excursion: imaginaries

Get your tickets for the excursion Imaginaries here.

The Imaginaries excursion challenges standard histories and future trajectories of media practice and thinking. It features performances, installations, and discussions of speculative design projects, science fiction, imaginary media, and archaeological investigations that intercut past, present, and future. What are media, but also when are media, and how do they mediate the production of reality? What is the relationship between speculation and design? Can alternative realities be conjured into being—or is imagination itself a product of cultural, historical, and material contexts? The featured art and research practices challenge the current drive toward a Western biased techno-colonialism, paying special attention to other sites and imaginaries of technological development and their relation to art and cultural movements.

The excursion takes place in the historical Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus, a site of shifting cultural and political imaginaries. The house first opened in 1915 as the German Society of Surgery. After the war, it was seized by the state and served as the GDR House of Parliament until the Academy of the Arts (East) took over in 1976. In 2000, ownership was restored to the Society of Surgery, and now, the building functions as a venue for conferences and fairs related to medicine and life sciences. Three editions of the transmediale festival (then called VideoFest), which occurred between 1990-1992 after the reunification, took place at The Academy of Arts (East), using the historical auditorium of the Langenbeck-Virchow House for screenings and the neighboring academy buildings on Robert-Koch Platz for exhibition, market, and networking events.

With: Bager Akbay, Morehshin Allahyari, Ayhan Ayteş, Sophia Gräfe, Darsha Hewitt, Jussi Parikka, Rasheedah Phillips & Moor Mother (Black Quantum Futurism Collective), Ebru Yetişkin