⊕ German language
Reading time: 32- 38 Minutes
The complete research: English PDF German PDF
The term “body” 1
ANS & ANN
During our entire lives, we are not able to consciously influence many of the physiological processes that assure our survival. The Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) takes over the management of the fundamental part of it without our conscious knowledge. We would probably go insane if we were aware of every bit of heart-beat-blood-flow and lungs-dancing, going-on-continuously, without a break, during our entire lives.
Is there a parallel to the structure of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) used for example to filter our spam emails, and our ANS?
Yes, we know that already. If our brain can “work” on many tasks at the same time, so should the ANN work as well, with many assignments at the same time and without a single break. Except, our ANS labors exclusively for our survival and well-being, whereas now in the social collective virtual body of internet communication the ANN are rather serving the survival and wealth of a very few companies.
INTERFACE_I
Are we now interfaces determined by “Artificial Neural Networks”? Surrendering to a superior unreachable “intelligence”?
In this dystopian scenario our body is understood more as an interface to the virtual world, and less of an organic substance in itself. “(…) The problems of the dualism of flesh and spirit thus return in a new way. And the longing for redemption from the finiteness and pain of the body receives new nourishment.” 2
The real body in the real environment moves towards the virtual room, so our bodies are interfaces for spaces of a different nature – to create an uninterrupted space. Somewhere we meet. New rooms miniaturizing themselves into microcells of environments. The object interface (i.e. the computer) is used there as an extension of our bodies. They are intrinsically wired to each other – subject and object. “Meatware”/Hardware/Software.
Even though many posthuman theorists have been predicting the end of the human species for quite some time, 3 or at least that the human body will become obsolete, the news is: Even though many post-human theorists have been predicting the end of the human species for quite some time now, * or at least the human body becoming obsolete, the news is: we are still here, and like it or not still fighting very old enemies from viruses to commoditization of all forms of life. When we perform or teach online lately, the tangible body is the real one and our most common dance in this case, the ever-repeating choreography is primarily a series of small movements of the hands – clicking keys. And the list of Repetitive Motion Disorders is growing. Essentially because we are not machines.
Basically, when talking about human body expansion through tools, it must be defined which areas of the body can be expanded and which cannot. 4 Not yet at least. Themes such as how to enhance the tangible body or make it less susceptible have already been researching material to many artists, especially with the expansion of computer science in the 1970s. Mechanical men and cyborg dreams of hybridity are much older than that. The Arts have been an important part in the process of reflecting on and rethinking new technological tools.
In the 1960s, the philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who focused his writing on the interconnection between new media devices and human behavior, stated that the emergence of each new media is marked by “the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” 5
Here the change of scale is rather massive.
Interface_”I” – what body image of ourselves is created by interfacing with our dear machines and through entry into the virtual worlds? Here specifically related to the intermediation of Dance online, which boomed in 2020. Dancing, singing, performing in front of a screen seems so disconnected sometimes… do we long to get rid of the physical body, to free ourselves from it? Or do we discover it right now as our anchorage in the real world?
In February 2020 the University of Southampton 6 announced the development of a successful link between brain neurons and artificial neurons to enable communication with each other over the Internet – facilitated by nanoelectronics devices. How long will it take until these devices are a popular commodity? How long it will take until this device is featured in an artistic production, or even further: Did the idea originally come from an artistic experimental production?
SERVERS & INDUSTRIES – BODY “WARE”
Literary critic Katheryn Hayles wrote, “(…)the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate(…)“. 7 She claimed that the human self is made of information that could be stored in a human body or eventually in a computer body.
Nanoelectronic devices for example belong to the category of “wearables” – electronic gadgets to be worn by a person, usually on the skin – Ap.le Watches are an example of this. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technology headsets and apps are further examples. The AR Pokem.n Go app with a billion downloads by 2019 is a wearable variation. 8 Whereas virtual reality replaces your vision, augmented reality adds to it. Wearables are a booming industry. 9 Their promise: a better-connected lifestyle, or better, more optimized bodies. Correcting what is bound to be faulty seems to always get a hold of us.
