Vera Bühlmann (TU Vienna, Professor in Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics)
The Greek word “eschaton” means the last thing that remains. How do we think of such lastness, of such remaining? The eschaton is involved wherever notions of crisis, apocalypse, and post-ness set the agenda for orienting our thinking. It is evident how strongly it features in our technological narratives, like those around climate and AI, but how do we find it employed in current mythopoetic imaginaries around the digital more specifically, like Heidegger’s and Harman’s Geviert, Virilio’s Postindustrial Eschatology, Simondon’s Eschatology of Technical Objects, Yuk Hui’s Cosmo Technics or Cacciari’s The Withholding Power?
The Digital, a Continent? Nature and Poetics (2024) takes cryptographic interest in such adventures in exuberance, and considers an informal “marriage” between architectonics and metaphysics taking place amidst its scenes of conversing theoretically. This is what in this lecture I want to "chat" about: I want to make a proposal of how to approach the digital in a natural philosophy way, by means of activating an architectonic play around the incommensurability between Nature and Poetics.
Vera Bühlmann is a Swiss writer, professor for Architecture Theory and director of the Research Unit Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics ATTP at Technische Universität Wien. Together with Ludger Hovestadt, chair for Digital Architectonics at ETH Zurich, she is co-editor of the Applied Virtuality Book Series (Birkhäuser, since 2012), with Katerina Kolozova and Adam Nocek she acts as founding director of the School for Materialist Research SMR since 2021, an inter-institutional online platform for research and exchange. Her own work oscillates around quantum literacy and ethics, with a research emphasis is on Digital Gnomonics and Meridian Architectonics. Since 2023 she is also co-founder of the Meteora Academy Buti, in Tuscany Italy.
Among her last publications are "Introduction New Materialisms: Quantum Ideation across Dissonance" in Methods and Genealogies of New Materialisms, edited by Felicity Colman and Iris van der Tuin (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Feminism and Techné, a special issue of Technophany, Journal for Philosophy and Technology (2023) co-edited with Katerina Kolozova, the monograph Information and Mathematics in the Philosophy of Michel Serres (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), as well as Ghosts of Transparency, Shadows Cast and Shadows Cast Out (co-editor with Michael Doyle and Selena Savic, Birkhäuser, 2019) and Ethics of Coding, a Report on the Algorithmic Condition with Felicity Colman, Iris van der Tuin, and Aislinn O'Donnell (2018, EU Horizon 2020, No.732407).