Energetic Transfers investigates twentieth-century modernity and technics with particular attention to the relationship between labor, ethics, and the physical sciences. This symposium explores how conceptions of energetic transfer—the displacement of subject and object positions with respect to an electromotive force—might be productive for experimental thinking in aesthetics, philosophy, and radical politics. It seeks to excavate the longstanding affective, political, or intersubjective nature of energetic transfers that the modern sciences have rendered nearly invisible, and that are routinely subject to capitalist capture. Exploring a broad spectrum of biopolitical relations and subjectivities as well as the sensorium of the nervous system, the symposium investigates which scientific, theoretical, and speculative ideas in energy politics, theories, and technics have been discontinued and which persist. It also explores which energetic transfers evade scientific and aesthetic representation and how they might relate to the work of philosophers, activists, artists, and filmmakers. 

Organized in collaboration with the NOMIS Foundation and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.