With the Dinnertime Talk, we pick up and continue the basic idea of our Lunchtime Talk series. While the latter focus on creative and inspirational solo lectures, the Dinnertime format plays with the idea of a creative conversation in a blind date duet: our guests meet eachother for the very first time.
Our guests have been invited by Prof Dr Klaus Birk and Prof Dr Holger Lund.

 

Punk saw itself as resistance against established social structures, as a rejection of capitalist living conditions. Many young people felt attracted to this movement in the face of the social contradictions of the 1970s and 1980s. However, in many cases change could only be achieved on a small scale, if at all. Since then, what has happened to those who left the small scale to fill senior and culturally influential positions today? How do they manage to preserve – and even more, to practice – personal integrity?

 

Once directing the Stuttgart Film Winter, in which he saw a “populist avant-garde festival,” Ulrich Wegenast today is the director of the International Festival of Animated Film Stuttgart. The ITFS not only is one of the major European film festivals in its field, but also a social event that crosses the boundaries of the arts and culture scene. How does Ulrich manage to combine experimental approaches, oppositional criticism and mainstream? “I like things that are incomplete,” reads one of his answers, made to mark the start of a promising discussion.

 

Russell Bestley is Principal Lecturer at the London College of Communication, UAL and Reader in Graphic Design. His design research is dedicated to the (apparent) anti-aesthetics of the non-commercial punk and related graphic subcultures. In 2012 he published his latest book “The Art of Punk” (dt. Edition “Design und Punk”) together with Alex Ogg. Russ is a member of the international Punk Scholar Network and writes for design magazines such as Eye, Zed, Emigré as well as standard publications such as the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World. Whether contradiction or consistency of extremes: Russ spends much of his free time as an ultra-marathon runner.

 

Poster design: Alexander Legath