Margit Rosen: Think before you're thought. The ZKM as an actor in the process of digital transformation

Thursday, March 1, 2018, 1 pm 

When, at the end of the 1960s, artists and cultural institutions first began to deal with computers and their consequences for art, they addressed the »thinking machine« as a piece of technology that one the one hand frees us from numerous tasks of thought, but on the other hand forces us to think about processes and values that were previously taken for granted. With the penetration of almost all areas of life by digital technologies, the pressure on museums and cultural institutions to re-evaluate and adapt their goals and methods has increased. In addition, the expectations regarding cultural education have changed. It is supposed to not only impart knowledge about art and culture, but to enable citizens to deal responsibly with digital technologies and strengthen their ability to develop innovative ideas, products and services.
The lecture addresses how the ZKM reflects the ever changing technological conditions and the current political and social expectations of cultural institutions – in its functions as a museum and as a place of artistic production.

Margit Rosen

Margit Rosen is the head of the department ZKM | Knowledge – collection, archive and research. In 2014, she conceived the net art project AOYS (»ArtOnYourScreen«), and since 2016, she has curated »Web Residencies by Solitude & ZKM«, a cooperation with Akademie Schloss Solitude. A focus of her scientific and curatorial work is the relationship between art and technological change.
She studied history of art, political sciences, philosophy and media art at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design [Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe (HfG)] and the University Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). After her degree, she initially worked as a research associate at ZKM. From 2002–2003, she also curated the lothringer13/halle, of the Municipal art gallery Munich [Städtische Kunsthalle München] together with Christian Schön.
Margit Rosen teaches the Masters program MediaArtHistories at the Danube University Krems. In the summer semesters 2011 and 2013 she was a guest professor at the University of Fine Arts Münster.
She published a series of books, texts and radio plays, including »Der Algorithmus des Manfred Mohr. Texte 1963–1979« [The algorithms of Manfred Mohr] (Leipzig: Spector 2014), »Maschinensehen. Feldforschung in den Räumen bildgebender Technologien« [machine vision. Field research in the areas of imaging technologies] (with Anselm Franke, Felix Mittelberger and Sebastian Pelz, Leipzig: Spector 2013), »A Little-Known Story About a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer's Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International. 1961-1973« (Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), »The Chrono-Files. From Time-Based Art to Database« (with Christian Schoen, Frankfurt: Revolver 2003) and »Bruno Latour. Kosmokoloss. Eine Tragikomödie über das Klima und den Erdball« [A tragicomedy about the climate and the globe] (translation and editing: Margit Rosen, Bayerischer Rundfunk, 2013/2015).