PROGRAM / abstracts
The workshop consists of two parts:
June 21, 3-8pm
Workshop 1 »The Timeline & The Curated Knowledge Space«
focuses on the Timeline as a whole, familiarizes the participants with the structure and the content of the Timeline and explores the potential and limitations of the approach.
June 22, 3-8pm
Workshop 2 »Editing the Hong Kong Timeline«
focuses on the individual entries. Participants are invited to edit the Timeline by adding their own entries based on their perspectives on what constitutes relevant events. The adding of new entries is a discussion that involves the whole Timeline, as each new entry replaces an old one in the process.
June 23, 7pm
OPENING of the exhibition / panel discussion
Lectures:
June 24, 5-6pm
Timelines and graphs: Reading the network diagrams
by
Doron Goldfarb
Digital repositories of knowledge – either derived from digitized sources or digitally born on the Internet – are one of the premier manifestations of the information society. Structured knowledge graphs extracted from these records serve a multitude of purposes and interests ranging from surveillance to cultural heritage documentation. How are the collaboratively edited items of the Technopolitics Timeline located within such externalized bodies of information? One approach is to contextualize the individual entries with their counterparts in a large existing knowledge base such as Wikipedia. Are they closely related with each other or rather scattered randomly there? Do clusters arise and if so, how do they align with the editor-assigned categories? Driven by these questions, the Timeline editors identified relevant Wikipedia articles for each of their entries. The resulting network of hyperlinks between these articles forms an alternative, synchronic representation of the diachronic timeline, offering means to quantitatively and visually assess its structure in this regard.
June 24, 6:15pm-8pm
Narrating the Timeline: Hybrid (hi)stories
by TECHNOPOLITICS working group
How can we possibly tell the (hi)story of something as impossibly large, complex and loosely-defined as the information society? Technopolitics approaches this issue by creating and relating multiple overlapping, contradicting or simply incommensurable narratives. The workshop presents multiple narratives around different tipping points when changes where introduced to, and effected by, different strands of technoculture and technopolitics. And we encourage the audience to develop their own narrative perspectives. Our aim is to open up the space of historically-grounded imagination, as we stand once again at a tipping point, uncertain which path our collective development will take.
June 26, 7pm
Mindreading/Thought Transmission
video & lecture by Margarete Jahrmann
Mindreading/Thought Transmission is a performance lecture with a film screening and a ludic text on techno- and experimental sciences from 1890 – 2019, created with the media theorist and dramaturg Marian Kaiser, Berlin.
Twelve commentaries on neurophysiological analysis technologies and measurement devices are correlated with film segments on the analysis of inner and outer surveillance data. This “interception project” follows the history of a future technology whose implementation can be expected by the year 2019: remote brain wave recording and analysis. A mind-reading lecture session introduces scenes in dialogue form, a speculative theory and a fictional narrative at the intersections of inside and outside, brain and electricity, reason and society, culture and madness. The scenes: NEUROSPIN (2016) - ONYX Swiss Surveillance Satellite Field (2012) – THOUGHT READING via YOUTUBE (2011) - SECRET COMMUNICATION SYSTEM HEDY LAMARR (1942) - THOUGHT PHOTOGRAPHY (1933) – A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU (1908) – WARDENCLYFFE TOWER (1901) – MENTAL EMISSION COHERER (1900) – BRANLY BOTTLE (1890).