The Affects, Interfaces, Events Centre works on the creation and the study of interfacial forms of learning and signification that takes into account affects as they appear in or unfold as events.

We study all kinds of events (historic, media-based, interactive and artistic) in their affective register.

Methodologically this means to step away from thinking in cause-effect relations and agency. This research topic has been actualized by digital interfaces that complicate a distinction between what counts as subject and object for a study or exploration. Thus, the interface considered in its three-hinge structure as an affective folding between sensing and seeing (Anna Munster 2006) that further builds on Baruch Spinoza’s idea that bodies are affected so that the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or constrained (Spinoza 1677) are seen in relation with the idea that events can influence the actual as manifestations of the virtual (whether past or future) (Gilles Deleuze (1969) and Brian Massumi (2002). So, this calls for and inspires to an exploration of the creative side of knowledge production and learning.

The centre’s primary concern will be to develop and discuss new methods for design and analysis in fields that classically pertains to the humanities and social sciences. The overall question is: what kinds of affect are activated in users of interfaces, and which kinds of learning capacities are activated or hindered? Prod/user- as well as real time events makes classical studies of representational or aesthetic forms of study almost obsolete, since a distinction between reader and read escapes capture. Instead we want to develop ways to understand the signaletic material that forms relations and creates affects in interfaces. This can further develop new understandings of perception and sensing as well as new framings of the formation of subjects and collective assemblages in interfaces and events in contemporary culture.

The centre takes as its point of departure the conditions created by the affective folding of interfaces, but works on other media (film, literature, theatre, performances etc.) in relation to affective events are welcome.

Gilles Deleuze: The Logic of Sense (1969; 1990)

Brian Massumi: Parables of the Virtual (2002)

Anna Munster: Materializing New media (2006)

Baruch Spinoza: The Ethics (1677; 2017)