Deadlines einzuhalten, gehört nicht zu meinen Stärken. Nach zwei Anläufen und nur gut fünf Wochen zu spät ist endlich der erste Artikel zur Medienarchäologie des Phonographischen Salons geschrieben und eingereicht. Freunde der Phonographie finden den Beitrag ab September im Katalog zur Ausstellung Zauberhafte Klangmaschinen.

Dear all,
the next concert featuring music by Peter Castine, his composition “Four Poems of Departure” for three flutes and speaker, on texts by Li T’ai-Po and Wang Wei (in the German translation by Eva Hesse), takes place in just ten days!

• Tuesday, 3 June 2008, 8:30 pm
• Unerhörte Musik/BKA, Mehringdamm 34, 10961 Berlin
• Ensemble FlAir: Wendy Castine, flute/alto flute Ulrike Philippi, flute/bass flute Katharina Schumacher, flute/piccolo with Stefan Gretsch, speaker

Also on the program: werks by Olive, Sciortino, the seldom performed “Souffle” for piccolo, concert, and alto flutes (one performer) by Petrassi, and an improvisation on a “Doppelgedicht” by the post-Dadaist poet Ernst Jandl. Jandl is also known for his translations of Cage into German.

Im Rahmen des Kolloquiums Medien, die wir meinen spricht heute abend Bernard Geoghegan zu einer Variante Medientheater, die wir möglicherweise meinen:

This talk examines the post-World War II proliferation of interest in computational automata, concentrating in particular on Claude Shannon and the roles his automata played within Bell Labs exhibition cultures. I argue that Shannon’s theatrical automata were canny, artifactual “demos” that underscored their own conventionality and rendered the habits of observers discrete and legible. I distinguish these machines from the dramatic automata of Norbert Wiener and others, which typically aspired to the status of transcendental scientific “models.” On the basis of this distinction I argue that Shannon’s automata for promoted an “ethics of eccentricity” that provides an alternative to dominant cybernetic and AI (artificial intelligence) epistemologies.

Bernard Geoghegan is a doctoral candidate in Screen Cultures at Northwestern University. He has held positions as a visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a fellow at Northwestern’s Center for Art and Technology, and a fellow at the Centre Pompidou’s Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation.

Mittwoch 21.05.08, 18.00 Uhr, Medientheater, SO22A, 2. HH.