Modes of Human Decentering and Recentering in Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballett – A Guest Lecture by Olivia Poppe (University of Berkeley, CA)
With the emergence of artificial intelligence technologies and their accelerated restructuring of human-nonhuman relations within various social spheres, there has been a widely registered return to human-centered discourse. In the face of the perceived loss of human relevance in near- and far-future scenarios of AI-driven societies, meaning is being constructed around a subjectivity that revives the Enlightenment subject, which had been deconstructed in schools of thought associated with the nonhuman turn since the late 20th century.
To consider the implications of AI and the resurgence of the sovereign subject, Olivia Poppe examines the work of Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer and his comprehensive production Triadisches Ballett (1922).
The ballet not only reimagines the art of dance but also materializes Schlemmer’s theory of the human as a figurine within its environment determined by mathematical laws. Poppe views Schlemmer’s understanding of the human as a prototypical example wherein the human is simultaneously recentered and decentered in relation to immense technological restructurings of knowledge and social practices.
Olivia Poppe is a Ph.D. student in the German Department at UC Berkeley with a designated emphasis in Film and Media. Her dissertation explores sociocultural theories and audiovisual poetics of haunting and spectrality. Prior to joining the German program, she worked as a PraeDoc researcher and lecturer in the Department of Theater, Film and Media at the University of Vienna. Her most recent publication was published 2025 under the title "Lumpenengel. Afrofuturistische Metamorphosen in The Last Angel of History" in TFMJ: Festschrift für Christian Schulte, vol. 69.
Entrance free • no reservation required
A cooperation between the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna and the International Research Center Gender and Performativity at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
contact: stefan.schweigler[–ät–]univie.ac.at
