Live Poetry as Resistance to Technology
November 22, 2022, 19:30 > POSTPONED DATE: May 31, 2023, 19.30
Katholische Akademie Hamburg, Herrengraben 4, 20459 Hamburg
The humans of the digital age are on the verge of becoming cyborgs. Our daily lives are increasingly reliant on and controlled by electronic devices. At the same time, people are connected to digital networks both day and night, and many are spending more time in virtual online realities than in the offline one. Digital technologies have become mobile and wearable; not even electronic chips implanted into human bodies are merely a dystopian fiction anymore.
In this context, poetry is sometimes seen as the most human-centric artform – because it expresses subjectivity and is least affected by technology, thus creating a site of resistance to the technocratic reality. Readers are turning to poetry as a vital means of “digital detox,” in search of sincerity and calmness Spoken-word events attract ever larger audiences longing for immediacy and intimacy of performances that are reduced to their essence: body, voice, and co-presence. This event asks how and why such lo-tech or no-tech forms of live poetry are being perceived as a reprieve from the ongoing assault of technology and media.
With
Nora Gomringer (Poet and performer, Bamberg)
Dr. Henrik Wehmeier (Media scholar, ERC Project, Hamburg)
Moderator: Prof. Dr. Claudia Benthien (Literary scholar and principal investigator ERC-Project, Hamburg)
Free entry. Registration information will be available on the website of the Katholische Akademie