affective Solidarity’: The Politics of Affect and the Rise of the far Right
While we know that part of right-wing populist appeal relies on its mobilization of affect – what Judith Butler describes as ‘fascist passions’ (2024) - we often struggle to delineate or harness affect for alternative, progressive projects.Public livestream here (no registration required) with the possibility to ask questions via chat.

21 23 May 2025

Conference

Mobilizing Affect –
Affective Mobilization

The conference Mobilizing Affect – Affective Mobilization explores the powerful role of affect and emotion in driving social and political mobilization. It examines the dynamics of affect in prompting (political) action, shaping activist practices, and sustaining social movements.

26 May 2025
19 00

Lecture

Jack
Halberstam

Unworlding: Trans Anarchitectures
In this talk, Halberstam will explore the meaning of trans embodiment using a vocabulary borrowed from a 1970’s art collective called ‘anarchitecture’. The work of Gordon Matta-Clark represents the spirit and the intentions of this group.

27 May 2025
15 00 – 18:30

Workshop

My
little i

From Capital Selfhood to Diminutive Life
The original meaning of subjectivity is to submit, akin to 'lying under' or 'below'. Even though the Latin heritage of subjectivity involves a bottom perspective, a gaze from below, the subject in a modern understanding claims its self by way of the upper cases.

2 Jun 2025
19 30

Lecture

Elisabeth
Strowick

Ambiguity of Scale: Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain — an Anthropocene Novel?
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is obsessed with questions of scale. Whether in its incessant reflection on days, weeks, months, years, minutes, or depths of fathoms and meters of altitude, the novel is driven by questions of the measurability of time and space.

5 Jun 2025
14 30 – 20:00

Screening Workshop

Operativism

Social Intelligence and Mediation
The notion of ‘operativism’ had a notable career in the twentieth century, articulating the relation between Marxist theory and technological modernization, the working body and its optimization, machine vision and cinematic montage.

16 Jun 2025
18 00 – 21:00

Discussion Screening

Notes for a
Séance

Towards a Technology of the Spirit
The practice of séances — attempts to make contact with voices and worlds on different scales beyond the living, through the agency of a medium — flourished during the social transformations of the early modernist period.

19 Jun 2025
19 00

Book Presentation Discussion

(Post)Colonial
Haunting

Ghosts are first and foremost figurations of power. By giving intersubjective communication a form that can challenge anthropocentrism and Western conceptualizations of Nature, ghosts have the ability to generate alternative histories.