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Fascination

What is fascination, how can it be generated, represented or staged and what role does it play in today's media and information society? Is fascination an artistic, social, biological or cultural phenomenon? What role does fascination play in cognitive processes? How does fascination relate to neighbouring concepts, such as enthusiasm and motivation, or to (seemingly) contrary areas, like boredom or indifference? And finally – how, if at all, can fascination be directed or measured?

What is fascination, how can it be generated, represented or staged and what role does it play in today's media and information society? That something fascinates often seems beyond dispute, however the specific ways in which this happens and what prerequisites have to be created to generate fascination are largely unknown. Is fascination an artistic, social, biological or cultural phenomenon? What role does fascination play in cognitive processes? How does fascination relate to neighbouring concepts, such as enthusiasm and motivation, or to (seemingly) contrary areas, like boredom or indifference? And finally – how, if at all, can fascination be directed or measured?

Fascination can be used in very deliberate ways to generate – say, for advertising purposes – a certain desire or to evoke a sense of community that has an identity-establishing effect. At the same time, fascination raises the question of the connection between ethics and aesthetics, which surfaces in the strong appeal of certain media events in the digital age. What are the limits (if any) to fascination; what may, or may not, cast a spell over us?

The Research Group deals with these and other questions, and it investigates 'fascination' from an anthropological, sociological, psychological, literary-artistic and cultural studies perspective. In doing so, the focus is on the significance of fascination in today's information society.

2016: FASCINATION WITH THE UNKNOWN: THE OTHER

Understanding others is one of our basic abilities and fundamental to social life. Yet, the question of how we understand and feel with others has been approached and answered differently by the scientific disciplines. The arts follow different strategies in putting their respective audience in the position of others.

The conference “The Fascination with the Unknown: The Other”, organized by members of the German Young Academy, brings together artists and scientists from different fields to enter a dialogue on the common yet mysterious phenomenon of understanding each other.

With the workshops, performances and talks, the symposium aims at integrating each participant’s valuable insights into an experience that is more than the sum of the individual contributions.

The conference is fully funded.

Special issue on “Empathy and Understanding Others” (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Volume 43, 26 April 2018)

2015: FASCINATION WITH THE UNKNOWN: TIME

The interdisciplinary conference “To boldly go where no man has gone before: The Fascination with the Unknown: Time” took place in Berlin on July 9-11, 2015.

Call for Papers (pdf) Programme (pdf) Abstracts (pdf) Poster (pdf)

2014: FASCINATION WITH THE UNKNOWN: SPACE

Ever since the spatial turn the subject of “space” is booming in many disciplines - especially in the social, literature and culture sciences. The interdisciplinary conference by the RG Fascination on the topic took place on the 30th and 31st of May 2014 in Berlin.

Programme (German, pdf) Abstracts (German, pdf) Plakat (German, pdf) Bericht im Junge Akademie Magazin 18 (German, pdf)

2013: PHOTO CONTEST „VISIONS AND IMAGES OF FASCINATION“

The research group Fascination organised a photo contest entitled “Visions and Images of Fascination: Sciences and Humanities Visualised” together with partnering Young Academies. For more information, please visit the contest's website.

Results of the photo contest (German / English, pdf)

brain tissue from a patient with Alzheimer’s disease

First Prize

DYING MEMORIES: Is this what forgetting looks like? (by Rozalyn Simon, Doctoral student, Linköping University, Sweden)

“This is brain tissue from a patient that had Alzheimer’s disease. Using a single probe we are able to visualize the interplay between Amyloid Beta plaques and Tau protein neurofibrillary tangles. When exploring these biological correlates of neuron loss and AD pathology, I am suspended between the actuality of my research and the fantasy of illuminating lost memories and the dying neurons of those who eventually became lost, even to themselves. Is this what forgetting looks like?”

A photograph of a wall at a train station. The shadows of people who are waiting for their train fall on the wall behind the rails.

Second Prize

Shadow Society (by Dominic Akyel, Research fellow, Germany)

“People are waiting at a train station, their shadows fall on the wall behind the rails. For me, this image is a perfect allegory for the remarkable disparities between individuals’ perceptions of the social world and its actual condition. Like the silhouettes in this image our concepts of the social world are projections of our own conditioning that obscure the complexity of phenomena. The distant hope of raising awareness of this disparity is the greatest source of inspiration for my work.”

A photograph of a microscope tip, imaged with another microscope.

Third Prize

Microscope tip imaged with another microscope (by Olof Persson, Ph.D. student, Lund University, Sweden)

“When trying to image surfaces and their atomic structure, an atomically sharp tip can be used to accomplish this. The final result of making these tips can be hard to evaluate since, if they are sharp enough, the tip will be invisible in an optical microscopes. The sharpness of this tip can not even be resolved with a scanning electron microscope. It is so sharp that it could easily puncture a bacterium.”

participating Alumnae / Alumni

Activities