Charitable organization, zeit-geist 19 is a research-led cultural enterprise that specializes in educational and cultural programs, lectures, workshops, public talks and debates, screenings, master-classes, and round tables with distinguished creative individuals, pioneers of contemporary art & culture, emerging talents, environmentalists, and entrepreneurs.
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Each era has a unique spirit - a nature or climate that sets it apart from every other epoch. In German, this is known as the Zeitgeist, from the words Zeit - time and Geist - spirit. Certain thinkers have asserted that the true zeitgeist of an era cannot be known until that era has passed, others have declared that only artists and philosophers can adequately make sense of it.
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Our aim is to gather representatives from various cultural segments under the umbrella of this philosophical concept, in order to explore the spirit of today.
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Our Curated Podcast’s Season VI entitled ‘The New Leviathan’ continues to address critical topics, on environmental destruction, human rights, institutional racism, the global pandemic and its economic fallout that has left institutional and cultural systems in dire need to reflect, reconsider and reform their practices. These series of episodes are grounded in many conversations capturing this moment of history, with its focal point on the relationship between individuals and technologies. In Cecilia Alemani’s statement for the 59th Venice Biennial she speaks about our
everyday realities being dramatically split between “technological optimism - which promises that the human body can be endlessly perfected through science - and the dread of a complete takeover by machines via automation and artificial intelligence. This rift has widened during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has forced us even further apart and caged much of human interaction behind the
screens of electronic devices.” Over the past decade, we have become accustomed to interpreting our online lives as a mixture of freedom and enslavement: the internet as freedom from physical constraints, with fluidity and speed of communication and transactions, but also digital colonisation of human spheres of experience and their privacy.
Leviathan, a mythical creature in Judaism, was used by philosopher Thomas Hobbes to symbolise the rule of law standing above all other human powers. Szymon Wróbel writes that the automation of technology risks becoming a new Leviathan. As autonomous technology removes humans from interactions, a political economy running on asymmetries of information as a form of control is
being born before our eyes. The new ruling class owns neither land or factories but instead owns the algorithms with which information is gathered and used.
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This season intends to further explore the themes of digital creation and preservation. Technology and innovations are key contributors for positive change for ocean conservation, one of the most challenging ecological issues today - the preservation of the marine world. We will further explore the stage of the Earth’s ocean water, enhanced by cutting-edge informational, digital tools
and meaningful initiatives spurring action to protect and preserve the marine environment.
What are the new and emerging technologies? What opportunities will arise for the presentation and preservation of cultural heritage using them? How might scientific progress, in conjunction with creative skills and enlightened thinking, change the rules of social life, politics and economics? Technological optimism or the dread of a complete takeover by machines?
