Events

The ICI Berlin is an independent, non-profit research centre. To accompany its ongoing research, it organizes public events on a wide range of topics and in different formats including lectures, performances, conferences, art events, and readings. It welcomes diverse audiences living in or passing through Berlin.

The ICI Core Project draws input from and is reflected in an accompanying lecture series. Other conferences and symposia represent collaborative initiatives of fellows and staff. Many more events are the product of cooperations with partner institutions and other research projects.

All events are open to the public and are usually free of charge. For semi-public workshops prior registration might be requested. Reservations are not possible, the ICI Berlin asks for your understanding that doors will close if the room gets overcrowded. The Institute’s facilities are wheelchair-friendly but their navigation might require some assistance; please contact Event Management ahead of your visit.

ICI events are frequently recorded and made available within the ICI Edition later on; the audience’s consent is presumed; individual recordings are not allowed. Video documentation not available on the ICI website might be part of ICI Library holdings and can be found through its catalogue.

Parallel to its ongoing research colloquium, the ICI Berlin organizes public events on a wide range of topics. Its core project draws input from and is reflected in an accompanying lecture series.

Scales are used to quantify properties such as length and temperature, or also to measure popularity and affect. But as Alice discovers in Wonderland, a change of scale can also have dramatic qualitative consequences. It disrupts customary ways of perceiving, acting, and being — to the point of feeling as ‘queer’ to her as a caterpillar’s metamorphoses. Helped by the arguably inextricable intertwinement of different meanings and aspects of scale, Alice’s experiences continue to provide apt metaphors for the disorienting importance and effects of scale and scaling at a time of hyperglobalization and the so-called anthropocene.

Scale is indeed a highly ambiguous notion, even when one only considers the meanings deriving from the Latin or Italian scala, ladder. It simultaneously denotes the whole ladder, one of its steps, and the relation between two steps: The scale of a cartographic map is the ratio between a distance on the map and a distance on the ground, but any particular length also defines a scale, and the range of scales from the subatomic to the planetary scale is part of the spatial scale. Paradoxically recursive, scale combines and helps mediate quantity and quality, as well as subjective perception, objective material properties, and contingent construction.

If different disciplines, discourses, and dispositives each have their privileged scales to which they tend to reduce others, what may be gained by thinking them together, acknowledging both the relative autonomy of particular scales — each with their own affordances, limitations, rules, even laws and ontologies — and their interdependence — each affecting and being affected by other scales? What is the critical purchase of developing multiscalar architectures or patchworks of scale-specific, mutually inconsistent and irreducible descriptions, theories, and models? How might the tensions be made productive where they overlap or come into contact? The ICI’s Lecture Series ‘Scale’ will address such questions by reflecting upon the critical role of scale within and across a wide range of different fields.