Studium Generale courses

Hello wrldz ;)

Let's start the vertical and horizontal analysis of past, present and future myths.

Dark age & co.

Destination 1: The Moon

Frankenstein

1984

R.U.R.

John "Ticktockman" W. Campbell vs. Harlan "Harlequin" Ellison and Horselover "nicht-alle-Tassen-im-Schrank" Fat

ultra-prolific (cca 45 novels, >120 short-stories)

his twin sister Jane died when he was six weeks old

first educated at Quaker schools, later at Berkeley

seller in record store, gets his first short-story "R🐶🐶G" published in 1951

amphetamine abuse; married 5 times; paranoia; schizophrenia;

self-described as "acosmic panentheist" - "I don't believe that the universe exists. I believe that the only thing that exists is God and (s)he is more than the universe. "

Space opera: epic destiny, cosmic technology, and the quiet suspicion that none of this was strictly necessary.

Dune

Olivia Butler - The parable of the Sower

Medienhaus Aula, Gaia

Humans are story-telling animals. In the peri(patetic|cycletic) SoSe2026 seminar at Gutshof Sauen, we shall reflect upon history of story-telling as it has been, since times immemorial, practiced in different cultures and different contexts (artistic, educational, political etc.). We will ask questions like: "How will story-telling look like in the future ? What methods, instruments and media will be used to-tell-the-story in year 2300 ? Will AIs and corporations be the principal story-tellers or are they just temporary actors reminding us how important it is that humanity should protect its "narrative sovereignity" ? What stories will be told, by whom, and to whom ?". But first and foremost: we will practice. Outdoor and indoor; by a fireplace and in Extended Reality, we - You, me, us - will be telling stories. And, hopefully, also learning in the process.

How will (story-)telling look like in the future ?

What methods, instruments and media will be used to-tell(-the-story) in year 2300 ?

https://udk.ai/sauen (main course information)

#udk2300:medienhaus.udk-berlin.de Matrix room(if You install Matrix client (e.g. Element) App on Your device use "medienhaus.udk-berlin.de" as the homeserver)

Foreword(s)

Texts You will go through with Daniel

Ursula leGuin: the Telling

William Storr: The science of story-telling

Joseph Campbell: The hero with the thousand faces

Paul Ricoeur: Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives

Texts You will go through with Rinah

Ingold, Tim: Lines (threads and Traces:p 39-53)

Trinh T. Minh-Ha: The Story began long time ago..(intro, 2 pages) 125-151 (Stories and their tellers)

Flusser, Vilem: Crisis of Linearity

Flusser, Vilem: Gestures

Suarez, Lavender: Transcendent Waves: How Listening Shapes Our Creative Lives.

The main narrative

Epilogue

How do ideas spread, mutate, and survive? Why do we laugh when others laugh, adopt accents, hum songs that refuse to leave our heads, or suddenly find ourselves saying "actually"? This seminar explores the evolution of information through the lens of theory of memes, also known as memetics—the study of how cultural patterns replicate, vary, and undergo selection. Beginning with genes and the logic of biological evolution, we trace the emergence of memes as cultural replicators transmitted through imitation, communication, and media. Along the way we examine mirror neurons, contagious behaviours, habits, dopamine, earworms and mindworms, the Maluma–Takete effect, memetic complexes such as fashion, ideology, and religion, self-referentiality, the formation of the egoplex, viral phenomena, computer viruses and worms, apps, emojis, memecoins, and other contemporary manifestations of cultural evolution. Combining perspectives from evolutionary theory, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, media studies, and computer science, the seminar invites participants to view culture itself as an evolving ecosystem of replicating patterns which often act and express themselves independently from what our bodies, minds and souls "actually" want.

Session 0 · Memetics begins at home.

Before Internet memes, before ideology, before theory: gestures, tunes, habits, rituals, phrases, drawings, interfaces and everyday acts of copying.

Replication + Variation + Selection = Evolution

Freud, Dawkins, Rizzolatti

... and how to defeat it

Earworms, mindworms, moving memes::Fashion, Style, Art &c.

Mediated memes, Urban memes

Memplexes, Religions, Ideologies, Self-reference

Memes in Law, Politics & Propaganda

Memes & Cyberspace

Memes, Memecoins, AIs

Memes revisited

The Congress

Pythagoras, Latin numerals, Invention of Zero, Leibniz, Decimal / Binary / Hexadecimal Codes, int8 / fp16 / bf16 &c.

In which the reader is asked, quite simply, What is an Algorithm? — and finds the answer rather older, and rather stranger, than expected.

Being an account of cogs and looms and engines of brass; of Signor Pascal's calculating box and Mr. Babbage's unbuilt Engines; of a certain Lady Lovelace who saw further than most; and of sundry other contrivances got up by ingenious persons long before any machine was called a computer.

Wherein two short films are watched, in the company of a partner to be consulted not once but twice; wherein old Euclid's method is recalled, some two thousand years and more since first he wrote it down; and wherein, at the last, the curious Persian origin of a word now spoken a thousand times a day — one al-Khwarizmi's own — is at length discovered.

The story of Alan Matthison Turing, his machine(s) and his test(s)

From information theory to Darmouth conference

Features, Classifiers, Decision Trees, Random Forests, Training & Testing, 

N-dimensional Spaces, Semantic Spaces, Feature Spaces, Embeddings

The Chrismas talk on Noosphere, Datasphere, Infosphere, Singularity, Novacene &c.

Large & Small Language Models

Agentic AI

Central Problem of Roboethics, Alignment

Humans and machines can learn together
Machines and humans can learn with each other