Starting from the summer semester of 2024, the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden is entering its second funding phase (2024–2027) under the new guiding theme "Data↔Worlds: Socio-technical and Cultural Syntheses of New Realities". The calls for applications for the doctoral positions, a postdoc position and the first of three artist residencies in the new funding phase are currently open.

Within the Schaufler Lab@TU Dresden, researchers and artists engage with the interactions between the fields of technology, art, science, and entrepreneurship. This distinctive feature will be maintained throughout the second funding phase. The focus continues to be on the transformation of society and culture, with technology playing a key role.

The central theme of the new phase will be "Data↔Worlds". By this, we mean the technical and cultural mediations of reality through data, which significantly shape society and lifeworld. Data↔Worlds aims to explore society and culture as synthetic realities. The concept encompasses a historical perspective on past periods of upheaval as well as the examination of contemporary societies during and after the so-called digitization. Recent developments have brought forth new realities, profoundly influenced by the availability of data. Data, in turn, have an impact on the world they describe, generating their own dynamics and challenges. A proper understanding of the interplay between data and reality is urgently needed, especially with regard to pressing societal challenges involving nature and environment, economy, law and politics, as well as art, culture, and education.

​In the Schaufler Kolleg@TU Dresden, the doctoral candidates will examine the guiding theme from perspectives of the humanities, social sciences, as well as from cultural, literary, and educational studies. The lab’s graduate school is located within the School of Humanities and Social sciences of TUD Dresden University of Technology.

The fellows of the lab’s artist in residence program, the Schaufler Residency@TU Dresden, are equally engaged with the guiding theme. The artists are encouraged to focus on the aesthetic and formal dimensions of data worlds as well as on the consequences of the generated Data↔Worlds. Confronted with pressing challenges of the present and extreme future scenarios, innovative artistic projects will be developed in line with the guiding theme. The residency program is based in the Office for Acedemic Heritage, Scientific and Art Collections of TU Dresden.

FURTHER INFORMATION