Kooperation ohne Akteure? Automatismen in der Globalisierung

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“ analysed automatic, unconcious and unintended 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 contributions of the authors that have been written for this occasion will be published here for future reference and further thinking.