Art and the Politics of Collectivity
SFSIA 2017 | Berlin

Spike Art Quarterly
July 3 – 27, 2017

Faculty include: Elena Agudio, Marie-Luise Angerer, Defne Ayas, Heidi Ballet, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Nicolas Bourriaud, Yann Moulier-Boutang, Mathieu Copeland, Jodi Dean, Arne De Boever, Nikola Dietrich, Julieta Gonzalez, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Robby Herbst, Helen Hester, Yuk Hui, Isaac Julien, Brandon LaBelle, Dan Levenson, Deborah Ligorio, Isabell Lorey, Jens Maier-Rothe, Antonia Majaca, Lambros Malafouris, Augustin Maurs, Ari Benjamin Meyers, Warren Neidich, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matteo Pasquinelli, Peter Pelbart, Gerald Raunig, Barry Schwabsky, Ludwig Seyfarth, Jennifer Teets, Tiziana Terranova, Ben Vickers, Anuradha Vikram, Joanna Warsza, Markus Weisbeck and Ming Wong.


The Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art is a roving art academy that was initiated in Saas-Fee, Switzerland in 2015. This summer it will take place in Berlin, Germany at the Spike Art Quarterly headquarters. It will concern “Art and the Politics of Collectivity.” In a world in which we find ourselves more and more connected as a result of the Internet and social networking websites, what happens to our sense of collectivity? Are these new technologies and the data they generate keys to new forms of subjection and subjugation? And what, if anything, can we do about it? Do artistic practices, especially those concerned with noise and improvisation, provide an exit? The academy will orbit around five important concepts in the hope of addressing these issues: post-operaist ideas of cognitive capitalism, cosmopolitanism, the undercommons, the theory of originary technicity, and extended cognition.

Inquisitive students and professionals hailing from artistic discourses such as painting, drawing, film making, sculpture, performance, sound studies and installation as well as those associated with the aligned fields of poetry, cultural studies, gender and queer studies, architecture, philosophy of mind, neuroscience, sociology and politics, are encouraged to apply. Lectures, discussions and workshops with outstanding artists and thinkers will be accompanied by an exhibition produced by participants in the last days of the course.