29 August 2013
Collaboration is considered something that is rational and intended: collaborative partners share certain interests and agree about the best way to realise their goals. But what about automated processes?
Embedded in the international arts festival Ruhrtriennale 2013, the symposium Global Cooperation in the 21st Century, hosted by the Centre, analysed automatic, unconscious, and unwanted collaborations that take place behind the backs of those involved. Beside the market mechanisms, they include automated actions carried out by robots and programs, including high speed trading on the stock markets, along with actions taken while asleep, traumas and psychopathologies of everyday life, and finally things that take place due to 'providence' and predestination. Can, as Bernard Mandeville’s fable of the bees was intended to show, private vices become public benefits?
World society, a world of unintended consequences, is driven by such forces. This symposium, with contributions from various disciplines—art history and theater studies, economics, psychoanalysis and computer sciences—explored this range of questions. The event was moderated by Prof. Claus Leggewie, co-director of the Centre and director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanitites in Essen (KWI).
Time: 17.00-19.00 h
Venue: Gebläsehalle, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord (Emscherstraße 71, 47137 Duisburg)
