Worldbuilding

Science Fiction. Utopia & Dystopia. Ecofiction. Biopolitics. Alternate Histories.

schedule

03. - 07.02.2025
11:00 - 17:00 exMedia Lab

references, sources, links

short comments and links following soon.
please enhance and add to the list!

03.02.

• language, set of symbols and agreeing upon it
• language: The Letter W
• language: System of numbers: Every number is Base 10
• POV. thinking about the forest without us. how do you change perspectives?
• Francis Bacon, 1626 Utopia
• About Mark Fisher: Deutschlandfunk-Blogeintrag
• "Every utopia has to take responsibility of the monsters it creates", see Donna Haraways text The Promises of Monsters (access to pdf via khm-login)
• looking critically at hypernormalisation (link)

05.02.

• Ward Shelley (gallery link). History of Science Fiction: drawing
• butoh, dance, Alisa Berger
• hypernormalisation, thoughtmaybe.com
• ferreiro... (miguel fragen: south american science fiction author)
• ziggy stardust
• the man who fell to earth
• vince mcmahon, WWE
• Wrestling as a medium: Kampf um die Stadt (Brechtfestival)
• idiocracy
• pop fashism arte documentation

further // more // zum sortieren

• can Sci-Fi age well? → Jacques Tati → Playtime
• animation and experimental science fiction by bill wurtz
• trope of „born sexy yesterday“ (in Sci-Fi)
• computer game worlds & economics → EVE Online
• Sci-Fi on stage:

1. Girl from the Fog Machine Factory
2. WoW – Word on Wirecard
3. Ultraworld

course text

Let’s go on a wild, critical five day journey of speculative thinking. We’ll explore futuristic architectural design, obscure visionary cinematic and other artistic achievements as well as texts ranging from socio-political satires to avant-garde manifestos from past and present. A collision trip including space travel, psychoactive drugs, relations of power, temporalities, immortality, environmental imagination as well as tentative governance of hypothetical technology and emerging science. At the start of the semester we will provide a syllabus as well as texts for self-study and preparation. During the workshop we give in-depth presentations as well as exercises to, collectively or individually, try out your own speculative concepts.

Adorno said (in 1964): „It seems to me that what people have subjectively lost in their consciousness is the ability, quite simply, to imagine the whole as something that could be totally different“. Let’s prove him wrong.