Nothing Matters. On Negative Objects, Spaces, and Relations

Nothing literally matters today. In the face of severe ecological and geopolitical crises, materiality itself is deeply affected by nothingness and negativity: landscapes are riddled with holes and voids due to massive resource extraction, mountains of waste pile up as negative matter, glaciers shrink and become monuments of loss. Thus, we are confronted with a multitude of material no‐things, non‐places, and non‐relations. What relations do we maintain with the the void, the absent, the forgotten and the vanished? Through which operations, acts, gestures, and practices is something turned into nothing? How does nothing materialize in various media milieus like film, literature, and games? And what kind of hidden potentialities may lie in material nothingness? By proposing a material, relational, and operative view on nothing, the conference ties in with recent media‐philosophical concepts like operative ontologies and anthropomediality and brings them into dialogue with interdisciplinary discussions around the negative turn recently announced in contemporary social, geographical, and media theory.

Program

GRAMA Lounge, University Library
Steubenstraße 6
99423 Weimar

--- Thursday, June 13 ---

14:00
Welcome and Introduction

14:15
Achim Landwehr (Universität Konstanz)
The Hole Story. How Otto von Guericke did get lost in time and what it tells us about the constitutive role of voids in modern European culture

15:15
Laura Moisi (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Designing Disappearance. Cultural and Affective Legacies of Disposal Architectures

16:15
Coffee Break

16:45
Lorenz Engell (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Nothing to See, Nothing to Do. Jarmusch, Duras, Jarman

18:30
Reception at Lichthauskino (Am Kirschberg 4)

20:00
Film Screening
Homo Sapiens
(Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Ö 2016, 94 min.)


--- Friday, June 14 ---

10:00
Susie Scott (University of Sussex)
Navigating Negative Identity. Doing, Being, and Feeling Nothing as Meaningful Social Action

11:00
Christiane Voss (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Neither nor/as well as. Reflections on Neutral Phenomena

12:00
Lunch Break

14:00
Kathrin Schuchmann (Universität zu Köln)
Spatial Relations and the Virtual. Christoph Ransmayr’s Literary Aesthetics of Absence

15:00
Mia Hallmanns (Universität Hamburg)
Landscape and an Aesthetics of the Void. Perspectives from Chinese Mountain‐Water‐Painting

16:00
Coffee Break

16:30
Dominik Schrey (Universität Siegen)
Loss Landscapes. Mapping Timelines of Glacial Disappearance

17:30
Rosetta S. Elkin (Pratt Institute New York)
Landscapes of Retreat

--- Saturday, June 15 ---

10:00
Sulgi Lie (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
The Negative Camera. On Samuel Beckett’s “Film”

11:00
Toni Pape (Universitaet Amsterdam)
Nothing Happened. On Stealth Gameplay and the Becoming-imperceptible of Political Action

12:00
Coffee Break

12:30
Martin Siegler (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar)
Hollowcene. Media Philosophy of Negative Spaces

13:30
Lucas Pohl (Humboldt-Universität Berlin)
Nothing Will Have Taken Place. Negativity, Space, and the Apocalypse

14:30
Closing Discussion