As Karin Harrasser, media and cultural scientist puts it, social media/online platforms connect us with other people, but also with biopolitics that aim to control life, in the spirit of neoliberalism. For her, one of the results is the entrepreneurial self – using many apps and gadgets to evaluate oneself for the sake of well-advertised self-improvement. 10
Is technology making anything “better”? Better than what? We must now examine new ways of framing information online, as there is a radical paradigm shift in the Performing Arts and its mediation. Are we moving to the online space as a reaction to an unexpected crisis, or are we becoming digitalized bit by bit?
So, what products are we endorsing? How are we dealing with these Bots*? Are creative artists making experiences with AI technology more accessible and acceptable? Or more promotionally effective? Only for the sake of avant-gardism and originality? Experimenting or endorsing?
Entertainers are certainly using these tools for the sake of the new hype and successful revenues. “Vocaloids” were originally developed in 2000 for non-commercial purposes. 11 However, in 2014 the first world tour of Hatsune Miku took place. Hatsuno is one of their most famous representatives, a completely virtual character, but with a very real legion of fans and buyers.
Often enough artists are rather contributing to the fabrication and consumption of new products that are only accessible to an infamous minority. Who has access to produce digital culture and who has access to use it?
The eternal question: How politically engaged does Art want to be?
DISEMBODIED WANNABE CYBORGS
“One might argue that we are moving and communicating more and more in virtual spaces, where our embodiment is becoming increasingly obsolete. In view of the global digital networking, the human body can increasingly appear as an atavism.” 12 wrote the philosopher Thomas Fuchs in 2020. The truth remains that in the virtual room, the tangible body is very much real and sentient. Our body is what defines our existence. Nowadays there are many perspectives on the colonization of the human body, and infinite ways to allegedly enhance it, forming a vast and powerful industry to “convince “us that essentially, we are always incomplete.
Florian Rötzer, philosopher and publicist wrote already in 1996: “Bodies are not only wet, fragile, sensitive (…) they are increasingly perceived as restrictive: They are too slow, have too few input and output channels, (…). Nevertheless, bodies are those organic interfaces that also provide us with pleasure and excitement, that stimulate the mental system.” 13
If we are endorsing the same mainstream media and gadgets that keep telling everyone that their body is flawed, aren’t we in a conundrum here? Doesn’t it make Dance for example, in its fundamental social value, also seem obsolete?
When interfacing online we’re missing the para-communicative elements in real face-to-face, body-to-body communication. Somehow disembodied…Here’s some insight about it from neurophysiologist and brain scientist Wolf Singer – Link to interview
Immersing oneself in the virtual world poses above all the problem of how far we want to take our body and body image into virtual space. Are we watching the display ever more frequently, and if not, do we feel somewhat disconnected…?
SHIFTING SUBJECTIVITIES
Neurobiology and AI research are making the simulation of human subjectivity 14 by artificial intelligence ever more compelling. There is an avalanche of products from smartwatches, IVA (Intelligent Virtual Assistant) to Virtual / Augmented Reality Games that are creating a massive wave of consumption. Eliza once or Alexa now, chatbots to fall in love with. Many of these products attempt to simulate affective and cultural experiences on a daily basis to standardize the process of subjectification. Subjectivity is like a different attribute of consciousness. You are conscious of possible multiple views, you know that you can think differently and experience an event with a completely diverse perception of it than the person on your side.
Is subjectivity disappearing or being shifted elsewhere in the frontier between machines and humans?
