TALK “WHAT TECH CALLS THINKING – AND HOW IT IS TOLD ABOUT”
HMKV im Dortmunder U | CINEMA, GROUND FLOOR And online
MI, 15th JunE 2022, 19 – 21 p.m.
With Dr. Inke Arns, Prof. Dr. Adrian Daub und Jonas Lüscher
Moderated by: Dr. Iuditha Balint und Fabian Saavedra-Lara
The Cologne-born Germanist and literary scholar Adrian Daub is professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, where he is the director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
He writes on topics such as early feminism, memory culture and 19th century German popular and musical culture. His book “What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley” (suhrkamp, 2020) tells the story of Silicon Valley – a region that has risen to become the most powerful IT and high-tech location in the world over the last 70 years. In his book, Daub, who established his professional focus at Stanford in close proximity to the Valley, questions its self-staging by examining the rhetoric of entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel or Mark Zuckerberg and historically contextualising the ideology of the industry.
Jonas Lüscher is a Swiss-German writer and essayist. After studying philosophy, he did intensive research on the significance of narratives for the description of social complexity and in this context he had a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation for a research stay at Stanford. His novella “Frühling der Barbaren” (2013) is about the importance of narratives in social contexts – in this book, Richard Rorty’s theories come to bear narratively. His novel “Kraft” (2017) tells about the mentality and rhetoric of Silicon Valley. As a socially and politically engaged essayist, Jonas Lüscher publishes on various topics such as economics and populism.
The talk “What Tech Calls Thinking – and how it is talk about” is being held in cooperation with the Fritz Hüser Institute for Literature and Culture of the Working World, the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein and the Office medienwerk.nrw at the Dortmunder U. The event is part of the programme accompanying the HMKV exhibition “House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm”. In the discussion, some thoughts from Adrian Daub’s and Jonas Lüscher’s texts will be brought into dialogue with the ideas and selected works in the exhibition.
More about House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm
The Talk will be held in German.
Admission is free, no registration required.
The event will also be broadcast via live stream.
Click here for the livestream of the event
Portraits:
Adrian Daub: © Cynthia Newberry
Jonas Lüscher: © Ulrike Arnold/Jonas Lüscher
Inke Arns: © Frank Vinken
