Design of the In/Human
With the project »Design of the In/Human,« Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, devoted itself to concepts of the human and the inhuman in the discourses of natural sciences, life sciences, philosophy and cultural studies, in economic theories, and particularly, in the arts. The focus of interest was as much the tensions between, as the interfaces with biological and technological reality, globalized economy, and philosophical reflections that raised the topic of humanism from a contemporary point of view. Theoretical and artistic approaches dealing with the opposition of the human and the inhuman, and also with their entanglement, have been concomitant with the history of mankind for time immemorial. How pervasive have concepts of the human and inhuman become? Could all the questions about the human and the inhuman, posed independently by individual disciplines, point to each other and be regarded and treated as diverse facets of one and the same question?
The two-year project »Design of the In/Human,« which was organized between 2009 and 2010, considered these questions from diverse perspectives made possible by an interdisciplinary and international cast of participants from the arts, humanities, sciences, and economics. By treating a theme of global scope in a multi-disciplinary manner, the project aims at stimulating a necessary social discourse on the question of the design and the territories of the human and the inhuman.