Ph.D. seminar: researching BWPWAP
In collaboration with transmediale festival, Berlin and Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Lüneburg, PIT is co-hosting a research seminar dedicated to the thematic theme of the upcoming transmediale festival: Back When Pluto Was a Planet. The seminar takes place Nov 22-24. In Lünbeburg, Germany.
In referring to the cancellation of Pluto’s planetary status in 2006, transmediale 2013 interrogates techno-cultural processes of displacement and invention. Back When Pluto Was a Planet, life might have seemed more innocent, yet whole cultural imaginaries, like planetary systems, may change overnight, and technical and cultural paradigms along with them. The festival will take this fragility of culture as a point of departure for exploring the disruptive potential of technological development and artistic practice.
This Ph.D. workshop, which precedes transmediale, asks how BWPWAP can be interpreted in the context of research culture. If Pluto didn’t exactly fall prey to an epistemological break or a scientific revolution, but rather to a mundane administrative procedure – a redefinition of what constitutes a planet and the invention of the category “dwarf planet” – then what does this say about contemporary research culture? What complicity can be constructed, with or without Pluto, between network and research cultures? Can digital culture save research from itself, and vice versa?
The participants will research concepts and phenomena that, in the light of the festival’s thematic framework, have become destabilised by network culture and digital media. Thematically, the seminar takes transmediale’s thematic framework as a broad starting point, and building on their own individual research, the participants have proposed to develop new perspectives on knowledge production, ecologies, curation, bodies, crowds, economies, and collaborations.
The aim of the seminar is to develop the participants’ individual research projects as well as foster networking, developing a platform for knowledge exchange, research across the arts and sciences, and to foster new forms of collaborative research, peer-review, publication and performative knowledge dissemination. The PhD workshop is a chance for young researchers to share ideas and development processes across and beyond the time/space of academic research paradigms.
The event follows on from similar events organised in 2012 and 2011 at Universität der Künste (Berlin), and Aarhus University, respectively. For the publication resulting from the last events, visit the following.
- darc.imv.au.dk/worldofthenewspaper.pdf
- darc.imv.au.dk/publicinterfaces
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