Angewandte Kulturtheorie

POETICS OF ASSEMBLY: DATA, ENERGY, AND LABOURING LOGISTICS ACROSS THE NEW EVERYDAY

Entangled across material and virtual contexts and between notions of the present and future that are equally exploitative and aspirational, the increasingly massive needs of everyday urban life–energy, infrastructure, and circulation—now unfold at a scale that renders efforts to engage these systems in their complexity a struggle, particularly when we seek to do so on more intimate or tangible scales.  Using notions of site encounter, multi-layered investigation, and norm-critical digression across mundane and boring landscapes of the present, this workshop will short-circuit divisions between humans and non-humans, workers and consumers, sites near and far, and powers up and down.

In the sense that our notions of public life have also become unstable, invoking assembly as a public practice of poetics and contingent imagination across these tensions involves acts of criss-crossing and merging, low-key study and reinvention. Drawing on practices of experimental “scores” or forms of annotation played out in time and space, this workshop also challenges narratives of futurity and efficiency, positing collaborative poetics as a simultaneous form of mess, collapse, and longing that refuses direct representation as causal linearity, breaks the mold of the stories we’re sold that need to make sense. (Informed by an ongoing collaboration with the poet and media theorist Tung-hui Hu)

Applied Cultural Theory
Univ.Lekt. Benjamin Gerdes, M.A.

Location: Seminarraum AC0440

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