Theory seminar main study and postgraduate study
Thursdays weekly 11 am – 1 pm | Start 11.04.2024
Filzengraben 8 – 10, 0.2 [ ] ground zero, Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Magic and technology are two seemingly contradictory concepts, but they are linked in many ways. Both magic and technology have a genuinely poietic character. The focus is on achieving very worldly goals such as the provision of material goods, power, prosperity, fertility, etc. Both are about control and expanding the effectiveness of human action, but this requires special expertise in each case. Above all, however, magic and technology are linked by the fundamental explanatory gap between the ritual or technical actions on the one hand and the effects of these actions on the other. We will examine this gap of not understanding and not being able to explain in more detail, particularly for a number of technical and algorithmic methods. These include: Machine Learning and Embedding methods in Artificial Intelligence, the emergence phenomenon in cellular automata, genetic and evolutionary algorithms, and embodiment in robotics. The fact that we can no longer understand current technology is therefore not just a question of our convenience or the excessive diversity of technical principles, but an ontological-epistemological problem.
The connection between magic and technology is also used as a starting point in the seminar to reflect on the social impact of technological developments. To this end, various “ontologies” such as animism, naturalism, totemism and analogism (according to Descola) are juxtaposed.
