“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” Ruha Benjamin
We are surrounded by doomsday scenarios: Climate change, species extinction, democratic backlash, and an inhumane technization of the world point to negative futures. Dystopian narratives can be an alarm bell, but beyond criticizing the present, they make no offer for a better future. Dystopias rather show fatalism, resignation and hopelessness. Don't we need strong utopian visions to stand against dystopia? Utopias, after all, formulate desirable futures and thereby provide orientation for action. Nevertheless – as also described by Stanislaw Lem – great political utopias have become disenchanted after the failure of real-world communism and the unfulfilled promises of neoliberalism. We want to overcome the simplistic dualism between utopia and dystopia by not striving for the unattainably perfect utopia, but by actively resisting dystopian narratives of the future. Between utopia and dystopia lies anti-dystopia, the rebellion against inhuman and negative futures.
In memory of the science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, who would celebrate his 100th birthday this year, we organize “The Anti-Dystopian Congress”. The proposition: the future will be imperfect and chaotic, but we can make it a better place against all odds. Part of the congress curated by Isabella Hermann is a film program curated by German author and theorist Georg Seeßlen and will be available online via stream. Under the title TOMORROW´S HUMAN - THE HUMAN IN TOMORROW´S WORLD the film program will reflect the notion of identity and diversity in the era of Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality. The selection is intended to show that films under the label Science Fiction can also be completely different: No spectacles from the construction kit of popular mythology, no fantasies of eternal struggle, of destruction and apocalypse and no leading articles in futuristic disguise. It's about personal visions and transgressions, about film as a thought and form experiment, about freer thinking and narration beyond the simple duality of utopia and dystopia, it is about understanding the future as an open space that is more than just an extension of the present and its problems. It's about science fiction as a brave genre.
Film program on demand: 9 - 14 November 2021
Congress: 10 - 12 November 2021
The times given are CET (Central European Time).
The congress will take place on the online platform Gather.town
Gather is a video chat platform designed to build customized virtual spaces and host virtual events in them. This makes virtual interactions more human.
Please, register for the event to receive updates on speakers, dates, film programme etc. Please note that the maximum number of participants is limited to 200.
This is a regional project by the Goethe-Institut Bratislava, Budapest, Krakow, Prague and Riga.
The implementation of the Anti-Dystopian Congress at gather takes place in cooperation with the agency playful solutions.
Wednesday 10 Nov 2021
Opening remarks by Sonja Griegoschweski (regional director CEE, Goethe-Institut Prague) and Isabella Hermann (curator of the congress program).
A dystopia is not a society in which things go wrong - it's a society in which we are helpless to put them right again. We shouldn't merely aspire to stories of a society that works well - we must also demand a society that FAILS well.
Moderation: Isabella Hermann (DE)
Speaker: Cory Doctorow (CA)
Here we have an elegant and clumsy music. Plodding along, bouncing at times, like an oversized ergonomic desk ball which sprouts daisies where it lands, a voice greets the listener caught up in its own mouth, artificial and logorrheic, on the verge of finishing its own words, each speakerly attempt triggering involvedly crafted sounds, intelligently put together, like comparing the colour of a watermelon to sunset, All Culture Is Dissolving compares ars-nova-esque chorale sung by vocaloid, with lament, to an environment of silicon and raindrops, where a melody leaves space for the sound of insects in the undergrowth, the trip, as it is inferred via a disguised text of Terence McKenna, comparing a musical gesture to a linguistic one, dialogically, a musical form to a non-human flourishing, the compositional technique in its sporadic virtuosity, improvisory and honed, talks uncompromisingly like the detail of a bee’s wing and the fuzzy unidirectionality of its lumbering body, like the sparkling chime of an app and its accompanying ecology, of thank yous to be said after listening, thank you, the mock and bubbling future this music so acknowledges, tinged, a celebration and warning. Open the album and the planet crumbles. Talk to it and it talks back. Play the music and picture the speaker at large. An image forms of this person-like entity, the protagonist, a being caught between the archaic and the sci-fi, an image readily shared online and readily seen in psychonautic excursions – ‘and now I transcend’, ‘and now I return’ – the figure slowly becoming dust-like pockets of what was formerly there, a gentle smile on their face, an app-filter which turns a reflection to mirrored powder, and then in its wake, some brilliant and twinkling effect on the air. - Emile Frankel
Artist: Kaj Duncan David (GB/DK)
THURSDAY 11 Nov 2021
Science fiction films are visual demonstrations of the motifs and conflicts developed in science fiction literature. They tell more or less grand stories of the future simulated as credibly as possible with the means of today. However, science fiction films can also be something completely different, namely attempts to expand and question the dimensions of storytelling in images. Radical science fiction films are films in which space and time and the subject are experienced in new ways. Science and art can meet in this quest to find space, time, and the man of the future.
Moderation: Sonora Broka (LV)
Speaker: Georg Seeßlen (DE), Robert Bramkamp (DE)
Are you interested to learn more about the congress and look behind the scenes? Then join us at this informal gathering with our curator Isabella Hermann and discuss with us about the program, your favorite Sci-Fi movies and what you expect from the future.
