In cooperation with the Exzellenzcluster Normative Orders of the Goethe University Frankfurt, we will have a closer discursive look on Chaos on Festivalfriday. Jacob Lillemose, curator of X AND BEYOND in Copenhagen will have a look at catastrophes in film in his lecture "The End is Not the End. Post-apocalyptic Imaginaries in Contemporary Movies“. Followed by a talk with Peer Illner (EXC) on Lillemoos’ observations. In Tohuwabohu 2.0, Matthias C. Kettemann (EXC) tries to uncover chaos on the internet, while Marcus Döller (EXC) follows the aesthetic idea of the chaotic shapelessness in Chaos in die Ordnung bringen. Following this, they all test their ideas for compatibility and fruitfulness in a moderated talk. 

Host: Stefanie Plappert (DIF). 

Jacob Lillemose PhD

The End is Not the End. Post-apocalyptic Imaginaries in Contemporary Movies

Lecture in English

It is an age-old thing for humans to imagine the end of the world. Already the cave paintings in Chauvet, dating back 37.000 years, depict the real-life monstrous drama of a volcanic eruption. Today, such depictions of earth-shattering events abound in the works of fiction produced by the movie industry, from the satellite malfunction in Geostorm to the zombie pandemic in World War Z. However, in these contemporary depictions of catastrophes the end is never really the end but always an occasion for a return to something that existed before the event or the beginning of something completely new. This talk will engage with a broad selection of current cinematic disasters to discuss the implications of these two types of "non-endings." It approaches the question of the end of the world as a horizon for world-making to raise both critical and visionary awareness of the political and existential aspects of imagined disasters.

---

Dr. Matthias C. Kettemann, LL.M. (Harvard/EXC)
Tohuwabohu 2.0

Chaos on the net as a force of productivity and a source of danger. At the beginning there was chaos. Then came freedom. Then came the states and with them the law. But does this loss of chaos also mean the loss of freedom? ‘Anti-chaotic’, legal approaches to order in the regulation of the internet may of course be justified, but – if excessive, instrumentalised by intermediaries or loaded with state authority – they carry the danger of violating freedom. Let chaos reign? The internet has many meaningful ‘chaotic’ tendencies: fragmentation, cyber attacks, diversification of private organising. Chaos is not anarchy if chaos on the internet stays as a productive force and universal basic values as well as basic principles of the internet are secured – especially on the internet as a non-linear dynamic system in which, as in physics, chaos is the regulatory state. And regulations are famously normative.

---

Marcus Döller (EXC)
Chaos in die Ordnung bringen (Bringing Chaos into Order) 

The philosophical thinking on aesthetic execution in artistic practices is marked by a reflection on the disruptions in successful executions in social practices and their normative constitutive conditions. The disruption of social practices of success opens aesthetic windows for the dissolution and production of forms that are themselves not constituted like the forms of these figments. Chaos is the name for the non-shape of the synchronism of dissolution and production of shapes out of shapelessness. In his lecture, Marcus Döller will survey the paradox connection of chaotic shapelessness and orderly shape on his own internal dialectics by interrogating the modern aesthetics on the structure of production of chaotic shapelessness through the forms of artistic practices. Aesthetic practices therefore enable the portrayal of a synchronism of dissolution and production of shapes by opening up, in the shape of products, to chaotic shapelessness and staging the differences of orderly shape and chaotic shapelessness in form of their productions themselves.