When formulated within the modern paradigm the products of biotech tend towards the extraction, alienation and entrapment of life, both natural and synthetic. These tendencies disregard (willfully or otherwise) knowledge of the intricate web of life found in many indigenous cosmologies, whereby each living thing is able to fulfil its (sacred) purpose within the ecology it is part of.

The notion of 'The Synthetic Sacred' is both a provocation and an attempt to forge sustainable narratives and practices. Weaving together posthuman and Indigenous knowledge systems, the initiative explores the sacred to transform fractured relations with nature and resist capitalist-colonialist extraction and alienation. It proposes the sacred as a framework to guide and detoxify our synthetic creations, ensuring all ecologies flourish. 

For this episode, we are joined by Professor of Biology at Tuft's University, Mike Levin, conceptual artist, Agnieszka Kurant, and the Director of the Natural History Museum in Berlin, Johannes Vogel. Together, we explore what becomes of nature when life is synthetic and ask what role biotech can play in ecological restoration. 

To celebrate 60 years of the Goethe-Institut London, we held three Goethe Annual Lectures in 2022. For our third, we invited Dr. Matthew Herbert for his talk “Beyond Hearing”. The talk was moderated by Ella Finer, whose work in sound and performance spans writing, composing, and curating with a particular interest in how women’s voices take up space; how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge, or change occupations of space.

Matthew Herbert is a musician, artist, producer and writer whose range of innovative works extends from numerous albums (including the much-celebrated Bodily Functions) to Ivor Novello nominated film scores (Life in a Day) as well as music for the theatre, Broadway, TV, games and radio. He has performed solo, as a DJ and with various musicians including his own 18 piece big band all round the world from the Sydney opera house, to the Hollywood Bowl and created installations, plays and operas. He has remixed iconic artists including Quincy Jones, Serge Gainsbourg, and Ennio Morricone and worked closely over a number of years with musical acts as diverse as Bjork and Dizzee Rascal.

To celebrate 60 years of the Goethe-Institut London, we held three Goethe Annual Lectures in 2022. For our second GAL, we invited Professor Mercedes Bunz to discuss “The Culture of Artificial Intelligence”. In her talk, she explores the particular power of AI systems using work from contemporary artists to reveal the human misunderstanding regarding AI. The talk was moderated by Eva Jäger, curator of Arts Technologies at Serpentine.

Mercedes Bunz is a professor in Digital Culture and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She studied Philosophy, Art History, and Media Studies at the FU Berlin and the Bauhaus University Weimar, and wrote her thesis on ‘The history of the internet-driven by a deep curiosity about digital technology'. Until today, she has not been disappointed by the transforming field that is digital technology, which provides her reliably with new aspects to think constantly about. At the moment, that is Artificial Intelligence and ‘machine learning’. Delving into the topics of AI and ‘machine learning’, Bunz co-leads the Creative AI Lab, a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London.

In light of recent events, a discussion about the role of love in our world seems more relevant than ever before. But this isn’t the romantic notion of love we are more commonly familiar with, it’s the love that cultural scientist and journalist Mithu Sanyal claims is sorely lacking in our world. A political love. It's the absence of this love that she believes is responsible for so much social injustice and inequality.

Over the coming weeks, the Goethe-Institut will explore these questions and more under the umbrella of a new project and international events series called ‘Living in a Quantum State’. Events in London, Dublin, Beijing and San Francisco will explore the role of civil society in regulating emerging technologies and examine how the arts may help us to communicate and understand these major scientific advances. In this podcast, we are diving right into the core of this complex theme to explore the possibilities and challenges that quantum computing will bring.

For more information and all event listings, see Goethe.de/quantum or follow @livinginaquantumstate on Instagram.

And with Isabel and Thomas’ involvement at the heart of the programme, we thought it would be a good idea to talk to them about things like food, decolonisation and creating a common positive future.

If you’re interested to find out more about the project, visit www.goethe.de/morphiceland.

In 2013, the German Museums Association (Deutscher Museumsbund) issued guidance on the treatment of human remains in museum collections, in which they introduced a novel concept. The idea of 'Unrechtskontext' (context of injustice) should, they suggested, guide curatorial ethics when assessing the circumstances in which museum collections were acquired. Among considerations here was not just the contexts of the past, but also whether any particular injustice 'continued to have an effect in the present'.

For the Goethe Annual Lecture 2021, Dan Hicks posed the following questions: How should we understand the 'Unrechtskontexte' of colonial legacies today? By the standards of the time - or by the values that we hold today? And how can these legacies be meaningfully dismantled?

For the inaugural edition from October 2021 we invited Berlin-based and Texas-born DJane, writer and performer Juliana Huxtable for the residency. Time to discuss her influences, visions, opinions, but also the current situation of clubbing in a global pandemic for a brief moment on a cloudy Thursday afternoon in South Kensington, London.