Symposium 2026

beyond-probability.com

When → March 4 + March 5 Where → Nylsuisseplatz 1, 6020 Emmen There is no admission fee for the symposium.How can we deal with unpredictability – in ecological, social, and digital contexts? The symposium (Im)Probabilities: Aesthetics of Unpredictability is dedicated to the aesthetic negotiation of the incalculable in its material, symbolic, and digital practices, and asks how productive forms of transformation can emerge from uncertainty. Invited artists and curators position their work within the tension between unpredictability and social change – through lectures, workshops, exhibitions, screenings, and performances. In response, students from the BA Fine Arts & Art education program develop so-called “Traces,” which will be publicly presented at the end of the symposium. Creative practices increasingly expose the limits of the sciences – particularly in fields such as quantum mechanics, climate modeling, and computer science, where uncertainty and complexity challenge notions of linear causality and predictability. The determinism underlying this worldview and its technologies has been called into question by twentieth-century quantum physics: according to the so-called Uncertainty Principle, a particle cannot simultaneously possess precisely defined properties, such as an exact position and a precise momentum. The universe thus appears probabilistic rather than strictly deterministic. The question, then, is how productive forms of disorder and polyphonic transformation can be created within these probabilities—configuring uncertainty not as a lack of knowledge but as an active space of possibility. During the symposium, these reflections will be connected to the search for forms of care that respond to the uncertainty, situatedness, and unpredictability of human needs: as resistant, pluralistic modes of engagement that open new horizons for thinking and practicing the present and the future. An aesthetics of probability also comes into view—as a poetic space of resonance in which the predictable begins to hover and the un/likely takes shape. Within this suspended state, nuanced forms of sensitivity and aesthetic responsibility unfold toward that which still eludes definition. In order to explore the possibilities of social coexistence beyond calculation, planning, and hegemonic thinking, the symposium engages interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly positions. These articulate critical and queer-feminist perspectives in which reality is understood as an aesthetic-political practice. The approaches highlighted by the symposium foreground the unplannable, the vulnerable, and the non-standardizable, thereby defining the shared, incalculable conditions of (non-)human coexistence.