rcpp Workshop Marathon! Winter 2015/16

New Media is wonderfully creepy
Lecture and workshop with Wendy Chun, (Brown University).
9th December, 10am-2pm
Hörsaal and Raum 115
New media technologies provoke both anxiety and hope: anxiety over surveillance and hope for empowerment. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals that these two reactions complement rather than oppose each other by emphasizing how exposure is necessary in order for networks to work. New media is–at its best–wonderfully creepy.

…………………………………………………………………………………………
Proxy Wars and Proxy Politics
Lecture and workshop with   Oleksiy Radynski, filmmaker and writer (Kiev).
11th + 12th January,
Raum 115
In 2003, Harun Farocki concluded his documentary War at a Distance by
stating that current wars are no longer fought between the equals: rather, they are outsourced and exported to the already degraded, downbeat and devastated parts of the globe. In post-2008 era this formula needs to be revised, as zones of total impoverishment, permanent crisis and collapse of state sovereignties sprout into areas formerly  known as ‘First’ and ‘Second’ worlds. While Russia is deeply entangled into the undeclared war in Ukraine, planting the post-sovereign militarized para-states in the East of Europe, France is declaring a war on an ephemeral and elusive entity that is Islamic State. It seems that the central figure of today’s warfare is a proxy gone rogue. Is the proxy war merely a continuation of proxy politics by other means? This seminar will trace the emergence of ‘proxy’ subjectivity through the reading of texts by Nick Dyer-Witheford (Cyber-Proletariat, 2015) and Giorgio Agamben (Stasis, 2015), as well as a number of visual artefacts. On a second day of the seminar, three films by Oleksiy Radynski made between 2013 and 2015 will be screened and discussed.
Oleksiy Radynski is a documentary filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. He
is a participant of Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge and politics founded in Kyiv in 2008.

…………………………………………………………………………………………
Computing In-Formation: Data and its base

Workshop with Franics Hunger, artist (Leipzig)
18th + 19th January
Raum 115
This workshop aims to establish a notion of computing history that is oriented towards database software. During the first day we look into diverse practices of database usage, its historical and social origins.
Knowledge production by way of the library, the collection, the processing of mathematical equations in the age of human computing and bio-political practices such as statistics, data collection, resource management and insurance business have informed database technologies.
Lately, notions like big data or large scale search engines were added to this set of practices. During the second day the discussion focuses on tables and relations that form and put in form the base of data. And we go for a database dérive, which means we go outside to observe databases in their natural habitat to sense the infrastructural dimension of database usage today.
Francis Hunger (*1976, Dessau) lives and works in Leipzig. In his practice he combines artistic research with the capabilities of narration through installations, radio plays and performances. His media-archeological works realize a critical examination of the history of technology as ideologically charged knowledge and power constellations.