FUTURE MANIFESTOS – Konferanse
DIGS, Krambugata 2 / 10. & 11. APRIL, 10:00 – 14:30
Gratis inngang.
Kurator: Zane Cerpina
DEEP FACULTIES – A TIME MACHINE FOR ADVANCED THINKING IN THE ARTS
Artificial Extelligences & Quantum Faculties
As an anarchaeologist of arts and media, I live in and with a time machine. Shaping future presents means for me constantly rethinking the origins of the fields of our knowledge and our actions, and extracting surprising variations from them. Both, past and future, are spaces of possibilities, potential spaces. They meet in the now of our activity, in which interventionist thinking can develop in the form of surprise generators.
It is in this spirit that I have developed approximately 20 faculties over the past two decades, which, like Italo Calvino’s Imaginary Cities, may well remain largely fictional. However, they should have the strength to effectively challenge the reality of our established cultural and artistic institutions and, in the best-case scenario, to transgress them.
Included in this presentation is a compressed version of my Short Manifesto on Artificial Extelligences. This pamphlet-like text tries to interfere with the meanwhile inflationary debate on AI with a different provocative terminology and two basic assumptions:
i) Deep thinking happens inside the human brain and body. It is an inner experience. Media are excorporated realities. Electric thinking still happens outside of the body.
ii) The existing Large Learning Models for text, image, and sound are not creating photos, films, or music anymore, but algorithmic artifacts. Used in a clever and sensitive way, they can open the space of possibilities for my deep faculties.
“The function of art for me is to make reality impossible.” (Heiner Müller)
Prof. Dr. Siegfried Zielinski [DE]
Siegfried Zielinski is Professor Em. of Media Theory at Berlin University of the Arts, Michel Foucault Professor of Media Archaeology & Techno-Culture at the European Graduate School (EGS) Saas Fee, visiting Professor at Tongji University Shanghai, and honorary Professor at the Budapest University of the Arts. He was the founding rector (1994–2000) of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, director of the Vilém Flusser Archive (1998–2016), and rector of the Karlsruhe University of Arts & Design (2016–2018). Zielinski has published extensively on the archaeology and variantology of the arts and media, including Audiovisions (1989/1999), Deep Time of the Media (2002/2006), (… after the Media) – News from the Outfading 20th Century (2012/2013), and Variations on Media Thinking (2019). In cooperation with Peter Weibel, he worked as a curator for exhibitions on “Vilém Flusser and the Arts”, “Allah’s Automata”, or Ramon Llull and his early thinking machines. The catalogue for the last exhibition in this cooperation, Art in Motion – 100 master pieces of Art with and through Media, was published in 2025. With musician and sound researcher FM Einheit, founding member of the band Einstuerzende Neubauten, he produced critical-poetical sound pieces for Teodor Currentzi’s platform, MusicAeterna, and for diverse German radio stations. With musician and composer Anthony Moore, he developed the format of “Expanded Lecture”, integrating sound, music, and sciences. Zielinski is an elected member of the Berlin Academy of Arts and the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
http://genealogy-of-media-thinking.net/?lang=en
https://raco.cat/index.php/Artnodes/issue/view/32198
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Photo credits: Portrait photo: Inge Zimmermann (AdK Berlin). Photo representing the talk: On the old French postcard, the little girl in the foreground is the embodiment of CLINAMEN, the deviation without which there is no movement (and no life). All the devoutly disciplined adults are forced to look in the same direction. The angle they form with their bodies towards Mecca is geometrically precisely prescribed. The girl breaks the rule and triggers a potentially new constellation…
