Imagining the Unimaginable

Saturday this week (22nd of November) my seminar „They are amongst us. Towards an intergalactic and interdisciplinary cultural history of aliens“ starts at the department for art research and media philosophy of the art academy HfG Karlsruhe. With art students from different disciplines I will try to find out how and why the unimaginable is imagined the way it is and how, why and when the imagination has changed in history and how all of that depended on the evolution of media.

We will be reading theoretical texts e.g. by Immanuel Kant, Nikola Tesla, Hans Blumenberg, Umberto Eco, Kodwo Eshun, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Joseph Vogl, novels by Stanislaw Lem and H.G. Wells, listen to Orson Welles‘ radio drama „The War of the Worlds“ (1938) and watch movies like „Alien“ by Ridley Scott, „2001: a space odyssey“ (1968) by Stanley Kubrick, „Solaris“ (1972) by Andrei Tarkowski, and „Contact“ (1997) by Robert Zemeckis. Of course this will be for me as a radio researcher one of the highlights:

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Remember

25 years ago we skipped school and climbed on the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. From up there we were looking down at armed GDR soldiers who didn´t know anymore what to do. One day before they still had the order to shoot anybody from the East who wanted to climb over the wall to the West. And now everyone from the East was allowed to cross the boarder freely and we, the people from the West, were climbing up on the wall  to celebrate freedom and the end of a dictatorship, to celebrate the success of the resistance movement and to welcome the people of the East. Very poignant memories.

Today there are still many walls in this world existing, separating and excluding people, between Palestine and Israel, between Mexico and the USA, last but not least on the outer boarders of the EU between Africa and Europe.

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