School of Commons

Learning Environment and Research Nucleus (LEARN)

Jessica Sequeira, Jörg Sternagel

Playful and Poetic. Creative Responses to Technology 

Thursday, Nov. 14th 2019 | Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Toni Areal, 10.15 am to 08.30 pm

Friday, Nov. 15th 2019 | Flumserberg, 08.30 am to 5.00 pm

Saturday, Nov. 16th 2019  | Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Toni Areal, 10.15 am to 1.00 pm

Call for Participation

What can creative responses to technology look like? How can technology's focus on ideas with application be embraced, rather than rejected? Does a sense of play offer a possibility, a way to begin thinking? What kind of thinking are we talking about, and where might this thinking take place? Can our own experiences become an origin that allows us to perform philosophy? A performative philosophy might not be exclusively about technology, but about our being-in-the-world, one in which technology plays a part but one we have initiated, from which we can also begin to think about being-in-landscape, about senses of existence. A poetic approach can verge on play: We might engage in telling experiences, finding examples, reflecting on concepts and expressions, and considering the functional and the dysfunctional. Our LEARN focuses on questions like these and works on approaches in our technological age that will develop in a poetic form, open to ludic reflection.

To participate in the LEARN, please write an email to both Jessica Sequeira (jessica.sequeira@gmail.com) and Jörg Sternagel (Joerg.Sternagel@zhdk.ch) providing short info on your background and affiliation. Since the LEARN is limited to 20 participants, acceptance will be organized on a first write, first admission basis! The call is open from Friday, July 5th 2019, 08.00 am to Tuesday July 9th 2019, 08.00 pm Zurich time. If you are accepted, you will hear back from us by Monday, July 15th 2019, 01.00 pm Zurich time. 

Jessica Sequeira (San Jose, California) is completing a PhD at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge; she is also a writer and translator. Her works include the novel A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), the collection of stories Rhombus and Oval (What Books) and the collection of essays Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age (Zero Books). Her translations into English include Adolfo Couve's When I Think of My Missing Head, Hilda Mundy’s Pyrotechnics, Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World, Maurice Level’s The Gates of Hell, Sara Gallardo’s Land of Smoke and Teresa Wilms Montt's In the Stillness of Marble, among others. www.jessicasequeira.wordpress.com

Jörg Sternagel is interim Associate Professor in Media Theory at the Department of Art and Design at the University of Applied Sciences Europe, Campus Berlin. Since 2016, he has been a Postdoc Researcher at the Institute for Critical Theory at the Zurich University of the Arts. His work focuses on theories of alterity and the performative, imagery and mediality, philosophy of existence. His latest publications include the monograph Pathos des Leibes. Phänomenologie ästhetischer Praxis (2016) and the co-edited collection Gegenstände unserer Kindheit. Denkerinnen und Denker über ihr liebstes Objekt (2019). www.joerg-sternagel.de