DIAS Lecture by Dominique Routhier, postdoc in the Department of Language and Culture Art and Automation: Cybernetics, Modernism and the Avantgarde Abstract: In a 2022 New York Times article, an artist who won a local art competition with an AI-generated artwork dramatically declared: ‘Art is dead, dude. It's over. AI won. Humans lost.’ This statement exemplifies a broader sense of anxiety about AI and automation, extending beyond concerns about jobs and livelihoods to encompass fundamental aspects of the human condition: our ability to think, reason, communicate, and express ourselves artistically. In a DIAS lecture presenting his new book, With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation, Dominique Routhier historicizes the automation-debate by returning to its ‘cybernetic’ origins in the 1950s. The lecture thus focuses on the centrality of cybernetics—a largely forgotten interdisciplinary ‘science of communication and control’—to the postwar moment in art, and, by way of examples from mid-century modernism and the avantgarde, argues that the history of automation and the history of art are deeply intertwined. About: Dominique Routhier is a postdoc in the Department of Language and Culture at the University of Southern Denmark, an affiliate at DIAS (Danish Institute for Advanced Studies), and part of the research project ‘Drone Imaginaries and Communities’ (Independent Research Fund Denmark, 2020-2024). His research focuses on the cultural history of automation, with a particular interest in the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. Dominique is currently at work on a scholarly handbook, The Aesthetics of Machine Vision: Critical Terms and Ideas (in review, MIT Press). His writings have appeared in numerous Scandinavian and international journals, including K&K, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Rethinking Marxism, Boundary 2, Historical Materialism, and LARB, among other places. Author of With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation (Verso Books, 2023). About: The lecture takes place in the DIAS Seminaroom Fioniavej 34 from 11:15 to 12:15. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed.

DIAS Lecture by Giovanna Cifolletti, Membres émérites et honoraires, Directrice d'études de l'EHESS From Early modern (European) symbolic algebra: a rhetorical project ? My research project aims to understand the sense of the symbolic algebra of Viète and Descartes, in the context of 16th-century Europe. To apply a sociological scheme could hardly bridge the gap between mathematical theory and practice on the one hand and the actual concerns of scientists and practitioners (including masters of crafts and merchants) on the other. Hence I opted for a social history approach in the sense defined by Lucien Febvre in connection with 16th-century people: our purpose is to see how people formulated their problems and found strategies to solve them. This invites us to search for information in documents about the history of books and printing, of universities, of academies and civic schools. At the theoretical level, we look for the connections of algebra, geometry and arithmetic with other disciplines or liberal arts: besides mathematics, these include grammar, rhetoric and logic or dialectic; within mathematics, there are the links with the mathematical arts music and astronomy as well as with many subordinate arts such as optics or chronology, calendars and commercial arithmetic. Febvre’s approach insists on paying attention to the perspective of the actors, not only as an intellectual curiosity but as the search for an actual comparison with our research. In fact, Lucien Febvre shares categories with the people he studies: for instance putting problems and solutions at the center of intellectual life is a typical move of 16th-century rhetoric and logic. With the study of symbolic algebra we are in a similar position: algebra in the 16th- century was transformed to become the science of formulating problems and their solutions. Today we shall see in particular how 15th- century vernacular rhetoric and logic of Lorenzo Valla created the conditions for this transformation in the works of Jacques Peletier, so that on this basis algebra itself replaced logic in Descartes and Fermat. About Giovanna Cifoletti, Professor and Directrice d'Etudes à l'EHESS, L’école des hautes études en sciences sociales, the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Histoire des sciences et des techniques, Doctor of Philosophy. Her research areas are the History of Mathematics, especially early modern algebra. Intellectual and social European and Mediterranean history in the early modern period. Abacus Schools: texts and commercial practices. Mathematics, rhetoric and logic in early modern Europe, especially among jurists and mathematicians. The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34from 11:15 to 12:15. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed.

DIAS Lecture by Prof. Dr. Bernhard Siegert, Gerd Bucerius Professor for the History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at Bauhaus Universität Weimar From Filtering to Imaging - MediaNatures of Plankton (1889 – 2019) By giving the concept of “environing technologies” (Sørlin and Wormbs) a media theoretical twist, the talk undertakes to re-perspectivize the history of plankton research in the North Atlantic from the angle of a praxeology of media. The talk will be divided into four sections: First, the concept of “environing media” is explained. The remaining sections will be devoted to three historical epochs of plankton research in the North Atlantic, or more precisely to the media practices (or “Kulturtechniken”), by which we can distinguish these epochs, and which gave rise to three different “medianatures” of plankton. Thus, it can be shown that the media history of microbiological oceanography proceeds through unstable distinctions between medium and message. By conclusion one could argue that plankton as such never existed, but only the "effective range" of the media systems used in each case. About: Bernhard Siegert is Gerd Bucerius Professor for the History and Theory of Cultural Techniques at Bauhaus Universität Weimar. From 2008 to 2020 he was co-director of the International Research Center for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy at Weimar (IKKM). Since 2021 he leads the project “The New Real – Past, Present, and Future of Computation and the Ecologization of Cultural Techniques” funded by the NOMIS Foundation. Siegert has held visiting professorships and scholarships at UC Santa Barbara, New York University, University of British Columbia, University of Cambridge, Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, and Harvard University. His many publications have drawn upon disciplines including the histories of sciences and technologies, art, literature, and data processing to deconstruct supposedly ontologically or naturally given entities in terms of a history of mediums and cultural techniques. Translations in English of his work on media theory and history have appeared as Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford University Press, 1999) and, more recently, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (Fordham University Press, 2015). The lecture takes place in the DIAS Auditorium, Fioniavej 34from 11:15 to 12:15. Everybody is welcome and no registration is needed.

Workshop Wednesday, December 13, 13:15–17:00 Tobias Nanz & Anders Engberg-Pedersen Host: DIAS in cooperation with the Department of Culture and Language (SDU), the Center for War Studies (SDU) and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Venue: DIAS seminar room Topic: The sea is an unknown smooth space. It is a space from which natural forces emanate, it is loaded with fictions that are meant to make it comprehensible. It is a space of trading and communication, but also a space of battles, war, and disruption. Since ancient times people such as coast dwellers, government officials, or military thinkers have sought to control the sea with ships and submarines and with specific media and cultural techniques. This workshop brings together perspectives from literature, media and culture studies to discuss the challenges of the sea and people’s struggle to transform the smooth space into a striated and thus controllable space. 13:15 – 13:30: Introduction 13:30 – 15:00: Panel 1 / Chair: Tobias Nanz Bernhard Siegert (BU Weimar): Trafalgar: Victory through Love and Hermeneutics Søren Frank (SDU): Coastal havoc in Peder Frederik Jensen’s Rans vilje (2023) and Holger Drachmann’s ’Efter Orkanen’ (1881) 15:00 – 15:30: Coffee and Cookies 15:30 – 17:00: Panel 2 / Chair: Anders Engberg-Pedersen Lieven Raymaekers (KU Leuven): War and the Ocean: Man, Media and Submarine Fiction Tobias Nanz (SDU): Noisy Shores. Communicating (after) the Apocalypse

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