The media theorist and net critic Geert Lovink has been observing developments in the digital world with growing concern for years. He warned early on about platform capitalism and urged us to delete our Facebook profiles. His analyses show how interaction in social media can produce a special kind of sadness. Nevertheless, he has not yet lost faith in a better web. His new book Stuck on the Platform. Reclaiming the Internet (transcript, 2022) has just been published in German. In it, he calls on us to develop “our own versions of the technosocial”. In conversation with media scientist Annekathrin Kohout (“Nerds. Eine Popkulturgeschichte”, “Netzfeminismus. Digitale Bildkulturen”), Geert Lovink presents the German translation of the book for the first time.

After the talk at the FFT Düsseldorf, all interested parties are invited to join a public viewing session: Together we will watch the livestream of internil’s performance Blackout in the foyer and interact via chat bot with the stage of Theaterdiscounter Berlin.


Our guests

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of, among others, Dark Fiber (2002), Zero Comments (2007), Under the Spell of Platforms (2017) and Digital Nihilism. Theses on the Dark Side of Platforms (2019) among others. Lovink is the founding director of the media-theoretical Institute of Network Cultures (INC) based at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, which has been dedicated to culture in virtual networks as a social phenomenon since 2004. Since 2021, Lovink has also been Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the University of Amsterdam.

networkcultures.org
Geert Lovink in the Collective Chronicle of Thoughts and Observations, 2017

Annekathrin Kohout is a media scholar and co-editor of the book series “Digital Image Cultures” and the journal “POP. Kultur und Kritik” and a member of the editorial board of the international “Journal of Global Pop Cultures”. Her book “Nerds. Eine Popkulturgeschichte” was published by C.H. Beck in 2022. She is currently a guest lecturer at the Institute for Media, Theatre and Popular Culture at the University of Hildesheim.

With Dr. Inke Arns, Prof. Dr. Adrian Daub und Jonas Lüscher
Moderated by: Dr. Iuditha Balint und Fabian Saavedra-Lara

Together with the cooperation partners, the Fritz-Hüser-Institut für Literatur und Kultur der Arbeitswelt and the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, the Office medienwerk.nrw cordially invites you to the discussion “What the Valley calls thinking – and how it is talked about” with the literary scholar and publicist Prof. Dr. Adrian Daub, the writer Jonas Lüscher and the curator and director of the HMKV Dr. Inke Arns on June 15, 2022 at 7pm. The venue is the cinema in the Dortmunder U.

On the occasion of the current HMKV exhibition House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm, the discussion event at Dortmunder U will bring some thoughts from Adrian Daub’s and Jonas Lüscher’s texts into dialogue with the ideas and selected works from the exhibition. What all three participants have in common is the concern to take a critical and differentiated look at the history of ideas in Silicon Valley and the narratives about digital technologies produced by the companies residing there. In the discussion, some of these myths, which currently revolve around the buzzword “artificial intelligence”, for example, will be named and deconstructed. The event will be moderated by Dr. Iuditha Balint (Fritz Hüser Institute) and Fabian Saavedra-Lara (Büro medienwerk.nrw).

About the guests:
The Cologne-born Germanist and literary scholar Prof. Dr. 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.

Dr. Inke Arns is the director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany. She has worked internationally as an independent curator and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. After living in Paris (1982-1986) she studied Russian literature, Eastern European studies, political science, and art history in Berlin and Amsterdam (1988–1996 M.A.) and in 2004 received her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin. She has curated many exhibitions – at the bauhaus dessau, MG+MSUM Ljubljana, Gallery EXIT Pejë, KW Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, CCA Glasgow, CCA Ujazdowski Castle Warsaw, HMKV Dortmund, HKW Berlin, Muzeum Sztuki Lodz, La Gaîté Lyrique Paris, MMOMA Moscow, BOZAR Brussels, NCCA Yekaterinburg, exportdrvo Rijeka, a.o. She is the author of many articles on contemporary art, media art and net culture, and has edited numerous exhibition catalogues and books. In 2021-2022 Visiting Professor at the Münster Art Academy. 2022 Curator of the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo (artist: Jakup Ferri), 59th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.

The Talk will be held in German.
Admission is free, no registration required.

The programme is funded by NEUSTART KULTUR and Stiftung Kunstfonds.