Authors in Conversation
Discussion with two artists who have thought about the future of humanity: the author Emma Braslavsky has written the short story
Ich bin dein Mensch (I’m Your Man) on which the recent film by Maria Schrader is based. The painter Agnieszka Pilat is best known for her series of heroic portraits of technology and machines. Both try to imagine how humans and machines will interact in the future.
Emma Braslavsky©Stefan Klüter_EV
Emma Braslavsky was born in a year (1971 in Erfurt) when a good two million more mines had been put in place on one side of the German-German border and soldiers with shoulder-length hair had been given hairnets on the other. She had the pleasure of spending her childhood and adolescence not only in a democratic republic and a dictatorship of the proletariat at the same time, but also between the Catholic-influenced word fields of her grandmother, with whom she spent the first years of her life, and the thought clusters characterized by dry logic as well as memory gaps of her father, a mathematician who had lost his memory shortly before her birth.
The codes fed by all these stimuli, which decisively shaped her thinking and work in writing, curating, staging, solidified the paradox as the pillar of her tragicomic narrative approach, with the help of which she reflects on the meaning and future of humanity.
She has published multiple award-winning novels such as most recently the story
Ich bin dein Mensch (I’m Your Man), nominated for the German Science Fiction Award and filmed, which became a spin-off to the award-winning and multiple nominated novel
Die Nacht war bleich, die Lichter blinkten (The Night Was Pale, the Lights Were Twinkling), or the audio comic series
Agent Zukunft (Agent Future).
Angnieszka Pilat©privat
Polish-born artist,
Agnieszka Pilat is best known for her series of heroic portraits of technology and machines. She’s been artist-in residence at Waymo (Google self- driving car project), Autodesk, USS Hornet Museum, Wrightspeed (electric vehicle startup founded by Tesla co-founder Ian Wright), and is a guest artist-in residence at Boston Dynamics.
She works and lives in New York City and as a self-proclaimed machine chaser, she commutes between the east and west coasts in pursuit of emergent technologies. In her practice, Pilat is taking not just painting, but the genre of portraiture as a starting point: in art history, portraits reflect the power balance in society and she believes that today technology holds that power. “To understand the future, we must understand the machine”, says the artist.
Pilat’s exhibitions include Google, de Young Museum, Rochester Museum of Fine Arts Biennial, and Art Week Miami, FL.
In cooperation with the Centre for German and European Studies, Brandeis University.
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