Some neuroscientists proclaim that subjective experience is not a phenomenon in itself, and only the ongoing background activity of the neural processes are to be perceived as “real”. So that subjectivity is nothing but an epiphenomenon (as in a secondary consequential occurrence). According to this, we humans wouldn’t be much more than very complex machines. 15
Everything that makes up a human being including Art with its poetry which allows ambiguity of interpretation according to one’s social and environmental context can /could be simulated by bots. According to these views, we are only creatures of our neurons. “A neurocentric view of the human being” 16 “On the one hand, they suggest a computeromorphic understanding of human intelligence, and on the other, an anthropomorphization of AI.” 17
“Is “subjectivity” considered either as a phenomenon or as an epiphenomenon in your research (?)” was one of the questions to Neurophysiologist and brain researcher Wolf Singer. He says: “It is considered a phenomenon.” So it is not just a side effect of the neuronal processes. In his interview here he says (paraphrased): Subjectivity lives from introspection, the first person s perspective and perception. And the contents of perception are made of immaterial things, which can only be recognized as existing because they were already once actively built in a jointly perceived “generated” social reality. Interview with Wolf Singer.
In a paper published in 2019 18 he describes the attempt “(…) made to bridge the gap between the material neuronal processes and the immaterial dimensions of subjective experience. It is argued that this “hard problem” of consciousness research cannot be solved by only considering the neuronal underpinnings of cognition.” He concludes in the same paper: “(…) consciousness must not be confined to the analysis of the neuronal functions of individual brains but must include the domain of socio-cultural phenomena that are traditionally dealt with by the humanities.”
EMBODIED COGNITION AND ITS TRANSMISSION ONLINE
Action-related cognition, or learning by doing, has become increasingly important in recent history, but then again, the spread of digital media and online virtual rooms tends to disregard the difference between physicality and physicality ‘simulation. When the “appearance of the other” takes the place of real encounters, it becomes all the more important to analyze the potentials and limits of virtual spaces. Thomas Fuchs asks “what are the differences between real and virtual encounters?” 19
Are these forms of encounters becoming integrated channels to our perception? Or just a screen addiction?
Our knowledge is being shifted from “knowing how” towards “knowing that/of”.20 If I know that I can search for nearly any information online as an extension of “my knowledge”, why do I have to “learn” anything?
In Dance for example, wherever there is an internet connection, dancers (no grade of professionalization given here) have copied and mirrored choreographies and choreographers who are popular on the net worldwide. Even more radically during the time of the Corona crisis. Does this confirm the growth of “embodied cognition” through media interaction? Or does the mimetic action here restrict what could have been “Embodied Knowledge”?
With video platforms and online conference tools, the room is zooming in on us, the room is virtual, not existing here or there and at the same time it’s everywhere – we are the interfaces collectively lacking geographical proximity and proper interaction. Still, embodied we are.
SITUATED LEARNING
“Situated Learning Theory posits that learning is mostly unintentional and situated within authentic activity, context and culture.” 21 Knowledge needs to be presented in authentic contexts — settings and situations that would normally involve that type of knowledge. Social interaction and collaboration are essential components of situated learning — learners become involved in a “community of practice” which embodies certain beliefs and behaviors that are to be acquired. (idem) We must all agree that the “situation” on-site/in situ has been changing radically in 2020 – “The old spatial experience was body-centered, the new spatial experience is machine- and media-centered” wrote the artist and media theorist Peter Weibel already in 1990. 22
The newly situated setting, (at least lately in the more privileged part of the world) is the cyberspace. There, different contexts are being created, with different demanded skills. Recently in England an advert from the government to recruit more people to the cyber sector shows a ballet dancer tying her shoes with the caption – “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber – she just doesn’t know it yet”. 23
This ad was highly criticized and caused great polemic, but one cannot help but wonder how symptomatic and revealing such an ad is. Firstly, the clear industrial lobbyist impulsion towards a digitalized society for profit, and secondly, the lessening of the social importance of the skills of an “analog” artist.
EMBODIED LEARNING ONLINE & PEDAGOGICAL CONCERNS
No doubt here, when it comes to learning online, teaching someone to dance or act will be much more challenging than teaching how to write code.
