How to relate? / Berlin, 5-6-7.07.2018

Annual Conference of the DFG Research Training Group “Knowledge in the Arts"

How to Relate: Appropriation, Mediation, Figuration
5–7 July, 2018
Medienhaus (Aula & Galerie), Universität der Künste Berlin
Grunewaldstr. 2–5, 10823 Berlin

How to relate? To each other, to something? Questions
about relations are relevant for a knowledge in the
arts. For just which knowledge can be produced depends
on the success or failure of relations: Knowledge is
implicated in power relations in institutional, social, and
technological infrastructure; it is formed in colliding
demands of hegemony and emancipation; it is created in
the momentum of things and materials.

With appropriation, mediation, and figuration, the conference
will discuss three epistemic ways of relating and the promises
and ambivalences that are bound up with each of them.

The appropriation of knowledge and skills is a foundational form
for carrying out all learning and research, and yet the concept
implies a possible appropriation of cognitive, aesthetic, or
cultural capital. Mediation enables participation in knowledge,
and yet its form—whether in an exhibition space, on the stage,
or in transmission by media—has an effect on the mediated
meaning. And the concept of figuration brings an understanding
of knowledge in the arts as a relational process, as an embodiment in
space-time that arises through the coming together
of heterogeneous actors, materials, and sources. How do such
encounters generate entryways to another kind of knowledge?

Through lectures, discussion, and performances,
practitioners of art, science, and activism will consider
their own interrelatedness in these ways of relating.
Do these ways of relating offer new spaces and imperatives
for action?

+ info: https://www.udk-berlin.de/en/research/temporary-research-institutes/dfg-research-training-group-knowledge-in-the-arts/how-to-relate-appropriation-mediation-figuration/