The aim of the event is a comparative analysis of contemporary speculations about the future in Central and Eastern Europe in an artistic-theoretical context. The focus is on contemporary futurisms, i.e. research into collective art movements (ossifuturism, hungarouturism), which subject the study of alternative futures and pasts to a political-aesthetic critique. The social relevance of artistic experimentation with time and history comes to the fore, as the ability to think about alternatives and differences is one of the cultural media for the production of social imagination.
Moderation: Zsolt Miklósvölgyi (HU) and Márió Z. Nemes (HU)
Presentations: Rike Flämig (DE), Daniel Grúň (SK), Vit Bohal (CZ)
The story of the robot, which after the death of its master was left at the mercy of various individuals of human society, balances on a thin line between absurd black comedy with existential drama. An "autobiographical" play written by artificial intelligence that talks about the search for closeness of someone in a world where people have not known or are not able to make simple contact with each other for some time, and in which the path of one person to another is the hardest to cover.
Director: DANIEL HRBEK (CZ)
The panel follows the Czech theater performance “AI: When a Robot Writes a Play”, which was written by the help of an AI system and – narrated by a robot – deals with the quest for belonging in an alienated world. With the makers of the play and other artists working with AI, we will explore to what extent AI systems can imitate human creativity and what this imitation says about our understanding of art and society. Beyond the fear of computers replacing humans, we want to discuss what new possibilities AI can offer to art and how artists can think critically and originally about new technologies.
Moderation: Michelle Christensen (DE)
Speaker: David Košťák (CZ), Theresa Schlesinger (DE), Jörg Piringer (AT), Rudolf Rosa (CZ)
FRIDAY 12 Nov 2021
Stanisław Lem's science fiction stories are deeply influenced by some of the key motifs underlying Christian religion, such as messianism, mysticism and eschatology. The panel tackles this imprint of Lem's prose by focusing on analogies between narrative strategies used to deal with artificial intelligence in speculative fiction on the one hand, and religious narratives on the other hand - both in the Eastern and the Western tradition. Spanning topics such as AI theology or techno-shamanism, the aim is to open up towards a spectrum of cultural codifications of technology itself, thus observing multiplicity of local technological traditions, as well as their relations to larger cosmological beliefs.
Moderation: Lukáš Likavčan (SK)
Participants: Bogna M Konior (PL), Chen Qiufan (CN)
In their constant search for the differences between Eastern and Western narrative traditions in science fiction, scholars have disregarded the overall commonality. The assumption that there are differences has often been treated as a premise and therefore clouded the judgment of researchers. This panel opens itself up to the suggestion that there are no essential differences between Eastern and Western science fiction, as both use cosmopolitan means to imagine humanistic and subjectivistic experimental designs.
Moderation: Deniss Hanovs (LV)
Speakers: Georg Seeßlen (DE), Elīna Reitere (LV/DE)
Bratislava Game Jam is an annual event where interdisciplinary teams meet and create video games in a weekend. The event aims to explore video games as a medium to understand and reflect upon the world. A contemporary art form the authors can use to share their thoughts and make an impact. Each year, there is a topic the games are supposed to address. It is carefully chosen to be contemporary and thought provoking. This talk will be a presentation of selected games created on Bratislava Game Jam.
Moderation: Ľubica Drangová (SK), Matej Fandl (SK)
Participants: Game Jamer 2021
In cooperation with Bratislava Game Jam 2021.
Are you interested to learn more about the congress and look behind the scenes? Then join us at this informal gathering with our curator Isabella Hermann and discuss with us about the program, your favorite Sci-Fi movies and what you expect from the future.
Solutionism is the belief in technical solutions – tech fixes – to even complex social problems. However, technology always reflects the values of the people who design, build, and apply it. As part of a socio-technical system, those values demand social negotations. But how can we develop technology that makes our lives better and benefits everyone including past and present marginalized groups? Is there an anti-dystopian middle ground between utopian and dystopian visions of technicized worlds? Can we learn from science and speculative fiction how to develop ethical and fair technologies?
Moderation: Wenzel Mehnert (DE)
Participants: Aleksandra Sowa (DE), Aleksandra Katarzyna Przegalińska-Skierkowska (PL), Lorena Jaume-Palasí (DE)
data poetry language and poetry are more and more influenced by digital systems and the internet. in the performance „data poetry“ i explore the technologies and concepts that will form our future interaction with those systems. i use algorithms and ideas of contemporary computer linguistics and apply them in poetic experimental setups asking questions like: can an artificial intelligence write poetry? is my computer a sexist? what does a program think about me? A performance by Jörg Piringer
Moderation: Ronit Wolf
Detailed information about this event will follow soon
The implementation of the Anti-Dystopian Congress at gather takes place in cooperation with the agency playful solutions
© PLAYFUL SOLUTIONS
This event takes place in cooperation with Bratislava Game Jam.
© Radovan Dranga