With online transmission, Dance for example is (once again) rather “eye-centric”, mostly stationary and without tangible contact with others. When a medium is mainly based on the sense of sight, the other senses tend to be less sensitive, almost numb.
Disembodiment in online communication is viewed critically by internet critics such as the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus. He states that the physical body is the most fundamental element of a subject’s reciprocal interaction with the lifeworld, and he points out that physical interaction is an essential condition for the formation of authentic relationships. The body’s “sensitivity to mood (is) what opens up our shared social situation and makes people and things matter to us (…).” 24
The main concern of many colleagues, as was also noted yesterday in an online conference*- (“How much body does dance education need?”), is to try to understand this – namely the determination of the human body in the digital mediation of dance. 25
Again, the same question: Is there a recognizable growth of “embodied cognition” through media interaction?
BODY POLITICS ETC.
Beyond professional education – there is an overwhelming online offer of Dance to be copied and re-copied. Infinite lives on mainstream sites, with their AI curators deciding content for us to like and buy. “T.kTok” / “Ap..le Fitness +” with dance classes connected to the watch and music stream service and so on.
Body, Politics and Market = #BodyPoliticsMarket. Prearranged rules and hierarchies reducing here the subjective expression of the body to monitored gymnastics, often emptying it of meaning and experience.
How can Dance /Music /Theater remain subjective expression?
Shouldn’t they be the best way to sense joy and the urge for freedom? Shouldn’t Art be the best channel to free society from the constraints of financial dictatorship? And why are we artists (often enough) troubled by the use of these last words? My own self-criticism. Art and should are simply not easy to combine.
“The body is undergoing a cultural transformation because the paradigm of culture is changing due to mechanization. The concept of culture is increasingly being equated with the concept of technology, and in some cases replaced by it: both in terms of body and meaning and duration. And the image of the human being – as the center of both – is also changing” says political scientist and sociologist Roland Benedikter. 26
Politically speaking, what does continuous interaction with cyberspace mean for the self? And who profits from it?
Franco Berardi again: “How should the isolated individual offer resistance? The digital revolution has also made it possible to replace interpersonal communication with techno-linguistic automatisms. 27 (…)The liveliness of movements (as in revolutions) was always a result of being together. How can this development be addressed politically when physical contact is being experienced less and less? ” 28Here an insight about it from the dramaturg and scholar Philipp Schulte. Link to interview (in German)
FRAMING&VOICING QUESTIONS
+ Is the remote mediation of art and the learning of it an extension of our capabilities or a setback? Especially for new generations during the Corona pandemic – children already having to use face masks, having to be afraid of closeness. It seems closeness will have to be redefined within its social boundaries, and also the acceptable amount of body contact.
+ In remote encounters, are we always acting in front of cameras or is it possible to interact with the camera as a non-judging eye? Is the camera always a catalyst triggering simulated behavior? What is your experience with it? How much of your own identity is exposed and identifiable?
+ What do you take from the experience of hybrid sessions? A real and virtual room at the same time?
+ What are the chances and limits of digitality in the “live” performing arts and/or its mediation? What was your experience in the year of 2020/21 with regard to this? Check Philipp Schulte. Link to interview (in German)
+ How much is lost through online remote learning? Is body communication being replaced by educational technologies? Graphic apps, videos, streaming for example to assist the online mediation.
+ What gets lost? With its stationary practice – ocularcentric perception – display framing – no simultaneous socialization, no touch, no collective proximity.
+What are the advantages of the remote digital encounter? What are the exclusive advantages?
“Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all”
(Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4)
+ Reduced amount of spatial and dimensional perception (often enough, but not good audio: like through a void and full of latency) – I ask myself whether this influences the dimensionality of thinking. Check Wolf Singer s Interview. Link to interview
+ What body image is created by interfacing with the machines and the “deeper” entry into the virtual worlds? Do we long to get rid of the tangible body, to free ourselves from it? Check Naoto Hieda s Interview. Link to interview
+ To what extent will the next generations be affected by the use of face masks and the lack of social encounter? Virtual environments changing the range of accumulated skills, with new patterns of the sensory and motoric channels to be discovered?
+ What do the “expansions” of ourselves (as in software and hardware) mean for the presence of our bodies? Is it still possible to be present on the spot, in the here and now, when our senses and perception are expanded and scattered to the geographically unreachable?
+ Is our tangible body, or the perception of it, divided into a virtual and a real one? Do we have an online self? Check Naoto Hieda s Interview. Link to interview
+ Do we want to keep analog interactions intact “only” for the sake of our jobs and institutions?
+ How often are we in front of screens that are projecting images onto us? And when not in front of a screen, do we miss it?
+ What are the traces that we would like to consciously leave online?
+ When people eventually go back to the theatres, when they can gather again in rooms, what do they mostly want this time: encounters or security?
+ How do you think “data governance” should develop? How should we view data in the near future: as something you don’t even know you’re giving away? As its own property that can also be sold? As a commodity that cannot be sold? As a democratic collective resource and/or…
+ Has the pandemic dissolved the last boundaries between media and real life? Should a critical and emancipatory approach to digital technology be part of cultural education? Check Marco Donnarumma, Philipp Schulte und Peter Weissenburger s Interview. Link to interview
WHAT ABOUT TIME?
What about time? Time spent online. Physical practical time spent with the body as interface, because it has to follow clear pre-determined cues of digital media. In a real room, we would be connecting the smells to the sounds around, the dimensionality of the space to other people and other things. How others react to you and how you react to them, causing a chain of reactions and causalities. What about time? Because of latency in online conferences, because there is a split when you start laughing at something and your image freezes (in the most unfavorable way sometimes), you cannot know if the person in the same virtual room heard you, or your words and moves just fell into a parallel black hole of sucking matter and experiences.
What about time? Because to all of these questions, the only answer we get lately is: digitalizing more is better! That is the answer for us all. If there’s a problem – digital and online is the solution.
ONLINE OR NOT TO BE?
Back to reality could be a wonderful thing…
In a recent lecture (German online conference) Shoshana Zuboff cited two new studies about North American Society and F.ceb.ok: ?” 29 She says that around 80% of those interviewed think that this type of social media does more harm than good.
Online or not to be? Digital or not to be? A rather rhetorical philosophical question for the Bots*. The algorithms of mainstream platforms we have been using lately to share content have already decided it for us. Anyway, to “be online”, or what else instead? How can we not submit to the zeitgeisty mainstream and still feel like part of society? Is this a non-exit situation? No, it is not – “we just need real social innovations, instead of only virtual technological ones“, says among others sociologist Jutta Allmendinger. 30
How can we keep stimulating a sense of communal experience in Dance and Music and Performing Arts? Check Marco Donnarumma Interview. Link zu interview Contemporary Dance, in particular, was/is consistently trying to distance itself from the “individual over-talented virtuoso”, and trying to find new ways into a collective sharing of sensorial experiences with democratic-diverse-inclusive necessary utopias. How is this collective sharing right now? There is such a clear hierarchy to be applied in the virtual room. The hardware, our digits and ears and eyes trying to keep up – the software, the procedures, we now literally need to mute our dialog partners.
What remains of dance as the oldest, most primitive activity of social interaction? The embodied experience as a non-utilitarian activity – the beginning and end in itself.
“In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.” Toni Morrison. 31
Online or not to be?
SHARING VERSUS DISTRIBUTING
We, the online diaspora of artists, are sharing content of our work, and I admit that it is a nice description, but “sharing” on mainstream platforms can more accurately be understood as an upload of content. The effective distribution of it, as in “who’s going to see it and how often and why” are all part of the game that we can only influence when we buy ads. The Bots* – faithful servers – actually “decide” it on behalf of the corporation. And we play their game. Check Laura Schelenz Interview. Link to interview (in German) Artists also accelerating it! Like disembodied hamsters on wheels!
