The Intellectual Platform’s key event is the Symposium, which will take place in Ekaterinburg, from September 11 to September 14. It serves as a pathway to understand the works presented at the exhibition. It offers the opportunity to contextualize the artworks under a theoretical and aesthetic framework, and allows new interpretations. Stationed in an ornately decorated hall of the Colosseum Cinema, art historians, social scientists, biotech scholars, curators and artists from different parts of the world will participate and debate the topics. 

Berlin-based philosopher Yuk Hui, whose concept of “cosmotechnics” has helped to shape the narratives of the Main Project, will illuminate the visitors on the limits and possibilities of this proposal, seen in the context of philosophy and history of technology. Together with Hui, the audience can imagine alternate technological futures which exist beyond the margins of popular culture. 

Anthropologist Abou Farman from New York’s legendary New School for Social Research will give a Keynote lecture dedicated to our contemporaries who try to achieve the most literal and physical immortality through cryonics, biogerontology, and AI. 

Symposium also invites influential Russian researchers: anthropologist Sergey Mokhov, the author of the book The Birth and Death of the Funeral Industry, will discuss the secular visions of immortality and the way these transform past and future generations; philosopher and sociologist Greg Yudin will present a talk on contemporary bioethics, a discipline that is largely responsible for future medicine and technology of defining the longevity of human life. Strategic partner of Intellectual Platform is the Ural Federal University.