SCEPSI (European School of Social Imagination): RUN Morphogenesis

SCEPSI (Scuola Europea di Immaginazione Sociale – European School of Social Imagination) is a nomadic free university initiated in San Marino by media-activist and writer Bifo – Franco Berardi. According to Bifo, financial dictatorship is destroying the educational system and submitting research to short-term profit interests. After dismantling the public school and university, it will submit the general intellect to the rule of competition. As a response to this, SCEPSI is an experiment in politics and pedagogy that aims at producing and transmitting knowledge in a space of autonomy.

In the context of dOCUMENTA (13), a new installment of SCEPSI takes place in Kassel under the title RUN Morphogenesis. It is composed of four skeptical lectures in which Bifo, along with leading thinkers from the fields of bio-neurology of vision (Alessandro Sarti), net-theory (Geert Lovink), art (Hito Steyerl), and social activism (Federico Campagna), attempts to answer the question “What is Morphogenesis?” The word RUN in the title, implying the execution of a program, the development of a concept, and the becoming form of information, is a metaphor for morphogenesis, which could be described as “trans-formation.” What is a form and what is morphogenesis? As the modern paradigm crumbles and social civilization itself seems on the brink of collapse, these questions are crucial from a social as well as a political point of view.

However, the answer will not come from the political field; nor will it arise from the ideological field of economics, which has never been a science, but a technology for the maximization of profits. It will rather come from the field of biological, neurological, and aesthetic research, from the spaces for experimentation where life and technology are investigated by institutions that are independent from financial power. This is where SCEPSI is seeking answers.

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