Real of Reality

»Hitchcock, Skepticism and the Bird’s Eye View«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

Markus Gabriel born 1980 studied philosophy, ancient philology, German literature and philology in Hagen, Bonn and Heidelberg. In Heidelberg he finished his Ph.D. under the supervision of Jens Halfwassen and wrote a thesis on Schelling’s later philosophy. In 2005 he was a visiting scholar at the university of Lisbon. From 2006-2008 he worked as lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. In 2008 he finished his habilitation with a work on scepticism and idealism in ancient philosophy. From 2008-2009 he was assistant professor at the department of philosophy of the New School for Social Research, New York. Since 2009 Gabriel is a full professor in epistemology, modern and contemporary philosophy at the University of Bonn.

Gabriel is considered to be part of the contemporary philosophical movement called “New Realism” or “speculative Realism.” In his own approach Gabriel argues that there is no all-encompassing totality: that the world, in the traditional sense of a domain of all domains, cannot exist. Yet, he convincingly shows that this does not entail ontological nihilism. Rather, he argues that the non-existence of the world entails an infinity of domains and shows that this motivates a general realism. This ontology hinges on Gabriel's concept of fields of sense, which shows that, fundamentally, he opposes the idea that mathematics or the natural sciences could ever replace a richer philosophical understanding of what there is and how we know about it.

»Shooting Ourselves«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

Thirteen lives affected by the global arms trade converge in a warehouse in Berlin. From around the world, they have come to dramatize and record their personal stories for “Situation Rooms,” a show by Berlin-based theatre legends, “Rimini Protokoll.”

Director Christine Cynn continues the exploration of performance and violence begun in “The Act of Killing” (which she co-directed), juxtaposing dramatic re-enactments with unscripted moments of private reflection and backstage conversation between the protagonists, from heated exchanges on “collateral damage” to banter about diplomatic picnics at Osama Bin Laden’s abandoned compound.

Each protagonist acts out their story, filming from their own perspective with a handheld device, creating an uncanny environment where everyone is filming all the time. The set is both real and surreal, a maze of factories, battlefields, and boardrooms, where each room simulates a real place in the life of each protagonist. Step through one door and you’re in a street demonstration in Homs, Syria. The next door leads you to a cubicle in San Diego where a drone operator drops bombs on villagers in Waziristan, Pakistan. Go past the Russian engineer in the Iranian nuclear lab and turn left to witness a nine-year old boy in a classroom in Democratic Republic of Congo being kidnapped to train as a child soldier. “Shooting Ourselves” captures the idiosyncratic atmosphere behind the scenes of this futuristic production, where total strangers from across the globe—and the political spectrum—submit themselves to a theatrical world order where all perspectives are equal.