Watch Your Bubble! About Borders, Multiplicity and Extensions

Interdisciplinary arte & science project

2022

Kindly supported by the district funds of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and the Einstein Foundation.

The interdisciplinary art exhibition and conference Watch Your Bubble! engages the bubble as a metaphor to knowledge formation, individual and social identity. Across the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience and aesthetics, the project considers the complex origins of social and personal identities as constitutive processes of demarcation and delimitation. Within the framework of an exhibition, conference and related events, the project explores the interface between these varied studies and promotes the productive exchange between the arts and sciences.

Inspired by contemporary social phenomena that reciprocally shape and arise from digitization, migration, globalization, transculturalism and other dynamics of hypermodern societies, Watch Your Bubble! conceives identities as biologically, historically, culturally, and socially determined, and as a constantly changing process.

The project includes recent discussions about social bubbles—that is, the isolation and separation of groups according to their preferences, but also across languages, habits, style, personality among others. The bubble metaphor applies to the ever growing atomization of our societies, where individuals relate less and less with others through enacted “real” interpersonal relations, relying more and more on mediated forms of digital interaction (e.g. social networks).

Watch Your Bubble! offers an interdisciplinary and discursive platform for the open-minded reflection and discussion of individual and social phenomena on the basis of partly interactive installations, objects, paintings, videos, performances, lectures and discussions with artists, curators and scientists.