Annual theme "The Present of the Future"
Interdisciplinary Lecture Series (2014/15)

 

13.01.2015

Calculating with Contingency

Elena Esposito and Nora Schultz

 

Elena Esposito

 

Elena Esposito is Professor of Sociology of Communication at the University of Modena/Reggio Emilia. She works with the theory of social systems, principally on questions of the social management of time, for instance on memory and forgetting, fashion and transience, media, probability calculus, fiction and the use of time in finance. Her current research projects focus on the social relevance of algorithms, on possibilities and forms of forgetting on the web and the proliferation of ratings and rankings for information management. Her monographs include Die Zukunft der Futures. Die Zeit des Geldes in Finanzwelt und Gesellschaft (Carl-Auer, 2010; engl. 2011); Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität (Suhrkamp, 2007); Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode (Suhrkamp, 2004); and Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft (Suhrkamp, 2002).

 

Nora Schultz studied film and painting at the Frankfurt Städelschule from 1998 to 2005 and, using the Ermenegildo Zegna international scholarship, spent the summer of 2005 on the Bard College MFA program at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in New York. In the following year, she took part in the summer academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. Her other awards include the Villa Romana Prize in Florence (2011), the scholarship of the Stiftung Kunstfonds (2012) and an atelier stipend from the Hessische Kulturstiftung for New York City (2014). In 2015, Schultz taught at the Salzburg Summer Academy and in the Department for Visual and Environmental Studies in Harvard, as well as being guest professor at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Since 2016 she is Professor for Sculpture in Harvard. Her works have been exhibited internationally, amongst others in solo shows such as I am honda at Reena Spaulings New York (2015), Stative auf der Flucht in the Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery in Berlin (2013) and Parrottree - Building for Bigger Than Real in the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014). Born in Frankfurt, she now lives and works in Berlin and New York.