Scaling Connections II - Pizzagate

About

For the official cooperation program of transmediale 2019, Import Projects presents four evenings of lecture-performance, installation, spoken-word performance, discussion, voice & instrumental improvisation, film screening and participatory intervention in dialogue with the festival key question ‘What Moves You?’—referring not only to an emotional response but also to the infrastructures and aesthetics that govern how affect becomes mobilised as a political force today. Foregrounding the continuum which links rare-earth elements, raw materials, hardware, software, and even cognition, the event series Scaling Connections turns around the blurred boundaries between organic and inorganic, intelligence, artifice, art, and resistance. 

SCALING CONNECTIONS draws from Deep History reminding us to constantly observe reasoning commonly internalised and conducted according to strict principles of validity, an appeal not only for viewing natural history and that of human culture but also for seeing our cognitive and psychological history. A critical debate over the last decades has stimulated sensitisation for interdisciplinary research and further historical interpretations, for instance focusing on trends and processes, drawing attention to connections and traditions and a shared substance, like deep kinship, able to reveal striking transformations in human behaviour. Reaching back to the beginning of life itself, to the primordial sandwich as proposed by the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser in 1988, fostering surprising connections. Deep History advocates to revive the foundation of humanity by scaling up from the molecular to the molar without the bias and in the process decentres humankind’s position. The central question of the event series is how the future of our brains—in the role of a constitutive element of freedom of choice—could look against the backdrop of a deeper understanding of our history in relation to today's ever-closer wiring with technologies.