Vortragsreihe "Kunst - Forschung - Geschlecht"

Marietta Kesting Mittwoch, 9. November 2022
18:00 - 20:00 Uhr
Auditorium| Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7 | Ground floor


_{© M. Kesting, 2022}

Dream content is seen as a valuable resource in both the political and creative realm. Through dreaming one can imagine social change, as in Martin Luther King's prominent "I have a dream" speech. Nevertheless, there is a passivity inherent in dreaming; dreamers are simultaneously recipients and producers, and for the most part cannot consciously control the content and development of dreamlike scenarios. This entails an overlap with feminist interests in what are coded as ‚passive', ‚latent', and unconscious states. Dreaming is proposed as an example of "speculating" in this lecture, referring to artistic projects that use dreams as raw material.

Furthermore, a tension can be discerned in processes that attempt to use dreams specifically to generate ideas, and to appropriate the creativity of the dream for economic ends. Like any human activity, neoliberal methods in late modernity attempt to siphon off the phantasmatic energy of dreams and use it strategically. But the anarchic power and unpredictable inventions in dreams stand in the way of this exploitation, since algorithms trained on dream content, for example, can only predict the future from the statistical analysis of past data. However, it is not possible to deduce what people will dream in the future from the elements of a scene that has already been dreamt in the past.

Marietta Kesting was junior professor for media and art theory at the Akademie for Fine Arts, Munich 4/2016-8/2022 and is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Potsdam. She is part of the publishing platform b_books, Berlin and a member of the FKW editorial team.

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