The CARS WE LIKE - Thinking and Enacting Radical Change in Mobility - Symposium from 4th to 8th of March 2024 at AIL Vienna

As a follow-up to the 2022 conference exhaust(ed) entanglements at FU Berlin, I will be organizing a 5-day symposium & workshop titled "The CARS WE LIKE - Thinking and Enacting Radical Change in Mobility" from the 4th to the 8th of March 2024 at the AIL of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In collaboration with the Futurama.Lab, we have invited an amazing array of speakers (Institut Momentum Paris (Agnes Sinai), Kilian Jörg, La Deroute des Routes (Enora Chopard), Marta Navaridas, Rainer Prohaska, Sand im Getriebe (Anna Raabe), Luc
Schuiten, Gretchen Sorin, Arthur Summereder, System Change not Climate Change (Mira Kapfinger), Verkehrswende Österreich, Markus Wissen, Conny Zenk) and will have an exciting 5-day building workshop for the CARS WE LIKE.

Mobility is one of the major challenges of global ecological transformation and yet our ideas for innovation seem to be very limited and one-sided – especially when it comes to automobility. In this transdisciplinary workshop and symposium, we will work towards overcoming this dead zone of imagination by prefiguring better worlds, beyond an auto-centered paradigm, for the many flourishing worlds of the future.

How can mobility become a source of inspiration in a devastated global society that mostly feels it has to or is obligated to move (to work, to the supermarket, etc.) and tends to forget the joys of doing so voluntarily and as a larger-than human practice?

The environment must no longer be adapted to the car, but the car to the environment is the leading motto of this 5-day-workshop led by the Futurama.Lab. It will focus on introducing plurality and fun to the gray monotony of mundane traffic jams. Participants will be able to build dada-esque, modular forms of radically ecological cars using recycled materials, found objects and bike waste.

The accompanying symposium seeks to go beyond mere critique by combining theory and practice in a novel way. Evening lectures, panels and screenings will investigate radical utopias of car-free worlds, the need to devise new safe spaces beyond the car, the car as a crucial nexus in the consumer-capitalist system and how the arts can take part in this transformation. International experts and visionaries whose perspectives are almost unknown in the German-speaking sphere will be introduced to stimulate a dynamic discourse for the radical change we need.

You can sign up for the 5-day-workshop (and see some more infos) here.

More Info on the detailed program etc. will follow shortly!

 

Toxic Temple-Interview @ UND Heft

Anna Lerchbaumer and me were invited to give an Interview about the Toxic Temple in this beautiful magazine. The UND Heft asked us about our project mainly from the perspectives of how humor can be a strategy to deal with dire topics in the arts (and beyond) and what connections could be made between activism and the arts. The magazine is really beautifully designed and I highly recommend ordering it here. 

LANDEN - Open Lab

Next week, we'll have the second public opening of our your research cluster LANDEN. Please come by and share your experiences with this difficult topic with us!

Within Im_flieger’s artistic research project LANDEN, five artists from different fields are researching multifarious ways of (dis)orientation in relation to ecological politics and applications to the troubles of finding habitable futures. The artistic research process revolves around questions highlighted by the philosopher Bruno Latour in his 2017 book Où atterrir (Where to land?). Landing – tracing, walking, embodying, dancing and losing oneself in the problems and possibilities of exploring this complex concept of landing, a challenge and potential in equal measure.

The artists invite you to a LANDEN Open Lab to share, practice and reflect on their practical and theoretical exploration with the guests, to continue their research in the collective space.

“You want me to land on Earth? Why? – Because you’re hanging in midair, headed for a crash. – How is it down there? – Pretty tense. – A war zone? – Close: A Critical Zone, a few kilometers thick, where everything happens. – Is it habitable? – Depends on your chosen science. – Will I survive down there? – Depends on your politics.”
From “Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth” edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel

--> All the info <--

Dissident Practices: Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy (Symposium @ TU Wien & Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 4.12)

Monday next week I will be joining a symposium on "Posthumanist Approaches to a Critique of Political Economy" at TU Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts. It is open to the public and I will speak about my critique of AI as a governmental technique - a thesis I develop in a chapter of my forthcoming book Ecological Reasonings (Bloomsbury 2024) and which will be re-published in updated form in the forth-coming volume of "Dissident Practices". Please feel free to join, as I hear it will be held in a quite experimental practice open for intervention and non-hierarchical ways of though-expression. 

Find all the info here.

"PASSIVELY WATCHING THE WORLD CRUMBLE OR ACTIVELY ENGAGING IN THE PROCESS?" & "THE CARS WE LIKE" - two Panels at Futurama.Lab @ Vienna Art Week

In the background, I have been building and collaborating with a new network of artists, thinkers and makers that try to take the ecological catastrophe seriously, called FUTURAMA.LAB (inaugurated by wonderful Rainer Prohaska, who has also been the artists and mind behind the MS Fusion project of last year). We try to build a transdisciplinary hub that seeks to overcome the dichotomies between form and content that so often creates weird moralistic hybrids in the art world. We want to work on ways how art can actively and radically engage in the radical transformation needed without green- or white-washing (and perhaps in dissolving the category of "art" in the process). We have many upcoming projects and I am happy to announce that we will present some of them for the first time to the public at the VIENNA ART WEEK on 11th&12th of November.

You can find the full program here.

