03Oct 2018
Presentation
The Neural Wunderkammer
The poster presentation was
accompanied by a hands-on cabinet of curiosities (Wunderkammer)
and a short film describing the methodology of neural
networks and their impact on the project.
20SEP 2018
Presentation
Revolutionary or "Radical Crank"? The Political
Utopias of Thomas Spence
Viewed as a political
radical by his contemporaries, Thomas Spence
advocates the socialization of land on his virtual
islands of Crusonia (1782) and Spensonia
(1803). Despite his rejection of land ownership,
which is dismissed as nothing but a communist utopia
avant la lettre, he developed a concept which is
widely discussed in contemporary society and was the
topic of a referendum in Switzerland in 2016 - the
idea of an unconditional basic income. This
contribution is going to present the basics of
Spence's Utopias and examine their validity in terms
of an 'alternative social formation' as well as its
impact on contemporary thought on social change.
Interdisciplinary Conference “Imaginationen des Sozialen. Narrative Verhandlungen zwischen Integration und Divergenz (1750-1945)", Universität zu Köln, 12-14.12.2018.
Website
01DEC 2017
Journal
The Fast and the Curious: The Role of Curiosity
in the Gothic Heroine's 'Grand Tour of the Mind'
In the eighteenth century, the gender
bias against female curiosity marginalises it with the
stigma of “gossip”. Situating Radcliffe’s Gothic novels
in discourses of knowledge, this article offers a new
reading of female curiosity as a positive side-effect of
the heroine’s “mobility”, regardless of whether her
state of being in motion is the result of invitation,
flight or abduction. Simultaneously, the female Gothic
heightens their implied readers’ curiosity without
actually satisfying it. This technique creates a
self-reflexive process ridiculed in Catherine, the
“virtual reader” of Gothic adventures in Austen’s Northanger
Abbey. Thus the female Gothic creates a “Grand
Tour of the Mind” which enhances the transmogrifying
power of female curiosity by dispensing knowledge either
forbidden or unavailable at the beginning of the
journey.
