Sebastian Vehlken (DSM Bremerhaven/University of Oldenburg): “Seestatt”. Schwimmende Städte als maritime Medien

Venue: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Eberhard-Lämmert-Saal, entrance Meierottostr. 8, 10719 Berlin

Organized by Henning Trüper

Research project(s): Shipwreck and Lifesaving in European Societies since 1800

We live in an “Age of Islands”— an era marked both by their disappearance and by an unprecedented boom of newly created artificial islands. The lecture explores floating cities as a unique case of such islands, encapsulating their political, socioeconomic, ecological, and futuristic potentials. From the perspective of the history of media, knowledge, and technology, floating cities are examined as “speculative objects” from a threefold perspective:

First, the medial aspects of architecture materialize in them in an exemplary way, as their construction and infrastructure must adapt to the dynamics of the surrounding sea.
Secondly, floating cities often explicitly follow an eco-utopian way of thinking and serve as heterotopic spaces for the projection of self-sufficient and “climate-neutral” circulation systems.
Thirdly, floating cities also offer special economic and political attractions. For example, movements such as Seasteading transfer the technological solutionism of Silicon Valley and the libertarian ideology of California into international waters.

The lecture combines some exemplary designs of current oceanic settlement projects with an architectural “futures past” of floating city designs from their heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. It discusses the ongoing speculative potential of an urbanist turn to the marine space for ecological, economic, and social concepts of order.

Sebastian Vehlken is Professor of Knowledge Processes and Digital Media at the German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History (DSM) in Bremerhaven and at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. In 2010, he completed his PhD at the Department of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, focusing on the media history of swarm research. From 2013 to 2022, he was Junior Director and later Senior Researcher at the DFG research group Media Cultures of Computer Simulation, and from 2017 to 2021, he served as Professor of Media Theory and Media History at Leuphana University Lüneburg.

Selected publications:

Making Waves. Schiffe, Störung, Simulation, in: Archiv für Mediengeschichte 2022: Das Schiff, ed. by Bernhard Siegert, Joseph Vogl, and Friedrich Balke (forthcoming)
Ed.: Media+Environment 3.2 (2021): Modelling the Pacific Ocean (with Christina Vagt and Wolf Kittler)
Ed.: Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 10.2 (2018): Faktizitäten (with Eva Schauerte)
Ed.: Trick 17. Mediengeschichten zwischen Zauberkunst und Wissenschaft. Lüneburg: meson press 2016 (with Jan Müggenburg, Katja Müller-Helle, and Florian Sprenger)
Zootechnologien. Eine Mediengeschichte der Schwarmforschung. Berlin/Zürich: Diaphanes 2012
- revised and reviewed English version: Zootechnologies. A Media History of Swarm Research. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2019 (trans. by Valentine Pakis)

Admission is free, and no registration is required.