Nothing matters nowadays. Or does it? In the face of severe ecological and geopolitical crises, materiality itself is deeply affected by nothingness and negativity: Landscapes are riddled with holes and voids due to massive resource extraction, mountains of waste pile up as negative matter, glaciers shrink and become monuments of loss.

Thus, we are confronted with a multitude of material non‐things and non‐places. But what relations do we maintain with the void, the absent, the forgotten and the vanished? Through which operations, acts, gestures, and practices is something turned into nothing?  How does nothing materialize in various media milieus like film, literature, and games? And what kind of hidden potentialities may lie in material nothingness?

By proposing a material, relational, and operative view on nothing, the conference ties in with recent media‐philosophical concepts like operative ontologies and anthropomediality and brings them into dialogue with interdisciplinary discussions around the negative turn recently announced in contemporary social, geographical, and media theory.

»Nothing Matters. On Negative Objects, Spaces, and Relations« conference
Thursday, 13 July to Saturday, 15 July 2024
University Library
GRAMA Lounge, Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar

The conference will be held in English. 
Program

Please register by e-mailing martin.siegler[at]uni-weimar.de 

The conference is being organised by Dr. Martin Siegler, Scientific Associate in the Department of Media Philosophy, together with the DFG Graduiertenkolleg Media Anthropology at the Faculty of Media. Further support for the event is provided by the Körber Stiftung.

For questions regarding the conference, please contact Dr. Martin Sieglerby e-mail at martin.siegler[at]uni-weimar.de.