Being Wrong

The annual theme "Being Wrong" of the artsprogram and the Centre for Cultural Production in the spring semester 2023 will take place in cooperation with the international multilingual street journal Arts of the Working Class.

To be wrong or even to live a false, insincere life, to be in the wrong body or to feel completely in the wrong place: the English phrase "Being Wrong" refers to a fundamental existential, cultural, almost ontological dimension of being wrong. The feeling of belonging to a dysfunctional culture, of being in the wrong skin, of living a wrong life, is more than just a harmless mistake or a small error that could easily be cleared up or excused. "Being Wrong" means the system, the person, the thinking or acting as a whole is wrong and fundamentally disturbed.

Are we living in a time in which all our beliefs, practices, forms of knowledge, institutions and infrastructures are epistemologically and practically embedded in the collective unconscious, and thus possibly transcendentally wrong? Do we, as anthropologist David Graeber and prehistorian David Wengrow argue in their book The Dawn of Everything, also need to completely rethink the history of humanity because the idea of intellectual progress and the generally accepted history of civilisation is fundamentally wrong? Diagnoses of our time describe the present as a time of filter bubbles, political division and radicalisation, a time marked by crises of planetary proportions and, as a consequence, by the desire for a "simplification of the world" (Thomas Bauer) and the belief in algorithmic control, which supposedly offers unambiguous solutions.

Is it possible that in the present a latent but all-pervading feeling of "Being Wrong" has become a collective unconscious driver that is still searching for a direction between violent destruction, feelings of guilt, shame, persistence, cynicism, absurdity, tragedy and parody. So are we witnessing a struggle for a new world relationship as a whole? And if so, what similar experiences of such a profound "Being Wrong" have there been in human history and what could be learned from a history of different attitudes to being wrong? As journalist Kathryn Schulz argues, does bossiness stand in the way of humanity finding a way to deal with wrongness or wrong-producing beliefs or to change the premises of action?

The artsprogram and the Centre for Cultural Production at Zeppelin University will deal with questions of this kind in various formats in 2023. It will not simply be about individual errors or "doing wrong", but about serious systemic errors in the economy, culture, technology, science, politics and about ways of life that convey the sense of being fundamentally wrong. In two exhibitions, a lecture series. and smaller scientific and artistic event formats, we want to encircle and discuss this topic - together with artists, scientists and everyday experts.

In the lecture series philosophers, sociologists, literature and art theorist will talk about films, music, literature, images, performances and everyday rituals that make this existential "Being Wrong" a topic.

The series of events takes place in collaboration with the multilingual street journal Arts of the Working Class(https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/)