How to create gaps for new thoughts to emerge? How to crack open the contemporary situation? How to imagine a different future? On Saturday the conference looks at how technologies shape our political and social interactions, and asks: ‘What counts as democratic?’ Alternative ways of navigating the world, the art of storytelling, and knowledge from non-Western and indigenous cultures offer cues for a different conception of our humanity.

Session 4: Cracking the Contemporary

10:30 - 12:00

David Roden, Rick Dolphijn, Sarah J. Whatmore Philosophy and art have the power to unsettle and to reveal new openings. They can create cracks in the present, through which new things may appear — the unforeseen, a glimpse of a future to come — forcing the existent understanding of the world and ourselves out of perspective. New concepts may challenge the present crisis and ask us to think differently, for instance, by reconsidering the relations between humanity, nature and culture. What is the political potency of nature in more-than-human terms? Do we live in posthuman times? How do the new materialisms contribute to these explorations? Session 5: Sensible Imagination

13:30 - 15:00

Ben Russell, Erika Balsom, Helen Verran Arguing that it is necessary to conceive of the world in radically different ways, to decolonise the modern worldview, and to escape from the bubble of a mediatised post-truth society, the panel Sensible Imagination presents alternative ways of navigating the world, documenting reality, and negotiating the entanglements between humans and nonhumans, words and things. The arts of storytelling and knowledge from non-Western and indigenous cultures offer crucial cues for a different conception of our humanity. Session 6: Updates Available?

16:00 - 18:00

Armen Avanessian, Jennifer Gabrys, Noortje Marres, Wendy Chun We move on by continuously updating and upgrading. But moving on does not mean moving forward toward a better world. The effect, politics and functioning of any technological infrastructure do not just depend on the system itself, but also on its implementation or, for instance, the affordances of its context. Updates Available? focuses both on case studies of how the implementation of new technologies is enmeshed with the transformation of politics and forms of democracy, as well as on a philosophical negotiation of moving ‘forward’ into the future, and postcontemporary fear. Are we even moving in time, or is the future coming towards us?