• Akademie der Künste / Hanseatenweg / Blue Room
How Water Calculates

with AM Kanngieser, Antonia Hernández, Laura Cugusi, Yu Hsin Su

Moderated by Robert Gerard Pietrusko

  • Panel
Passes only
How Water Calculates With AM Kanngieser, Antonia Hernández, Laura Cugusi, Yu Hsin Su Moderated by Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Water is an indicator. A sign of the possibility of planetary life. Water as we know it is a modern abstraction; we believe that digital tools help us to understand how water moves, stays still, changes states. But these tools have been developed based on a knowledge of water that is based on a diagram, one that is considered a universal portrayal of the states of water, despite having been modelled after conditions specific to one discrete part of the world.

Engaging with water, its temporal relations, and spatial orders through cartographic and statistical datasets, historical documentation, and ethnographic fieldwork, and in conversation with Robert Gerard Pietrusko, AM Kanngieser, Antonia Hernández, Laura Cugisi, and Su Yu Hsin ask how water and its states of matter have shaped and formed infrastructures, digital systems and processes, and worlds, making space for the unknowability and unpredictability of water as they discuss new political, economic, and spatial methods.