TU Wien, 2025WS
ATTP Architekturtheorie und Technikphilosophie
The Cumaean Sybil tangles true things with the uncertain: involvens vera obscuris, writes Virgil in the Aeneid. Involvere, from the PIE wel, “to turn, to roll, to move in rounds”. The Sibyl is a Sibyl insofar as her verses circle around what is to come by providing us with determinations and instructions, with predictions, but also with veils and bagatelles, with mirages, with promises, with all that sustains conversation. “Verse” and “conversation”; from the Latin “versare”, “to turn, to bend”. Isn’t it a propitious coincidence that “involvere” and “versare” both invoke the idea of turning? Turning as the loquacious circularization of truths and uncertainties, a talk where interlocutors are not neutralised for the sake of a given truth, but rather turn with one another in pursuit of distilling more manners to share the cosmos.
“Turning together with” (con-versare); in ACT we will step into the Sibyl’s setup to articulate sites from which to talk in terms of resonance and reverberation, in terms eluding transparency and its complicity with epistemic colonization. Working in groups, we will invent situated, narrative and conversational arrangements where questions are dramatized rather than replied, where theses and arguments unfold as if a great dining table was set up, a feast that invites discussion, negotiation and trial, but also decision and resolution, confirmation. Dining tables might do that by accommodating all sorts of humors: laughter, claims, hopes, tears, prayers, declarations, songs, advice… the Sibyl’s verses lack none of that. Her chants do not seek to be used in only one way; like dining tables, they offer and accommodate, they place things at a proper distance from us, triggering exploration of what it might mean to remain sibylline today.
