Diagrams are indispensable in scientific and philosophical thinking. They are both figures of thought and material signs — gestures in space and concepts in mind — yet they operate in rather enigmatic ways, suspended as they are between the readability of texts and an untranslatable image quality. Diagrams are as ubiquitous as they are context-specific and resist a comprehensive theoretical ‘diagrammatics’, yet they are applied every day, perhaps without us noticing. This workshop offers an opportunity to observe and reflect on diagrams, considering their materiality, visual tactics, and formal mechanisms. Through a shared, multidisciplinary exercise in ‘close reading’ and ‘slow looking’, participants will explore the open forms and conceptual possibilities of symmetry and reversibility, repetition and separation, cracks and connections, compasses, graph paper, dotted lines, arrows, and more.
The organizers welcome proposals for short presentations centered on single diagrams (commenting on one or two images maximum), from any discipline or historical context, including self-made diagrams, ranging from chess to thermodynamics, from genealogy to harmonics, from architecture to quantum physics…
In English
Organized by
Filippo Bosco and Yuri Di Liberto
How to Attend
- At the venue (registration required): Registration opens on 8 June 2026.
- No online attendance / no livestream available (in-person only).
The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin.
If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.
Image credit: Hans Kayser, Ton Cycloid, Lehrbuch der Harmonik, Occident Verlag, 1950