Demo or die!

In 2012, a viral video showed a one-year-old trying to swipe, pinch, and zoom on a paper magazine, growing frustrated when the images failed to respond. Her parent ended the clip with a striking remark: “Steve Jobs has coded a part of her operating system.” 

The seminar examines the dystopian potential of technological innovation by analyzing the rhetoric of TED Talks and tech demos and confronting their promises with their actual impact on society.

Taking the popular conference format “Technology, Entertainment, Design” as a point of departure, we approach selected talks as a hybrid form situated between lecture and theatre. We focus on presentation techniques, the use of media apparatuses, and the transformative, at times disruptive, potential of the ideas being promoted. In addition, we examine adjacent genres of public address - such as political speeches, corporate keynotes, Shakespearean monologues, and classical forms of rhetorical persuasion - to trace how performances of authority and vision migrate across cultural domains, inscribing inevitability in bodies and gestures, and shaping collective imaginaries organized around technocapitalist and patriarchal models of progress.

The lecture-performance, originally a research-driven format positioned between analysis and enactment, serves as our methodological framework. It enables us to read these public presentations not merely as vehicles of information, but as staged epistemic operations that inscribe, produce, and reproduce specific imaginaries of technological possibility (or devastation).