The 25th Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts Conference is happening September 5-7 in a hybrid format (in-person and online)!

Please join us in Berlin or come along digitally for an encounter between the digital and environmental humanities:

Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency in the Anthropocene, September 5 - 7, 2021@ the Heilig-Geist Kapelle, Humboldt University Berlin AND online @gather.town & Zoom

Hosted by the Excellence Cluster Matters of Activity: Image - Space - Material in cooperation with the Excellence Cluster EXC 2020 Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective & the practice-based research project Viral Theatres, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Registration

• Members of the Cluster of Excellence “Temporal Communities": Please email l.drury@fu-berlin.de to register (free). 
• Members of the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity”: Please email christian.stein@hu-berlin.de to register (free). 
• Other student, faculty, and artists, and members of the public: please register online for either physical or digital participation (80 Euros for faculty / 60 Euros for students) or digitally (20 Euros for faculty / 10 Euros for students). For physical participants, there are also a limited number of day passes (35 Euros) available. Physical registration closes on August 27, 2021; digital registration closes September 3, 2021.

Conference Theme:

Digital Matters: Designing/Performing Agency for the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene offers a contradiction and a challenge. Its contradiction lies in highlighting the immensity of human impact on a planetary scale matched only by the impotence of creating agencies that might mitigate or change this impact. Its challenge lies in the collapse of the nature/culture-divide that results in a shift in temporal, spatial, and conceptual scales. The Anthropocene reshapes how we think, perceive, design, create and connect. The current pandemic has shown us that the interconnectivity of the Anthropocene is no longer hampered by being too complex or abstract; the pandemic instead has forced these shifts into a globally shared experience.

Keynotes: 

Nicholas Johnson (Drama Department, Trinity College Dublin) & Aljosa Smolic (Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin) - Rethinking Interdisciplinary and Adaption through Beckett in XR

Claudia Mareis (Institute for Experimental Design and Media Culture, Humboldt University) - Designing Resilience

Etienne Turpin & Nashin Mahtani  (anexact office) - Just Enough for the City

Joanna Zylinska (King’s College London) - Performing Planetarity

A Roundtable on The Non-Human in Artistic Practice and Research with Kim Albrecht (Potsdam University/ Harvard Media Lab), Annette-Jael Lehmann (FU Berlin/Harvard Media Lab), and Siobhan Leddy (FU Berlin)

A Decolonization-Workshop with Clémentine Deliss (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin).

Further programming includes a hybrid installation space with VR, AR, sculpture and video art to explore, plus: panels, performances, and workshops on topics including social movements and digitality; digital mapping; mixed reality theatres; Indigenous knowledges and immersive technologies; animal extinction and water as medium.