EXPERIMENTELLE GESTALTUNG NEUER TECHNOLOGIEN / PROF. RALF BAECKER–The first meeting will be on April 14th at 14:00 in room 2.11.100.–
This course offers a critical re-evaluation of code and computation, exploring their historical roles and future potentials beyond conventional paradigms. Over the past 80 years, Turing computation has become a dominant cultural technique—underpinning systems of control, power, and automation in a networked society, and enabling the rise of so-called artificial intelligence and life-like machine behaviors.
Yet computation is not limited to the digital or the deterministic. In this class, we will investigate alternative, often overlooked forms of computing and code—ranging from biological and chemical systems to fluidic, mechanical, quantum, and wave-based processes. We will explore emergent and self-organizing computation, neural networks, and self-generating code, as well as hybrid systems that blur the boundaries between the organic and the artificial.
Through this lens, we will engage with the idea of “living, dead, and zombie media,” navigating the space between experiment and application, artificial life and material practice. Our aim is to imagine and prototype other modes of computation—non-deterministic, poetic, slow, tactile, collaborative, or entangled. These speculative and material investigations will help us question whether we even need a new vocabulary for what comes after computation as we know it—and invite us to envision new computational futures together.
registration
To join the class, please write a short text expressing your interest in the topic of this class by 23:59 CET on April 12th. Please mail it to r.baecker@hfk-bremen.de
please also register via ARTIST!
The class is limited to a maximum of 15 students. The first meeting will be on April 14th at 14:00 in room 2.11.100.