During the three-day conference, internationally renowned artists and thinkers from various disciplines explore and speculate on what being human means in the present time. Old notions of individualism and the supposed privileged status of humanity are no longer sustainable, while climate change and immense technological shifts demand that we reassess our self-image.

Session 1: Unbinding Mediatisation

10:30 - 11:30

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Metahaven In our darkest dreams, our bodies, emotions, reality and knowledge are dominated by hypervisibility, data collection, the ubiquitous regimes of micro-surveillance, and the tyranny of fake news and populist factoids. We have become little puppets in a machine, controlled by an insidious, fear- mongering, manipulative framework. Can we imagine how this began and how we can end it? Hot Readings (performance)

11:30 - 11:50

Erica Scourti In Hot Readings, Scourti presents her public YouTube record, consisting of lectures, performances and interviews. This record is intercut with her own private viewing history and automatically generated subtitles. While meandering through these historical accounts, Scourti creates a new textual record; a compressed temporality in which mediated and bodily presence battle each other. Session 2: Decapitating Capitalism

13:30 - 15:00

Isabell Lorey, Nina Power, Peter Frase Decapitating Capitalism asks is there a world after capitalism and what could it look like? Can we invent new ways of living together based on a shared precariousness? How can social sciences and speculative fiction help us to imagine new roads to the future? Session 3: Tipping Points

16:00 - 17:30

John Palmesino, Natasha Ginwala, Nick Axel Modernity is grounded in a conception of time that understands historical progression and change to be derived from a series of particular events, particular places, particular people, and particular actions. This particular history projects an anticipation of the future. We can witness this in the collective anxieties surrounding contemporary geopolitical events, from referenda, elections and territorial contests to infrastructural developments, oil spills, and bombings. How does this affect the societal bonds that keep us together, or keep us apart? The panel Tipping Points reflects on how events are conceptualised and gain significance through networks of power. Tipping Points is curated and moderated by Nick Axel.