I have organized two panels about topics particularly dear to me. One about "ecological art-making" and what that could mean and the second one about a new project you will hopefully soon hear more about. Find the descriptions below.

 
"PASSIVELY WATCHING THE WORLD CRUMBLE OR ACTIVELY ENGAGING IN THE PROCESS?"
 
Panel Discussion
Sabrina Rosina, Alexandra Graupner & Tomas Zierhofer-Kin. Modeartion: Kilian Jörg
 
Despite its omnipresence in public discourse, we would argue that there is surprisingly little art that is engaged with our ecological predicament in creative, radical and enabling ways that go beyond mere doom-kitsch, romantisization of Nature or moral exhibitionism. In this panel bringing together curators, artists and philosophers, we want to discuss examples and ideas that show us a way forward.
 
 

 

"THE CARS WE LIKE"
 
Dialogue
Kilian Jörg & Rainer Prohaska
 
Going beyond "mere" critique of the current automobile-centered system, Kilian Jörg and Rainer Prohaska try to hack the car-system from within by inventing serious and dada-esque vehicles that follow a simple paradigm: it is no longer the environment that has to adapt to our vehicles, but our vehicles that have to become as fluid as our environments. In an open dialogue they will discuss the broader horizon of changing mobility patters by means of artistic research.
 

A Tool for Decomposing the „World as We Know it“? Resilience beyond Critique and Affirmation

In writing my book about the car (that will be titled "Autodestruktion - das moderne Selbst in der ökologischen Katastrophe" and will be released next September in'shallah), I have written some preparatory papers in English to work out the theoretical implications of my philosophy of the car as one of the main prostheses to attach our selves to modern lifestyles. They are also the best sources in English as of now to get to know more about my main project these last years (maybe next to this video of a talk of mine).

The first one has already been released a couple of months ago:

• Politicizing New Materialism against the Toxic Entanglements of the Now - Towards a New Materialist Philosophy of the Car 

 A third one will be released beginning of next year with the title

• The Car as a Machine producing Nature 
  

Now the middle one has been released with the title:

 

A Tool for Decomposing the „World as We Know it“?

Resilience beyond Critique and Affirmation

 

It is a condensation of my year-long critical occupation with the term "resilience" that I have started with my book "Backlash - Essays zur Resilienz der Moderne" and will still play an important role in "Autodestruktion". 

 

The abstract of the now released paper is:

The critique of „Resilience“ as a predominately neoliberal concept that individualizes responsibility and depoliticizes the causes of crises of late-modern statehood is certainly en vogue in the more critical branches of the Humanities. However, in spite of a significant proliferation of these critiques the concept continues to spread almost unhalted. To understand this, I want to investigate the shortcomings – and even complacency – of modern critique with what it criticizes. By reading Isabelle Stengers, Tom Boland and Denise Ferreira da Silva, I want to propose a different approach towards resilience that is not only critical, but also affirms it as a critical tool to dismantle our toxic entanglements with the neoliberal state of the “world as we know it”, as Ferreira da Silva puts it. By learning from some fringe discourses within economic theory, I want to propose a methodology of examining the resilience of political problems with the aim of slowly decomposing them. By proposing an angle of a critical examination of the “resilience of Modernity” in order to overcome this world, I want to illustrate how resilience can be translated affirmatively as a critical tool to the Humanities.

 

Read it here. 

Ist eine autofreie Stadt möglich oder nur eine Spinnerei? - Panel at KAOS Berlin, 3.11.2023 19h

I have been invited to give an introductory input to and participate at a panel about the Utopia of a Car-Free City of Berlin. Given the current government of CDU and SPD that mainly fed on the resentment of car-drivers in the last election, I think this is a particularly challenging and engaging topic and I will be very happy to try to broaden our scope to create more inclusive and fun utopias that can enable people to de-tach from the very toxic realism of the Status Quo. I will be discussing with activists and politicians and am both excited and curious about the encounters!

Join us on Friday, the 3rd of November at KAOS. Find the Event-Link here and the description in German below.

Initiativen wie „Volksentscheid Berlin autofrei", „Aktionsbündnis A100 stoppen!" oder die „Bürger*innen-Initiative Wuhlheide" setzen sich für eine Verkehrswende und für die Abwendung von der autozentrierten Stadt ein.

Die Debatte um den Bau der TVO (Tangentialverbindung Ost) hat die
Bedeutsamkeit dieser Diskussionen für Treptow-Köpenick sichtbar gemacht.
Im Wahlkampf zur Abgeordnetenhauswahl 2023 und auch im politischen Alltagsgeschäft standen und stehen dagegen vermehrt die Perspektiven von autofahrenden Menschen im Fokus.

Die Diskussion um verkehrs- und klimapolitische Themen löst Emotionen aus. Wir möchten verschiedene Positionen zu diesen Themen an einen Tisch bringen und diskutieren.

Dazu laden „KLIMA IM KAOS" des KAOS e.V. und das „Zentrum für Demokratie Treptow-Köpenick" am 3. November 2023 zu einer Diskussionsveranstaltung in das KAOS in Berlin-Oberschöneweide ein.

Beginn: 19:00 Uhr, Einlass: 18:30 Uhr

Der Eintritt ist frei.
Barrierefreiheit: Der Veranstaltungsraum ist nur über eine Treppe zu erreichen. Ein Aufzug ist leider nicht vorhanden.