On the equally specific and general, productive and reproductive, material and immaterial nature of artistic labour.
Today
Ongoing
Winter Semester 2023/24
Information, 16 October 2023 – 9 February 2024
Lectures Winter Semester 2023/24
Information, 7 November 2023 – 6 February 2024
Upcoming
Rundgang 2024
Exhibition, 9 – 11 February 2024, 10:00–20:00
Nika Dubrovsky: Another art world: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity
Lecture, 28 November 2023, 19:00
Iris Touliatou: In this Economy
Lecture, 21 November 2023, 19:00
Gareth Evans: An Act of Care: Curation–A Modest Proposal
Lecture, 13 – 14 November 2023, 19:00
Helena Uambembe: Creating Myth for a historical understanding
Lecture, 7 November 2023, 19:00
Summer Term Break 2023
Information, 17 July – 13 October 2023
GROTTO – Graduate Show 2023
Exhibition, 14 – 30 July 2023
Hoor Al Qasimi: Sharjah Biennial 15. Thinking Historically in the Present
Lecture, 4 July 2023, 19:00
Manthia Diawara & Monika Szewczyk: AI: African Intelligence
Screening, 28 June 2023, 20:15
Lynn Rother: Uncanny provenance. Art history and its double
Lecture, 27 June 2023, 19:00
Slavs and Tatars: The Transliterative Tease
Lecture, 20 June 2023
Amt 45 i: Talks
Symposium, 17 June 2023, 14:00–20:30
another night in daimler
Konzert, 16 June 2023, 20:00
Jacqui Davies: Playing with Fire or the perils of working at the intersection of art and film
Lecture, 13 June 2023, 19:00
Willem de Rooij: King Vulture
Lecture, 6 June 2023, 19:00
Vittoria Martini & Thomas Hirschhorn: The Ambassador’s Diary
Talk, 1 June 2023
Tarek Lakhrissi: Beastangel
Lecture, 16 May 2023
Éric Baudelaire: When There is No More Music to Write (Lecture)
Lecture, 9 May 2023
Éric Baudelaire: When There is No More Music to Write (Screening)
Screening, 8 May 2023
Lectures Summer Semester 2023
Lecture, 2 May – 7 July 2023
Grada Kilomba: A conversation about the 35th Bienal de São Paulo
Lecture, 2 May 2023, 19:00
Summer Semester 2023
Information, 11 April – 14 July 2023
Admission Period for Full-time Studies in Fine Arts 2023/24
Information, 1 – 30 April 2023
Lap-See Lam "Tales of the Altersea" at Portikus
Exhibition, 11 March – 28 May 2023
Peter Weibel (1944–2023)
Information, 1 – 15 March 2023
Winter Term Break 2022/23
Information, 13 February – 10 April 2023
The Mensa is taking a break!
Information, 13 – 20 February 2023
Rundgang 2023
Exhibition, 10 – 12 February 2023, 10:00–20:00
Water Cooler Talks 2023
Lecture, 10 – 12 February 2023
Rundgang Film Program at DFF
Exhibition, 10 – 12 February 2023
Rundgang Party 2023
Party, 10 February 2023, 23:00
Rundgang Awards 2023
Information, 10 – 24 February 2023
On the Benefits of Friendship—A symposium in honor of Prof. Dr. Isabelle Graw
Symposium, 27 January 2023, 14:00–18:00
Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw: city limits
Lecture, 24 January 2023, 19:00
Christina Li: Time, dispossessed
Lecture, 17 January 2023, 19:00

Keller Easterling: Medium Design
A different habit of mind about design and politics might begin with one simple observation. Culture is very good at pointing to things and calling their name, but not so good at describing the interactivity or chemistry between things. While designers are good at designing buildings, they might also design the medium in which those buildings are suspended. The extended repertoire offers additional aesthetic pleasures and political capacities that may elevate the status of spatial variables in culture.
In medium design, the logics and rules for addressing problems are turned upside down or inside out. With a focus on ground instead of figure or field instead of object, medium can’t really be assessed by a name, shape or outline but rather by what might be called disposition—latent properties that unfold over time and territory, propensities within a context or potentials in relative position. That disposition, that agency in arrangement, like an operating system or a growth medium, decides what will live or die. In this matrix of activity where it is easier to detect, discrepancy, latency, temperament and indeterminacy, right answers are less important than unfolding or branching sequences of response that are not reliant on discrete events or solutions.
Benefitting from an artistic curiosity about reagents and spatial mixtures or spatial wiring, medium design suggests different organs of design or different ways to register the design imagination. Beyond buildings, master plans, declarations, laws, or standards, it considers the political powers of multipliers, switches or time released organs of interplay like bargains, chain reactions, ratchets. These are forms that might inflect populations of objects or set up relative potentials within them.
Medium design is ever present in many disciplines. It learns from the work of Harold Innis as well as Marshall McLuhan when it gets related to mass communication. But it can also be akin to the non-modern thinking that according to Bruno Latour steps out of its hierarchies and ultimates into a “as vast as China, and as little known.” It is thus related to the focus on disposition/dispositif /disposition that fascinates Michele Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, or Gilbert Ryle. Medium design is attuned to reverberations of aesthetic practices in cultural networks about which Walter Benjamin or Jacques Rancière write. Lending from J.J. Gibson, one could say that there is a sense of the affordances of things at play. Or from Gregory Bateson: a sense of temperament in the interplay of things.
At a moment of digital ubiquity, it may be easier to treat digital platforms as primary in contemporary innovation and to believe that, if coated with sensors in an internet of things, the stiff, dumb world will suddenly become responsive and “smart.” But the heavy lumpy components of space are themselves information systems that don’t really need digital devices to make them dance. As Gregory Bateson noted, a man a tree and an ax is an information system. So, since architecture and urbanism are making radical changes to the globalizing world, space may be an underexploited medium of innovation.
Bored with the rhetorical, the seminar meetings foreground actual experiments in medium design that attempt to leverage some heavy spatial consequences.
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction(Sternberg, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Her research and writing was included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and will be included in the 2018 Biennale.
She lectures and exhibits internationally.
Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt.