The Swarm-Being of the Infected Metropolis is Johannes Paul Raether’s most recently developed character. The Inception of its research mission into techno-dystopian thinking, merging the field of artificial intelligence and critical city-planning discourse, will start by harvesting “dismembered City parts” of the metropolis. These reifications of the metropolis’ infection with a yet unknown substance or agent will be collected in Canal Street, the trading place for the Thingiverse’s poisonous particles.

During her talk, Kerstin Stakemeier reads into and out of Johannes Paul Raether’s yet relatively young Swarm-Being catechizing its spatial and temporal location. She lends the Swarm-Being a voice, attempting a joined exegesis and expansion of its research. Furthermore, the Swarm-Being will become the medium to jointly talk about Raether’s other creatures. Together, Swarm-Being and Stakemeier pick a fight with black magic, and reach into symbolism in search for a psycho-materialist realism.

Please find the sound file here.

Kerstin Stakemeier lives in Berlin/Munich. She is a writer and teacher currently serving as an assistant professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. She writes for Texte zur Kunst, Afterall, Springerin, and Phase2, and has been a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Akademie (Maastricht) working on realism in (contemporary) art. In 2012, she co-edited Anfang Gut. Alles Gut (with Eva Birkenstock and Nina Koeller) and Painting—The Implicit Horizon (with Avigail Moss). A—Autonomy (co-authored with Marina Vishmidt) will be published this summer and Entkunstung—ends in art is forthcoming with PoLYpeN, b_books.

5pm
Canal Street at Broadway

7pm
Kerstin Stakemeier in conversation with the Swarm—Being of the Infected Metropolis
Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building
5 East 3rd Street
New York, NY 10003