DEGENERATION OF THE SELF-EXPLOITATION – THREE PHILOSOPHICAL TAKES ON IT
Jorge Freire, philosopher, asserts that the contemporary subject is prey to constant movement and yet does not go very far. But can we stop “moving”? He speaks of the Homo agitatus – the new Sisyphus filling a barrel that invariably becomes empty. He adds: this is the reason why it is so crushing to “do things”…to disguise impotence. The counterbalance to the agitation is in the end not rest, but numbness. 32
Another perspective was written by Jean Baudrillard, sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist; already in the 1980s/90s he wrote that Post-Modern society shows consistent signs of a sensory and informational overload, and it makes us rather passive subjects. When everything is available there is no place for activity – there is so much disjointed information that is impossible to be organized into something meaningful, and each person is a terminal for absorption. TV, computer, (nowadays smartphones, tablets, and…) are projecting on to us so that we became absorbing screens. 33
Are we somehow passive in the real environment and hyperactive in the virtual environment?
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes in his book The Burnout Society from 2015 that the much praised “multitasking skill” does not represent Evolution. Lions on the prairie are doomed to be skilled in multi-tasking in order to survive. To be fully concentrated on one activity, that’s the real evolution of humans. He advises: We are burning out by having to prove far too much and display it constantly – the performance society asks much of “what we could do”. An overemphasizing positivity in what “I” can accomplish, and if we fail, we have only ourselves to blame. 34
Living in a Meritocracy, where we are victims and judges at the same time. Back to the hamsters’ wheel!
ARTIFICIALLY ARTISTIC
So, dancing/singing/acting in front of the camera is what Live Art becomes in a dystopian future…or it is already here? I’ll remember these events from 2020 – me in the display while the session’s mediator tells me about how dancing together holding hands used to be in old times, and I’ll make a performance out of it. With bodies of Bots*?
“(…) Your machine-becoming (…) We have arrived in post-futurism. (…) In the futurelessness of a degraded society that dreams of progress thanks to artificial intelligence. An “intelligence” that consists of masses of quantified data. Which leaches out bodies and produces mountains of waste.” 35
DA BODY OF BOTS*
They, who used to be us, as in the sum of all our interactions with the WWW and the artificial neural network, are judging us! They were conceived for it. The Bots* – highly programmed to exceed our abilities and to (willingly?) “serve” us. Personal thought: this is bound to go wrong, and I am just applying Murphy’s law here.
“In biology, when an organism becomes a superorganism, it devours others. In nature, this is so.” Ailton Krenak. 36
They who could become sentient beings, they, who are a part of us, have so many more inputs and outputs…and so much more time and space…
How can we make them respect and admire us more than we do it ourselves?
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.” Albert Camus 37
Are we the Bots*?
Footnotes - no specific academic system: ⊕ Author's name and surname (if available) ⊕ Oeuvre / Link ⊕ Day and/or Month/Year ⊕ No hyperlinks here. ⊕ *BOTS - the umbrella term for this research = Algorithms and AI
- *The term “body”: human or non-human, organic or non-organic. Ex. The human body, the social body. In the non-cartesian dualistic and non-anthropocentric Spinozist definition.
- Jörg Hermann – “Vom Himmel in den Hypertext. Die religiösen Dimensionen des Cyberspace” – 1998
- * 1 Example – Patricia MacCormack – “Posthuman ethics: embodiment and cultural theory! – 2012.
