Nervous Systems: Quantified Life and the Social Question

Co-curated by Anselm Franke (HKW), Stephanie Hankey, and Marek Tuszynski (Tactical Technology Collective), Nervous Systems questions the pervasive nervousness that haunts today's systems and data-driven rationalities and ideologies. It asks: Will these systems be able to stabilize themselves, and contain the forces of chaos, disorder, and the unknown, real, or imagined threats? What does 'privacy' mean when it becomes possible to identify someone just as easily from 'anonymous data' as from a fingerprint or identity card? What remains of the world when it is being interpreted for us by machines?

Discourse around the integrations of these technologies vary with magnitude. One approach is of emancipation, egalitarianism, and empowerment the other of repression, surveillance, and state power. Neither in favour nor against these technological advancements, this exhibition instead highlights the relationship between the individual and the vast networked infrastructures of data collection. The revelations presented also shed light into the roles that legislation and markets play to influence individual experience and activity.

These issues are pursued by the exhibition Nervous Systems at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, with artistic works and collected materials to better illustrate the entanglements of state, industry, body and technology in its genealogy as well as its relevance.

Nervous Systems is part of the long-term project 100 Years of Now on the global transformations and classification systems that emerged from the World War I.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as well as by the Federal Foreign Office.