Periodization (Panel Discussion)
26. Jun
The Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) invites you to a panel discussion with Tom McCarthy (Novelist, Berlin) and Inke Arns (Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund) on “Periodization.” The panel discussion is part of the Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy 2026.
- Friday, June 26 / 7 – 9 pm / ICI Berlin
- Registration is not necessary.
Contact: cdcforum@leuphana.de
How, why, and with what epistemic implications is history divided into temporal segments? Periodizations—whether in the form of epochs, ages, turning points, or more heroic “eras”—belong to the most fundamental and yet most frequently contested historiographical operations in literary, art, and media studies. In recent years, a renewed problematization has emerged—in the name of re‑periodizations (“Anthropocene”), de‑periodizations (“broad present”), or comparative and global perspectives and other temporalities (“multiple modernities”). Yet these approaches do not escape the legacy of periodization; rather, they are often blind to its recursive and pattern‑forming operations. Tom McCarthy and Inke Arns will explore these tensions from the perspectives of literary practice and curatorial work.
Tom McCarthy, born in London in 1969, is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theater and radio. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award; his third, C, was a 2010 Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. . (https://www.suhrkamp.de/person/tom-mccarthy-p-17294)
Inke Arns, PhD, curator, since 2005 Artistic Director, and since 2017 Director of HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, Germany (www.hmkv.de). She has worked internationally as an independent curator, writer and theorist specializing in media art, net cultures, and Eastern Europe since 1993. She obtained her PhD from the Humboldt University in Berlin, with a thesis focusing on a paradigmatic shift in the way artists reflected the historical avant-garde and the notion of utopia in visual and media art projects of the 1980s and 1990s in (ex-)Yugoslavia and Russia. Her latest exhibitions include among others Robotron. Working Class and Intelligentsia (2025-2026), Genossin Sonne (Comrade Sun, 2024-2025), Was ist Kunst, IRWIN? (2023), House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm (2022), Technoshamanism (2021), The Sea is Glowing (2020), Artists & Agents — Performancekunst und Geheimdienste (2019), Der Alt-Right-Komplex (2019), Computer Grrrls (2018), Sturm auf den Winterpalast – Forensik eines Bildes (2017). (https://www.inkearns.de/)