- Nicole Weniger – “Der Einfluss von Technologie auf den Körper, der übrig bleibt Selbstverortung, Imagination und Ausdehnung im virtuellen Raum” – 2016 – unauthorized translation
- Marshall McLuhan and W. Terrence Gordon “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” – 1964
- University of Southampton – https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200226110843.htm – February 2020
- N. Katherine Hayles – “How We Became Posthuman Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics” – 1999
- https://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/accessed in December 2020
- https://builtin.com/wearables https://builtin.com/wearables – Dec. 2020
- Karin Harrasser – FAZ Magazin – Spring 2017 – unauthorized translation
- A voice synthesizer software developed in Pompeu Fabra University Spain and then made popular by Yamaha Co.
- Thomas Fuchs – “Verteidigung des Menschen – Grundfragen einer verkörperten Anthropologie” – 2020 – unauthorized translation
- Florian Rötzer – “Die Zukunft des Körpers II -Der virtuelle Körper” – 1996 – unauthorized translation
- * “Subjectivity” – following on the late work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari is here understood to what is perceived as one’s own feelings, thoughts, social needs and impulses.
- Thomas Fuchs – “Verteidigung des Menschen – Grundfragen einer verkörperten Anthropologie” – 2020 – unauthorized translation
- Jan Slaby – “Perspektiven einer kritischen Philosophie der Neurowissenschaften” / Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie – 2011 – unauthorized translation.
- Thomas Fuchs – “Verteidigung des Menschen – Grundfragen einer verkörperten Anthropologie” – 2020 – unauthorized translation
- Wolf Singer – “A Naturalistic Approach to the Hard Problem of Consciousness” | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2019.00058 – https://www.frontiersin.org/ – October 2019
- Thomas Fuchs – “Verteidigung des Menschen – Grundfragen einer verkörperten Anthropologie” – 2020 – unauthorized translation
- Gilbert Ryle – “The Concept of Mind” – 1949
- Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger – “Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation” 1990.
- Peter Weibel – “On the disappearance of distance” – unauthorized translation – 1990
- https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/oct/13/dying-swan-or-lame-duck-why-fatima-the-ballerinas-next-job-was-tripping-up-the-government – October 2020
- H. Dreyfus, -“On Internet” – 2001 + Su Jung Kim – “Von der Zwischenmenschlichkeit in der pädagogischen Beziehung und der internetbasierten Kommunikation” – 2001
- Online-Gesprächsforum “Wieviel Körper braucht die Tanzvermittlung?”– Tanz und Kulturelle Bildung in (post) pandemischen Zeiten – DYNAMO – Junge Tanzplattform NRW , geteilt durch das NRW Landesbuero tanz e.V. – Dec. 11th 2020
- Roland Benedikter – Kulturstiftung des Bundes Magazin – September 2019
- Aureliana Sorrento – Interview with Franco Berardi – “Der Aufstand – “Demokratie als solche spielt keine Rolle mehr” – deutschlandfunk.de – April 2015
- Anna Stiede – Interview with Franco Berardi – „Unser Hirn leidet “ – Freitag .de – May 2018.
- One from Gallup-Knight-Report – Techlash and a second one by Accountable tech – 2020
- Interview with Jutta Allmendinger – “Die Zeit” Newspaper 17. Dec. 2020
- Toni Morrison – “Beloved” – 1987
- Samuel Haya – “Interview Jorge Freire: El aburrimiento es lúcido – Agitation – https://www.filco.es/jorge-freire-el-aburrimiento-es-lucido/ – March 2020 – March 2020 – unauthorized translation
- Jean Baudrillard – “Simulacres et Simulation” – 1981 and Jean Baudrillard – “The Transparency of Evil” – 1993
- Byung-Chul Han – “The Burnout Society” – 2015
- Yvonne Volkart – ” Postfuturistische Körper” – KUNSTFORUM International – 2020 – unauthorised translation
- Fernanda Santana – “Vida sustentável é vaidade pessoal’, diz Ailton Krenak” – correio24horas.com.br – Jan 2020- unauthorized translation
- Albert Camus- ” The Rebel” – 1951