Die Untoten - Life Sciences & Pulp Fiction

Date: 05/12/2011, 17:00h to 05/14/2011, 22:00h

Location:
Kampnagel Hamburg
Jarrestr. 20
22303 Hamburg

Further information: http://www.untot.info/

Description: The relationship between science and popular culture is generally acknowledged with embarrassment or irony. What predictions have turned out to be true? What current neuroses determine the prospective image? What sentiments are being produced and conveyed? We wish to take this relationship more seriously. It would be impossible to imagine the “undead” without the interaction of diverse pop-cultural images on scientific image production. Like the images of pop culture, those of science are also serially produced and reproduced for mass-media presentation. The figure of the “undead” haunts our literary and cinematic cultural memory and dramatically focuses our attention to the blurry boundary dividing the living from the dead. This congress will examine the reciprocal relationships of theories and images and present their mass-media dissemination through performance. Biotech experts, bioethicists, philosophers, artists, film and media professionals and pop icons have been invited to attend the congress. They will meet in various constellations and debate a wide range of issues in the rooms of a film set, constructed specially for the congress inside a former factory hall at Kampnagel, the theatre and cultural performance venue in Hamburg. Visitors may move freely through the rooms of the film set, each of which invokes places where the “undead” are produced. All the discussions, lectures, presentations and experiments will be audio- and video-recorded. Wherever the visitors happen to be, they can decide which programme they would like to listen to via portable radio receivers with multiple channels and headphones. A film programme will be shown parallel to the live events. In normal life, scientific, political, ethical and pop-cultural debates run concurrently and independently of one another. At the congress they will confront one another and productively work to make the one thing we are all trying to grasp more visible and negotiable – namely the present and future of what we regard as life.

Contact:
Projektbüro "Die Untoten"
Brunnenstr. 9
10119 Berlin
Phone: 030-57 70 68 96
info@untot.info
http://www.untot.info/22-0-Tickets-und-Info.html

Organizer: Kulturstiftung des Bundes in Kooperation mit Kampnagel Hamburg und der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Program coordination: Karin Harrasser; Markus Metz; Oliver Müller; Georg Seeßlen

Keywords: assisted reproduction; eugenics/enhancement; research ethics; reproductive medicine; human experiment; prolonging life; medical ethics; technology ethics; technology assessment; ethics and science; xenotransplantation