Symposium: Costs of (Dis)Connecting (04.-05.12.2025)
Digital connections have long been sold to us as an unalloyed good: seamless, frictionless, universal. Yet the infrastructures that knit us together are also infrastructures of extraction, dispossession, and psychic attrition. To connect is to pay—with attention, with intimacy, with the disassembly of common worlds. In this symposium, we ask: what are the costs of (dis)connecting in the digital present?
Programme
Thu 04.12.2025, HGB (only for HGB students)
10 am - 9 pm
Introductory Workshops for HGB students:
Lenn Blaschke & Caspar Weimann hosted by Prof. Christin Lahr & Sven Bergelt (Class Artistic Action and Research
Nicolas Gourault hosted by Prof. Clemens von Wedemeyer (Expanded Cinema class)
Aleks Berditchevskaia hosted by Prof. Eli Cortinas & Prof. Stine Jacobsen (Media Art foundational course)
Cait Fisher hosted by Anna Zett (Class for Performative Arts)
Screenings of works: Nicolas Gourault, and others
Fri 05.12.2025, HALLE 14 (open for everybody)
10 am - 9 pm
Full-day program consisting of lectures, talks, a workshop and performances with: Günseli Yalcinkaya, Shumon Basar, Orhun Mersin & Yagmur Uçkunkaya, Shusha Niederberger & Heiko Schmid, Franziska von Hasselbach, and others
Screenings of works: Gala Hernández, and others
The symposium is organized as part of (Un)Learning Digitalities with Prof. Anna Ehrenstein, Photography in the Field of Contemporary Art Class of the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst / Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Büro für Digitale Lehre (Eliza Goldox and Juness Beshir) in cooperation with HALLE 14. The project is co-financed by the European Union and is co-funded by public funds on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon state parliament.