MIND AND MATTER. Comparative Approaches towards Complexity

10th to 12th September 2010
Every day, 14:00 -19:00 Uhr
Raum D, QDK, quartier21, MQ, Museumsplatz 1,1070 Vienna

The terms nous (the philosophical term stems from ancient Greek - knowledge, spirit, intellect) and matter appear to signify two concepts irreplaceable and permanent in nature. The increasing challenges and modes of reflection of digital life and cultural creation have contributed to a productive doubting of said dichotomy. Net culture has exposed the causality of the two only superficially contradictory systems and translated these into new technological realities. This symposium, using an interdisciplinary approach, strives to investigate the entanglement of cultural, artistic and technical praxis, to document the developments, to clarify the status quo of the scientific community in a practical and exemplary fashion and to enable glimpses of potential future developments. The process of transformation of the scientific disciplines, the replacement of extremely heterogeneous meta-scientific values will be made as graspable as the evolution of abstract concepts or the digital saturation of the human body. The symposium aims to describe, transmit and clarify a paradigm shift of society as a whole which is still in process.


Friday, September 10th 2010: Technology

The first panel will take a close look at technical innovations and technological implications, lay out the basics of different fields and sketch the shifts of cultural, technical or political scientific and
productive methodology.

Saturday, September 11th 2010: Archives

The second panel will assume the challenge of the manifold archives and their relationship towards the public - to which they should be indebted as much as to the preserved content itself. Cultural science is joined in unison with more practical fields in the examination of storage, traces and latency as focal points.


Sunday, September 11th 2010: Networks

The third and final panel will revolve around the main metaphor of the "network" and react constructively to the preceding panels with the discussion of the terms "complexity" and "emergence". The net and the networks should, however, not only be treated as exclusively computer-related terms, but rather also be interpreted and pondered as sociobiological and neuro-scientific phenomena.