WORKSHOPS and SEMINARS (selection)

8 December 2020

Workshop
Page to Picture! Screenwriting for Artists
Goldsmiths, University of London, London

The practical and theoretical workshop is designed for artists working in the moving image who want to develop screenwriting as an integral part of their practice. It introduces basic screenwriting rules alongside approaches to screenwriting outside of conventional formats, and looks at how those may be adapted for the specific needs of a range of artists' moving image projects, using examples from Kirschner's work and that of other artists, writers, choreographers and directors.

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3 - 7 February 2020

Workshop
Gamic Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to Machinima as Artistic Strategy
Piet Zwart Institute/Willem De Kooning Academy, Rotterdam

Machinima means using and manipulating computer game technology in order to make films and videos. Originating in gamer culture this technique has been increasingly appropriated by contemporary artists, probing the virtualisation and gamification of life in late liberalism.

This workshop introduces practical and theoretical approaches to post-cinematic media and virtual worlds, resulting in the production of collaborative video works, woven from computer animation and observational footage.

It draws on Kirschner’s research into immersion as well as films and videos by Chen Zhou, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Jacky Connolly and others who have explored deeply personal and wider social phenomena, often counterintuitively mixing machinima with observational documentary elements.

The aim is to make the world of videogames open for investigation to players and non-players and seek to draw wider connections between technology and personhood and the modulation of contemporary life through games and simulations.

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20 - 24 January 2020

Workshop
Cinematic Objects
Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe

Based on videos by Rachel Reupke, Romily Alice Walden, Hanna Rullmann and Faiza Ahmad Khan and other artists, this workshop deals with the filmic staging of objects, things and matter, linked to queer, feminist and decolonial approaches to materialisms, ecologies and non-humanisms (Dana Luciano, Claire Colebrook, Sylvia Wynter).

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4 November 2019

Seminar
"Technology is not neutral, and there is no virtual world."
Piet Zwart Institute/Willem De Kooning Academy, Rotterdam

The seminar focuses on how seemingly immaterial, digital technologies need to be thought in material terms, using examples from science fiction, gaming and moving image and linking these to decolonial and queer-feminist debates.

The history of technology from antiquity to the 21st century is also that of mining, slavery and ‘surplus populations’, of uprisings on earth and in space. Here political action repeatedly comes up against the question of its reality: Should you swallow the red or the blue pill? Are you on a psychotic 'ego trip' or on the way to a revolutionary consciousness? Woman or machine?

Put differently: would it be more effective to refuse to think in binary terms about realities and virtualities, organisms and technologies? Has not the cyber-utopianism of the 1990s failed, insofar as it merely imagined the net as an unregulated revolutionary space? What is the bias of technology in 2049? Can technê and technology be conceived as universal? And will all these questions still be relevant in 2098, when Usha Adebaran-Sagar graduates in Exoanthropology at ISS Multiversity?

Departing from Louis Chude-Sokei's discussion of "Caribbean Pre-Posthumanism" in relation to Sylvia Wynter, and Claire Colebrook's writing on artificiality and extinction, the seminar focuses on the critique and complication of current new materialist and posthumanist discourses through queer-feminist and critical race theory.

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5 November 2019

Seminar
Navigating the Virtual
Piet Zwart Institute/Willem De Kooning Academy, Rotterdam

This seminar considers immersive technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and other digital simulations (in gaming, training and design), not as ‘neutral’ technologies for modelling physical reality, but as technologies that have emerged from the military-entertainment-research complex and are actively shaping the physical world and modulating affects, behaviours and dispositions within it.

Drawing on Harun Farocki’s exploration of digital animation and Virtual Reality exposure therapy and the way these inform recent theoretical texts on navigating the virtual (by Tom Holert, Pasi Väliaho, Orit Halpern), it explores the politics of virtuality, artificiality and survival (Claire Colebrook).

In particular, it focuses on the rise of dominant navigational paradigms and what the visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff has called decolonial countervisuality, or the right to look, which “refuses to allow authority to suture its interpretation of the sensible to power, first as law and then as the aesthetic.”

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Academic Year 2018/2019

Seminar
Radical Matter
Royal College of Art, London

As a member of the RCA research community, Kirschner co-taught the “Radical Matter” seminars lead by her PhD supervisor Prof. Johnny Golding. The seminars introduce MA students in the Arts and Humanities to foundational texts and recent critical theory on matter and technology, with an emphasis on quantum physics, digital poetics and artifical intelligences (Karen Barad, Matteo Pasquinelli, Orit Halpern, Luciana Parisi, Louis Chude-Sokei, Black Quantum Futurism, N. Katherine Hayles, Isabelle Stengers, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, Nils Bohr, Alan Turing).

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26 April - 1 May 2018

Seminar
Szenerie Als Protagonistin (Scenerie as Protagonist) II
School of Applied Arts Vienna, Class of Tanja Widmann

Through examples from the artistic practice of Kirschner and others in the field of moving image (Zhou Chen, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Basma Alsharif, Karrabing Film Collective, Eric Baudelaire, Masao Adachi) the life of props, landscapes and interiors is illustrated and theoretically linked to discourses that deal with queer and feminist approaches to new materialisms, ecology and the non-human (Johnny Golding, Karen Barad, N. Katherine Hayles, Elisabeth A. Povinelli, Dana Luciano).

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8 February 2018

Public Lecture and Workshop
"Technology is not neutral, and there is no virtual world."
Academy of Fine Arts Munich

The lecture and workshop address how seemingly immaterial, digital technologies need to be thought in material and decolonial terms, using examples from science fiction, gaming and moving image, departing from to Louis Chude-Sokei's book The Sound of Culture, Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2016).

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18 - 22 December 2017

Seminar
Szenerie Als Protagonistin (Scenerie as Protagonist) I
Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, Class of Anja Dorn

The seminar pursues strategies and approaches for experimental film scenography in which the scenery is in the foreground and acts as the actual protagonist. Starting from the three focal points of landscape, interior and object, a double question is explored, namely, how can a thinking, feeling and acting subject be portrayed by (supposedly) inanimate objects and how does such a portrait destabilise and expand the conventional conception of the subject itself?

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2017

Workshop
Page to Picture! Screenwriting for Artists
The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Class of Angela Melitopoulos

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23-25 February 2017

Glasgow Film Festival in association with LUX, Scotland present:

23 February
SUPERLUX Masterclass with Anja Kirschner

24-25 February
SUPERLUX Workshop with Anja Kirschner:
Page to Picture! Screenwriting for Artists

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16-17 February 2017

Workshop
Professional Practice: Screenwriting for Artists with Anja Kirschner
LUX, London

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2015

GEGENkino und Klasse Expanded Cinema (Clemens von Wedemeyer) present:

Workshop
Schreiben um Gedreht zu Werden (Writing for Shooting)
Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB), Leipzig