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Since the 1990s, genomics has promised cures for major challenges to human survival, among them disease, food shortages, fertility problems, and climate change. It has offered a vision of a better world by sequencing and modifying the building blocks of life.

Part of the Symposium Coding Utopias

Live-stream available
At the venue: Registration required

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Utopia has been, and continues to be, an often violent gesture that chooses the future of select groups and certain forms of life at the expense of others. Is utopia, then, still worth keeping in a world that has been so damaged through its violent deployments?

With Leonardo Caffo, Hilda Fernandez, Patricia Reed, and Fátima Vieira

Part of the Symposium Coding Utopias

Live-stream available
At the venue: Registration required

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Engagement with the planetary and its crises has led to the emergence of radical challenges to conventional analytical distinctions between global and local. This symposium explores how the concept and reality of the Anthropocene disfigures and refigures four key spatial figures of Western modernity: the place, the territory, the network, and the route.

Organized by the Collaborative Research Center 'Re-Figuration of Spaces' (CRC 1265) in collaboration with the ICI Berlin 

At the venue: Registration will open on 20 Sep 2023

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This workshop will focus on how the meaning of models changes as it travels between different domains, and on how a given model is constructed and broken depending on how tightly it is bound to its reference. Opposing the idea that models are mere representations, contributions will inquire into their generative properties: to make a model involves abstractions and idealizations that can have very real effects in its target system. Likewise, to break a model often leads to novel theoretical insights, revealing hidden presuppositions and opening up the possibility of making, and breaking, again.

Organized by current ICI Fellow cohort

At the venue: Registration will open on 4 Oct 2023

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The sun has been a continuous element of utopian imagination — as a cultural form, an ideological power, and a spiritual force. The energy of the sun keeps the planet functional, regulates the metabolic rhythms of plants and animals, and is part of a contemporary global capital of technological and economic power. 

Organized by Sara Castelo Branco and Claudia Peppel
An ICI Event in cooperation with Bard College Berlin

At the venue: Registration will open on 10 October 2023

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A model can be an object of admiration, a miniature or a prototype, an abstracted phenomenon or applied theory, a literary text — practically anything from a human body on a catwalk to a mathematical description of a system. It can elicit desire, provide understanding, guide action or thought. Despite the polysemy of the term, models across disciplines and fields share a fundamental characteristic: their effect depends on a specific relational quality.

With Teresa Fankhänel, Victor Stoichiță, Leigh Raiford, Sven Lütticken, and Yala Kisukidi

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