Our topic for the Winter term 2017/18:

Real, Fake and the Imaginary

Here’s what to read and watch. The titles are in the library on the Semesterapparat shelf, unless otherwise noted.

• Adam Curtis –  Living in an Unreal World, trailer for HyperNormalisation, 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMM7p2blVXs
• Adam Curtis  – HyperNormalisation, video essay, 2016, freely available online i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InbLmw_x6jQ
• Bruce Nauman, Walker Art Center, catalogue, 1994
• Bruce Naumann, Audio-video underground chamber, catalogue, 2005
• Christoph Keller, Observatorium, catalogue, Braunschweig 2008
• Mareike Wegener, Mark Lombardi, documentary about the artist, on DVD, 2011
• Orson Welles, F for Fake, film essay, on DVD, 1975
• Errol Morris, The Unknown Known, documentary, on DVD, 2013 (available online, too, i.e. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=The+Unknown+Known )

• Bruce Sterling , Distraction, novel, 1998
• Bruce Sterling, Zeitgeist, novel, 2001

• Bertold Brecht, On Restoring the Truth, 1934, October 160, Spring 2017 – available online http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/OCTO_a_00297
• Bertold Brecht, Über die Wiederherstellung der Wahrheit, 1934, aus: Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, Suhrkamp, 1967

• Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife For a Hat, 1970, (chapter “The President’s Speech”, on aphasia) – online i.e. here
• Oliver Sacks,  Der Mann, der seine Frau mit einem Hut verwechselte, Hamburg 1993

• Francesca Hughes, Truth Is in the Tower, e-flux  Journal #84 – September 2017 http://www.e-flux.com/journal/84/149170/truth-is-in-the-tower/

• For a  popular imagination, Hollywood take on this, (re-)watch Blade Runner, Fight Club, The Truman Show. Plus Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 for a very contemporary mix of real and fake.

…

For a quick intro check out these trailers for two of the videos listed above:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
There are known unknowns; the things we know we don’t know.
There are also the third category of unknown unknows; the things we dont know we don’t know. And you can only know more about those things by imagining what they might be.
Pearl Harbor was a failure of imagination. We didn’t know we didn’t know they could do what they did in the way they did it.

The Unknown Known, documentary by Errol Morris about master liar Donald Rumsfeld, 2013

You go into an office and sit at your desk. But maybe it is a fake job. Your real job is shopping. The true factories of our times are the shopping malls. That is where the real hard work is done.

A typical Adam Curtis, good intro to how he works.
Living in an Unreal World, trailer for HyperNormalisation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMM7p2blVXs