Nächste Termine// Next Dates:

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5. Juni 2025 19:30 Uhr

Gäste:  Anna Ivanova and Gao Chang

The Future of Sex: A.I., Desire, and the Flesh

Bodies Beyond Boundaries: AI-Mediated Desire in Digital Spaces
Anna Ivanova
https://anna-ivanova.art/

How are AI algorithms reshaping our sexual desires and bodily experiences? Anna Ivanova brings their background as a queer pornography filmmaker and researcher to explore this digital frontier. They'll take us through the algorithmic bedrooms of AI companions like Replika, the creator economies of platforms like OnlyFans, and the mind-bending possibilities of AI-generated porn content. Beyond the usual tech panic or uncritical celebration, we'll examine how these technologies create new forms of embodiment and connection, particularly for marginalized communities who've historically pushed boundaries in digital spaces. The talk offers a look at how our bodies and desires aren't just being digitized—they're being fundamentally transformed through these technological encounters, raising critical questions about power, consent, and what our bodies might become in a posthuman future.

Anna is a researcher, filmmaker, and visual artist with an interdisciplinary background in visual anthropology and computer science. Their artistic practice focuses on queer activism, body politics, philosophy of technology, and digital intimacy through installation art and filmmaking. anna's work has been showcased at multiple international film festivals and exhibition spaces, with particular focus on feminist and queer narratives.

Desire Beyond Flesh: Combating AI Bias through Supernormal Stimuli -
Dr. Chang Gao 

www.gaochangart.net

Her research project and multimedia art practice have been widely exhibited internationally in cities including Utrecht, Graz, Berlin, Tuscany, London, Seoul, Tokyo, Helsinki, and various locations in China. Her research examines how bodily affect can disrupt entrenched socio-political and cultural structures, including cultural hegemony and postcolonialism. She further investigates how affect- and desire-driven encounters between human and non-human agencies might be used to counteract political repression like Chinese censorship and AI bias rooted in anthropocentric systems.

Chang Gao is a Berlin-based artist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Arts Berlin (UdK), PhD from the Royal College of Art (London), public art researcher, and director of the Social Innovation Research Lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (China). Chang obtained her PhD from the Royal College of Art and continues her interdisciplinary research spanning psychology, politics, philosophy, and sexuality. She is a multimedia artist who incorporates eroticism and supernormal stimuli into her practice, using mediums such as robotics, augmented reality interfaces, bioelectric systems, sculpture, real-time AI installations, film, and immersive, performative, time-based media.

In English// Contributions in German will be very welcome// Donation-based from 10€ and up// Auf Spendenbasis ab 10€//

THE PHILOSOPHICAL COLLOQUIUM

Expanding body thoughts, prospectives for the future.

Sexuality is an existential dimension of the human form of being in the world. We premise our philosophical investigations on the experience of the ongoing violation of this anthropological fact. The social norms and ideals, which govern us in our intimate interactions alone or with others, are inscribed in our bodies. They express a heteronormative, misogynist, and racist paradigm.

With the discursive format of the “Philosophical Colloquium ”, we like to address key aspects of a progressive concept of sexuality. What are the groundworks of a philosophy of sexuality that does justice to the plurality of our sexual, somatic and spiritual expressivity? We are convinced that, subversively understood, the erotic is “source of power and knowledge” (Audre Lorde). Taking this claim as a starting point, we aim at a conceptual framework for an emancipated sex-positive culture. We believe there is a lot of conceptual work to be done to reach emancipation, given the intersectional and trans-temporal consistency of the binary, anti-pluralistic paradigm.

Analytical background and discursive connections

We want to investigate the theoretical groundworks of a philosophy of sexuality. 

Our first analytical perspective is shaped by questions concerning the ontology, epistemology and the discursive history of the prevalent anti-pluralistic paradigm. 

How are sex, gender and the erotic conceptualized in the scientific and public discourse? How to account for the enormous changes of this discursive field and how to move on? 
How thinking beyond the binary schemes of sex and gender? What are the ethical implications and presuppositions of affirming both, openness and bonding through love? What is a fair practice, to balance between the tension of need of care-taking and freedom of erotic expressivity? What privileges and role expectations condition the social space in which we are oneself in the other? 

There will be space to reflect on the practical dimension of the varieties of the forms of life and love. We aim also to address, the aesthetical dimension of the social spaces of queer expressivity and somatic empowerment.

How can we reconsider the relation between sex and art? Can sex be art? Can a participatory and activist art contribute to a sex-positive culture? Playing with Oscar Wilde’s “Bonmot”, if everything in the world is about sex, except sex, why then is power play so beautiful?

We believes that these theoretical, practical and aesthetical dimensions are analytical and since they intersect in the reality, they cannot be taken apart. They stand in the background of our investigations and become more concrete and detailed by the topics of the series of the Philosophical Colloquium. 

Format of the “Philosophical Colloquium”

What we will do during the night is theory. 

We will invite researchers with expertise in these fields of study. The program will be specified throughout the year. The format is discursive as the content is conceptual. 

We will not discuss everything and all together, but we will have a focus on individual aspects and revealing phenomena. One of the organizers will host each event: a preluding discussion with the host will be follow by a talk with the invited guest, and after that all participants will gather in small groups, without moderation, to reflect the topics brought up so far. In a final collective and moderated discussion, inspired by the topics invoked throughout the night, we will deepen and structure the body thoughts and bring up together new prospectives for the future.

TOPICS

• SEX-POSITIVITY & MAINSTREAM 
• CONSENT & CONFLICT CULTURE 
• FORMS OF LIFE
• COLLECTIVE EMANCIPATION/S
• THINKING FLUID IDENTITIES, A NON-ESSENTIALIST UNDERSTANDING OF GENDER
• FORMS, SHAPES, SPACES & SUBLIMATIONS... PHYSICAL & METAPHORICAL
  

-> all workshops  

-> all lectures / talks/ salons

-> experimental spaces / play spaces/ practice