Shared Habitats Conference

Minds and Milieus

5 May 2019

What is really at stake when we speak about the interaction between humans, animals and technological objects? Do the classic distinctions of animate or inanimate, natural and cultural, subject and object remain valid, as we keep on discussing the future of all-encompassing artificial intelligence and the creation of living organism de novo in laboratories? Shouldn’t we understand the consciousness as liberated from the centrality of subject and discover the process of thinking and imagining outside the realm of the individual?

In this sense, the thought itself can be thought as a pure potentiality, which exceeds the poles engaged the process of cogitation and creative development. Perhaps, the interaction of ‘minds and milieus’—as equally important and mutually constitutive factors—offers a more plausible perspective to discover a more nuanced relationality and to avoid dangerous reductions that bear the tendency to downplay the non-human in many regards. The process of thinking is a form of relation within the world which has a poetical aspect of both producing the consciousness and its objects of cognition. Minds and milieus are to be thought as contained in internal tensions which produce their individual articulations.

Program

14.00-14.30. Introduction: Minds and Milieus. Kristupas Sabolius
14.30-15.30 Shared Habitats and Uexküll’s Bubble. Andrew Pickering
15.30-16.30 For an Aesthetics of Becoming beyond the Wasteocene. Yvonne Volkart
Coffee break
17.00-17.30 Art after 100 Years of Bauhaus. Ursula Damm and Birgit Brüggemeier
17.30-18.00 Other Minds. Audronė Žukauskaitė
18.00-18.30 Toward a Technological Notion of Milieu. Rebekka Ladewig and Angelika Seppi.
18:30-19:00 Final remarks and discussion.