Experimental Informatics
ground zero: Website of the Experimental Informatics
The starting point is the conviction that humanity, while increasingly dependent on technology and its smooth functioning, is at the same time "spiritually not in control" of it. A different understanding, new experimental-aesthetic approaches and, last but not least, new language games are necessary to dissolve the insufficient dualism of euphoria over technology and pessimism over culture that still dominates the discourse.
The focus of teaching and project work is on experimentation, aesthetic reception and production, and their reflection. But the own "making" is the starting point for everything! By freeing (digital) technologies from their usual purpose orientation in the prevailing alliance of economy-technology-science and focusing on the experimental exploration and aesthetics of technical possibility spaces, the fundamental importance of technology and design for the formability of our own (technical) future becomes visible in the first place. We learn that the horizon of our world, in which we orient ourselves, move and act, is always already significantly determined by our poietic capacity (fiction, design, imagination, making) and that we cannot delegate the responsibility for it.
Between poetry and poiesis: Another focus is the examination of language and text. What does language mean at a time when most of the texts that surround us are read and written by computers? What literary potential do algorithms—which are themselves signs and texts—offer, and how can we use them artistically, for example, to reveal the structures of natural languages and enable new experiences of language? What language, concepts, and literary forms are suitable for promoting other thinking, other narratives, and other poietic practices (i.e., other practices of making, technology, production, architecture, design, etc.) so that other futures become imaginable?
