Contemporary societies are often described in terms of network metaphors and theories informed by an ‘ethos of connectivity’. Many contemporary social theories operate with a normative bias toward networking. The lecture will present some exemplary cases of these phenomena and inquire into the social and media-theoretical relevance of disconnection. 

The starting point is a novel entitled ‘Gas gegen Gas’ (Gas against Gas) written by the chemist, editor, and translator Dora Sophie Kellner (1890–1960), which was serialized in a number of newspapers between 1928–30.

Organized by Sam Dolbear and Flossie Draper

This event is partly supported by an Initiativstipendium from the Deutscher Übersetzerfonds, who is supporting Sam Dolbear and Flossie Draper to explore the possibility of a publication of Gas gegen Gas in both German and English.

In-person: Registration required

Gas, made in the factories of future conglomerates IG Farben (Germany) and Imperial Chemical Industries (Britain), diffused from the battlefields of the First World War and seeped into dreams and thought.

Part of the symposium Heavier Than Air

Public Livestream available
In-person: Registration required

What might it mean to treat the climate crisis as a crisis of culture? This in-person symposium approaches the period since the 1950s of accelerating consumption and environmental destruction as a question of taste. What kinds of tastes propelled the Great Acceleration? And what follows for the history of aesthetics and cultural critique?

Organized by Benjamin Lewis Robinson and Caroline Lillian Schopp

An ICI Event in cooperation with LMU Munich, this project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101025546.

In-person: Registration required

Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen will talk about the histories, anatomies, and applications of computer vision systems.  Together they will draw on the literature on operational images, the statistical turn in vision research, and their own projects of building neural nets.

Organized by the Centre for Digital Cultures of Leuphana University Lüneburg in cooperation with the ICI Berlin

Public Livestream available
In-person: Registration required

‘Case’ derives from the Latin casus, which denotes a fall, a chance event, a misfortune or accident. A case seems to portend a twist of fate, even death, but whose? In two distinct fields in which the case looms large — law and psychoanalysis — it is knowledge itself that falls before the case.

Organized by Christopher Chamberlin and Xenia Chiaramonte

In-person: Registration required

This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.

Print version (Paperback) 17 €
Print version (Hardcover) 32 €