About this Event
Tickets are available on Mae: https://www.mae.community/6af19f61902d1f000297f4be
What do we gain when we become visible, and what becomes harder to keep our own?
In conversation with Andreas Bernard and Circle.
Andreas Bernard is the author of The Triumph of Profiling, the book that follows how techniques once used to identify suspects and patients became the profiles, location data and step counts we now share every day. He is a professor at Leuphana University Lüneburg, has held fellowships at New York University and in Berlin, and writes for the culture section of Der Spiegel.
A profile that introduces you to strangers. An app that remembers where you've been. A watch that counts your steps and tells you how well you slept. We check these things, update them, and sometimes share them.
They can show us patterns we'd otherwise miss. They also leave a lot out.
Many of these tools are older than they look. Profiling, locating and measuring people began as ways for police and psychiatrists to identify others. Andreas has traced how they turned into things we now do to ourselves, by choice.
Some of the links he follows are surprisingly concrete. A fitness wristband looks a lot like the early electronic tags used in criminology. And the pioneer of the electronic tag took his idea from a Spider-Man newspaper comic of the 1970s.
So what do our profiles and numbers really tell us about who we are? And how much of us stays outside them?
Andreas will open the evening with his research. Then we'll talk together about why we make ourselves visible, what we learn by measuring our lives, and what no profile can hold.
No one is asked to share personal experiences. You can always pass, and listening counts too. No specialist knowledge is needed.
Your contributions can be recorded in the Mae app, where you can review, cut or delete them afterwards. After the evening, the app turns the conversation into your own learning experience: a summary of the ideas you raised, in your own words, with the thinkers, artists and books that take them further. With Anima, you can go deeper into an idea, test it against the strongest objection, or connect it to another field. Evening after evening, your Journey shows which questions keep drawing you back, and how your thinking moves.
Contemporary life, examined. Judgment expected.
About Andreas Bernard
Andreas Bernard is a cultural historian and professor at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He writes about how everyday technologies change the way we see ourselves, from the elevator (Lifted) to reproductive medicine and the family (Kinder machen) to the hashtag (Das Diktat des Hashtags). His book Komplizen des Erkennungsdienstes (2017), published in English as The Triumph of Profiling (Polity, 2019), follows techniques of identification from the police and psychiatry into social media profiles, location tracking and self-measurement. He has been a fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin and at New York University, and a visiting professor at UC Santa Barbara. He also writes for the culture section of Der Spiegel.
Event venue & nearby stays
KÖNIG GALERIE, Alexandrinenstraße 118-121, Berlin, Germany
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