Transmediale /Conversation Piece: Everything Will Be Fine – Working Anxiety. Nishant Shah is hosting a workshop at this amazing festival which is being held on February 3-7.
Workshop with Nishant Shah, Elizabeth Losh and Jonathan Worth
Thu, 04.02.2016
13:30 - 16:30
Workspace
Anxious to Act
The military-industrial-research complex of the last century has relied on the faith in the digital as a deus ex machina to miraculously resolve our insurmountable anxieties. At the same time, the digital has by now become the established ground zero for apocalyptic futures. And paradoxically, the digital has been—again—presented as the solution to both these anxieties; digitally mediated violence is believed to be resolved by producing more digital structures and practices.
This capacity of the digital to generate, perform, mitigate, and resolve anxieties truly produces its own cybernetic feedback loop. This techno-centrism often glosses over the often-underprivileged bodies, the “undercommons,” that bear the burden of experiencing and servicing anxiety in the post-democratic age. Drawing from postcolonial locations, gendered sites, and other political contexts, this workshop will look at three kinds of post-digital bodies marked by gender, sexuality, race, and political identification, in order to produce new vocabularies, visions, and practices for engaging with and working out the anxieties of the digital.
About Nishant Shah
About transmediale:
transmediale is a Berlin-based festival and year-round project that draws out new connections between art, culture, and technology. The activities of transmediale aim at fostering a critical understanding of contemporary culture and politics as saturated by media technologies.
Under the name Conversation Piece, transmediale reboots the format of the post-digital culture event, creating a transitory space for discussion of the anxieties of late capitalism. Rather than a single-themed festival with separate exhibition and program sections, artistic and research practice will unfold live through discussions, workshops, temporary installations, performances, and various hybrid formats. Through the thematic streams that function as conversation starters, Anxious to Act, Anxious to Make, Anxious to Share, and Anxious to Secure, the Conversation Piece creates an occasion to reflect upon past transmediale themes while resolutely focusing on the ambiguity of present digital culture.
Main Venue
HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
D-10557 Berlin Germany