Dialogues as Artistic Experimental Systems in the Cultural Sciences

The communication culture of the early 21st century is significantly shaped by the explosive rise of conversational cultures. Traditional formats of soliloquies, dialogues, or polylogues are changing under the influence of the Internet. Whether it is oral, written, or graphical; face-to-face, computer-mediated, or printed; in presence, situated, virtual, or in hybrid form; live or asynchronous, human-to-human, human-to-machine, or machine-to-machine interaction. On all levels, conversational formats have become experiments, not only focussing on the content but also their form.

These developments also fundamentally affect art and science: considering recent media conditions, they have to experiment with the new configurations, challenging the very conditions and possibilities of knowledge processes in science and art.

This five-day-workshop focuses on these challenges and considers conversations and dialogues as systems, which experiment with the form of the conversation and dialogue themselves. The course inquires about the established as well as new, possible configurations of artistic and academic forms of conversations and dialogues. Most importantly, the workshop wants to invent and elaborate them in the participants' experimental performances. Hence, the moderators understand the workshop itself as an experimenting system. Together we develop, organise, perform and enact, translate, reflect, and present experiments of/in conversation. The participants (aka experimenters) will train how to develop and understand conversations as performance experiments as well as establish a methodological framework for further experimentation and reflection.

REQUIREMENTS

Bachelor's degree and/or artistic training.
Good German language skills.