Gastwissenschaftler:innen

Daniel Nemenyi

What kind of thought, what kind of social form could have imagined and produced something like an internet? Dr. Daniel Nemenyi’s research involves conceptual histories of the present, of the cybernetic revolution of the 1940s and its aftershocks. Before joining the Disruptive Condition as a Guest Scientist (Gastwissenchaftler) with a specialism in disruptive technologies, he was a fellow in the 2023-24 round of the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS). With us he continues to work on the project he began there, developing new conceptual accounts of the cunning kybernetes, the ancient Greek navigator of ships after whom cybernetics was named. To the Greeks the kybernetespossessed a special kind of intelligence that enabled them to predict the future of the shapeshifting, boundless sea, such that they could escape from its disastrous traps. Like the sophist, doctor and army general on land, the kybernetes could turn their opponent’s power against itself, and do so without turning to the eternally stable truths of philosophy and mathematics. As such the history of philosophy has hardly embraced their cunning intelligence. Plato sought to overthrow the kybernetes of the ship of State with the philosopher king; Heidegger saw in their art of steering the origins of the violence of logos. What does it say that those who invented the machines which define our age saw the world through a science that carried the kybernetes with it in its very name?

Prior to Leuphana, Dr. Nemenyi held the position of Lecturer in Big Data Methodologies and Technologies Education at King’s College London (KCL) and was a research assistant on the KCL project ‘La toupie folle: The Pragmatic Genealogy of Concepts’. He completed his postgraduate studies at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University, under the supervision of Professor Howard Caygill, and his Bachelors in philosophy at the University of Sussex. His doctoral thesis is entitled What is an internet? Norbert Wiener and the Society of Control (2019). From 2012 to 2024, he served as an editor of the British magazine Radical Philosophy. Besides his research, he has interests in analogue cinema and niche programming languages.

Publication history:

• Daniel Nemenyi, 'Robot Makes Free: The Leibnizian cryptowar of Norbert Wiener', Radical Philosophy2.14, Spring 2023, 3–20. (Radical Philosophy)  
• Daniel Nemenyi, 'How we never became posthuman: Homeostasis as conflict from Claude Bernard to Norbert Wiener', Distributed Perception, ed. Natasha Lushetich and Iain Campbell (London: Routledge, 2021), 160-173. (Taylor & Francis, British Library)  
• Daniel Nemenyi, 'Position paper', Terra Critica, (July 2019). A reading of Alexandre Koyré's 'The Political Function of the Modern Lie' together with Stuart Hall's 'The Meaning of New Times'. (read) 
• Daniel Nemenyi, Submarine State: On secrets and leaks, Radical Philosophy, 193 (Sept/Oct 2015), 2-8. (Radical Philosophy)
• Daniel Nemenyi, 'Rose-tinted lens', Radical Philosophy, 186 (Jul/Aug 2014). Review of Hannah Arendt, dir. Margarethe von Trotta, 60-63. (Radical Philosophy)

Igor Galligo

Igor Galligo is initially trained in the humanities, leading to four masters degrees: contemporary philosophy, visual arts and aesthetics at the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, and political science at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Since the end of 2012, he has been conducting research on ecology of attention, design of attention and relationships between attention and aesthetic experience. In 2013, he joined the Reflective Interaction program at EnsadLab, the research laboratory of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. He also became an associated researcher at GERPHAU, a research center in architecture and urbanism, attached to the ENSPLV. In 2015, he became a research officer for the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication à la Direction de la Recherche, de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Technologie. From 2013 to 2015, he directed three international seminars with Bernard Stiegler at Centre Pompidou in Paris on the transformation of attentional capacities in a digital milieu and participated in the creation of the chair of contributory research, led by Bernard Stiegler, on the territory of Plaine Commune. In 2017, he was an associate researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, in Basel. In 2018, he founded NOODESIGN, a think tank on the design of mind operations. In 2019, under the supervision of Yves Citton and within the EUR ArTeC, he began working towards obtaining his PhD on the themes of Automedias, contributory media and post-truth. In 2021, he was appointed associate researcher at the COSTECH laboratory, at the Université Technologique de Compiègne. From april 2022, he is a researcher in residence at the Berlin Open Lab, a project associating the Technische Universität Berlin (ECDF) and the Weizenbaum Institute, directed by Michelle Christensen and Florian Conradi. In 2022, he founded AUTOMEDIAS.ORG, a platform that brings together researchers, software developers, and political actors from the automedia world, notably from the Gilets Jaunes movement. From August 2022 to July 2023, he is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley (USA), sponsored by the Networking Ecologically Smart Territories program. Attached to the Rhetoric department at UC Berkeley and under the supervision of David Bates, he develops his reflection on automedia and the contribution of critical digital rhetoric to elaborate different approaches from surveillance capitalism to the problems of the so-called “Post-Truth”. This led him to collaborate with several research centers at UC Berkeley including the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society; the Social Science Matrix and the Jacob Institute for Design Innovation. In autumn 2023, he is once again a researcher in residence at the Berlin Open Lab, thanks to a DAAD grant. Since March 2024, he has been a guest researcher in “The Disruptive Condition" program at the University of Leuphana, Luneburg, under the direction of Erich Hörl.