The Automated Condition. Manifestations and Narratives in Art, Literature and Culture
Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the Department of German, Princeton University in collaboration with the FWF-funded project “Co-operative Art Techniques” at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of Graz.
Driverless cars, social credit systems, or Twitter poetry bots: our increasingly technologically optimized and algorithmically organized existence informs an automated condition, a mode de vivre centuries in the making, in which spontaneity, ingenuity, and exceptionality are re-defined through the standardization of processes of labor, production, and consumption. Concomitantly, the flipside of the Fordian promise of total automation has become a bitter and unavoidable reality where automated systems upend the foundations of social interaction and artistic production alike. That this is the inevitable fate and triumph of the animal laborans would be the argument posited by Hannah Arendt, who warns in The Human Condition, like many others, how such advancements in automation, spearheaded by the industrial revolution and invention the steam engine, could result “in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known” (Arendt 1958). Moving within a variety of manifestations and narratives, this interdisciplinary graduate conference wishes to both connect and cross-pollinate historical case studies on automation with theoretical perspectives on the conditions it produces. Collectively, literature, art, and culture can provide vital points of entry into the interrogation of life in the automated condition, question whether it is truly a fatal form of passivity, and offer a nuanced and holistic understanding of its promises and its possibilities.

OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Luisa Feiersinger (12. April 2022). The Automated Condition. Manifestations and Narratives in Art, Literature and Culture. Dimensionen der techne in den Künsten. Abgerufen am 14. Mai 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/uo7m