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Clearances. Reading by Manuela Koelke and screening of Harun Farocki’s The Leading Role (1994).
Presented at TIER The Institute of Endotic Research, Wednesday, October 23, 2019 as part of Objects Before and After the Wall, Part 3.

“For the third part of Objects Before and After the Wall at TIER, a collaboration with Tlaxcala 3 in Mexico City, Manuela Koelke will investigate her experiences of East Berlin, and we will screen Harun Farocki’s film The Leading Role (1994). Both works reflect on the role subjective experiences and conflicting media narratives play in the capture, remembrance and re-writing of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In her reading, Manuela Koelke revisits her childhood experience of growing up in East Berlin before and after the fall of the wall in November 1989, which brought about a sudden change of appearances, people disappearing, the economy crumbling, ideologies shifting, socialized land and goods being privatized, and new commodities flooding the East. But what really changed, from whose perspective? How do the subjective micro-stories of those who lived through these events relate to the state-sanctioned and media-driven narrative, then as now? How is the conflict between personal and collective affectedness to be understood, considering walls both within and outside? This foray into memories will question the value of being persuaded by any one perspective, whether personal or collective, and instead emphasize the need to make up one’s own mind, not to uncritically believe what the media claims to be true, and to find one’s own answers by relating to motivations other than one’s own.
Five years after the fall of the wall, Harun Farocki’s film The Leading Role (1994) delivers a montage film of media footage, produced by East and West German television crews at that time trying, for days on end, to get an emblematic image which would crystallize the event. In the attempt to define this ‘absent image’, “[…] this material shows the extent to which the collective conscience was affected by the event, as well as all the efforts made to repress the trauma” (Harun Farocki).”

Clearances © TIER – Institute of Endotic Research

The publication Objects Before and After the Wall was launched in an online conversation on Wednesday, June 10, 7pm together with the editors Benjamin Busch and Lorenzo Sandoval, and the contributors Tlaxcala3 (Ali Cotero and Clara Bolivar), Rodolfo Andaur, Eli Cortiñas, Manuela Koelke and Sung Tieu. Continue reading →

In the recent decades, digital technologies have not only brought about huge ruptures and disruptions in the field of digital commu­nication and information processing. They also have extended the repertoire of the methods of inquiry towards understanding human and non-human interaction. – I will here refer to ‘non-human entities’ mostly as technological/digital/discrete entities. – This shift has thus not only impacted our everyday lives, but all fields of research and education in the arts and sciences. In contrast to most STEM fields in which new technology is continuously incorporated and applied, the Digital Humanities have emerged as the description for those n­ew digital modes of research and education that have been introduced into the hu­manities discipline.
Recent debates focus on the emergence of the Digital Humanities as a discursive construct,¹ on how digital technology is applied to various disciplines and their practices,² on the implications of Big Data,³ on the materialist dimension of digital cultures⁴ and on their implicit political turn⁵ when it comes to accessibility and manipulation of data, in the media, for example.

In my presentation, however, I will focus briefly on the different ends between traditional and Digital Humanities, and on their superposition, that is, on how their tasks can be rethought, reoriented by fusing them together into a Posthumanities. I will also focus on the conditions of a posthuman inquiry and its implications for a posthuman science. Continue reading →