The stars are out tonight

Activity: Talk or presentationOral presentation

Description

Under the digital spell of a fully-administered global society, the spectre of the end of the future looms over all of us (Berardi, 2019): technofantasies about the final overcome of mortality; technonightmares about a climatic apocalypse; or just the inability to think futurality. With the end of the great narratives of the XXth, the great narratives of the End of History absorbs the production of the real. The XXIst century is carachterized by an inability to think about the future and about the possibilities of the present.

In his pharmacological study of technique, Stiegler reconsiders Heidegger’s model of care [Sorge], proposing that at center of Sorge is being-towards-death as “the arche-protention required by a being-for-life that exceeds life.” (Stiegler, 2017, p. 317) For Stiegler, technique – as pharmaka (medicine/poison) to the prometheic essential deficiency – is central for the establishment of care, understood as the establishment of shared concerns and preoccupations. As an externalization of memory, it is technique that allows for the construction of a shared network of concerns and preocupations about the world.

This paper discusses the concept of care in Stiegler’s work and the specific role that art, understood as a transgressive sublation of technique, might play in establishing networks of care. We will take the example of Johann Lurf’s “★”, an ongoing film project that consists of a montage of scenes of starry night skies collected all throughout the history of film. The importance of these scenes in many of these films highlights the cultural place of outerspace in: simultaneously the light of a stars reaches us from a distant past; and it offers a platform of protention where we project shared dreams and expectations. Associated with the fact that every film and photograph secretly carries with them the recognition that it is an image of death – and image of the past. (Barthes, 1980)
Period12 Dec 2024
Event titleII Graduate Conference on Science and Technology of the Arts: Response(ability)
Event typeConference
LocationPorto, PortugalShow on map

Keywords

  • dasein
  • being-towards-death
  • Care
  • Johann Lurf
  • dialectical image
  • montage