Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
Hannes Bajohr, “Wirklichkeit auf Abruf: Künstliche Intelligenz und die Welten des Romans”/”Reality on Demand: Artificial Intelligence and the Worlds of the Novel”
Vienna Mosse Lecture
June 19, 2026, 19:00 CET
Red Bar
Volkstheater Wien
Arthur-Schnitzler-Platz 1
1070 Vienna, Austria
Welcome: Burkhardt Wolf
Moderator: Rafael Jakob
Sponsored by:
Global Mosse Lecture Series
Volkstheater Wien
City of Vienna
University of Vienna
Lecture Series Theme: Availability
Lecture Series Description: As an economic and political problem, “availability” today no longer concerns only the provision of basic resources in the sense of health, education, or food. Making everything and everyone available seems to have become the guiding principle of governance. For what is now considered crucial is unimpeded access to raw materials, the prompt delivery of goods, the convenient accessibility of places, the constant availability of information – and the ability to dispose of people, their labor, and their desires. But isn't it precisely this unavailability that autonomy, and above all the political sphere, must prove itself against? And isn't it the unavailable that ultimately shapes value creation and, above all, desire? In the summer of 2026, the Vienna Mosse Lectures explore the question of (un)availability from a variety of perspectives: the contested field of prostitution and sex work; the arena of political participation in today's "platform democracy"; the sphere of art, which increasingly has to defend itself against authoritarian interference; and that fictional reality which threatens to become the domain of artificial intelligence.
Burkhardt Wolf is a Professor of Modern German Literature (with a special focus on literary and media theory) at the University of Vienna. He is the principal applicant for the ongoing international WEAVE research project “Bureaugraphie: Administration After the Age of Bureaucracy.” His research focuses on the history of discourse on violence, economics, and governmentality; the poetics of knowledge of affect; the cultural and media history of seafaring, and the cultural techniques and literary history of administration. In addition to positions at Humboldt University in Berlin and a multi-year Heisenberg Fellowship from the DFG, his academic career has included visiting professorships in Berlin, Munich, Santa Barbara, Bloomington, Beijing, and Berkeley.
Rafael Jakob is since September 2019 Universitätsassistent (prae doc) am Institut für Germanistik der Uni Wien.
After studying philosophy, German literature, and modern history at Humboldt University, Berlin, and New York University, Hannes Bajohr received his Ph.D. from Columbia University with a dissertation on Hans Blumenberg’s theory of language. Prior to joining Berkeley’s Department of German in 2024, he held postdoctoral positions at Berlin’s Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Zurich’s institute of advanced studies, the Collegium Helveticum.
He has published extensively on the impact of digital writing technologies on language and literature, the German philosophical tradition in the 20th century – especially the connection between phenomenology and anthropology – as well as liberal and republican political theory. A particular interest connects him to figures like Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, and the political theorist Judith N. Shklar, six of whose books he has edited and translated into German.
His work has been supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation as well as the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2022, he was invited to give the Walter Höllerer Lecture at the Technische Universität, Berlin, and the Poetics Lecture at the University of Hildesheim. In 2024, he received the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature by the Electronic Literature Organization.
Professor Bajohr is not only a theoretician but also a practitioner of digital literature. He has published numerous generative works as a part of writers’ collective 0x0a, including the volume Halbzeug (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), which was translated into English as Blanks (Denver: Counterpath, 2021). In 2023, he published (Berlin, Miami), a novel co-written with a self-trained large language model.
Currently, he is working on a project about “post-artificial writing,” the impact of generative AI on literary reading expectations; and on another on “negative anthropology,” a strand of German philosophy that eschews any definition of an “essence of man” but still insists on making the human the main focus of its attention.
Together with Nina Beguš, he runs the projects "The Latent Spaces of Culture" (funded by the France-Berkeley Fund) and "NarrAItion: Bridging the Humanities and AI" (funded by a Peder Sather grant).
Hannes Bajohr, “Wirklichkeit auf Abruf: Künstliche Intelligenz und die Welten des Romans”/”Reality on Demand: Artificial Intelligence and the Worlds of the Novel”
Vienna Mosse Lecture
June 19, 2026, 19:00 CET
Red Bar
Volkstheater Wien
Arthur-Schnitzler-Platz 1
1070 Vienna, Austria
Welcome: Burkhardt Wolf
Moderator: Rafael Jakob
Sponsored by:
Global Mosse Lecture Series
Volkstheater Wien
City of Vienna
University of Vienna
Lecture Series Theme: Availability
Lecture Series Description: As an economic and political problem, “availability” today no longer concerns only the provision of basic resources in the sense of health, education, or food. Making everything and everyone available seems to have become the guiding principle of governance. For what is now considered crucial is unimpeded access to raw materials, the prompt delivery of goods, the convenient accessibility of places, the constant availability of information – and the ability to dispose of people, their labor, and their desires. But isn't it precisely this unavailability that autonomy, and above all the political sphere, must prove itself against? And isn't it the unavailable that ultimately shapes value creation and, above all, desire? In the summer of 2026, the Vienna Mosse Lectures explore the question of (un)availability from a variety of perspectives: the contested field of prostitution and sex work; the arena of political participation in today's "platform democracy"; the sphere of art, which increasingly has to defend itself against authoritarian interference; and that fictional reality which threatens to become the domain of artificial intelligence.
Burkhardt Wolf is a Professor of Modern German Literature (with a special focus on literary and media theory) at the University of Vienna. He is the principal applicant for the ongoing international WEAVE research project “Bureaugraphie: Administration After the Age of Bureaucracy.” His research focuses on the history of discourse on violence, economics, and governmentality; the poetics of knowledge of affect; the cultural and media history of seafaring, and the cultural techniques and literary history of administration. In addition to positions at Humboldt University in Berlin and a multi-year Heisenberg Fellowship from the DFG, his academic career has included visiting professorships in Berlin, Munich, Santa Barbara, Bloomington, Beijing, and Berkeley.
Rafael Jakob is since September 2019 Universitätsassistent (prae doc) am Institut für Germanistik der Uni Wien.
After studying philosophy, German literature, and modern history at Humboldt University, Berlin, and New York University, Hannes Bajohr received his Ph.D. from Columbia University with a dissertation on Hans Blumenberg’s theory of language. Prior to joining Berkeley’s Department of German in 2024, he held postdoctoral positions at Berlin’s Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Zurich’s institute of advanced studies, the Collegium Helveticum.
He has published extensively on the impact of digital writing technologies on language and literature, the German philosophical tradition in the 20th century – especially the connection between phenomenology and anthropology – as well as liberal and republican political theory. A particular interest connects him to figures like Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, Peter Weiss, and the political theorist Judith N. Shklar, six of whose books he has edited and translated into German.
His work has been supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation as well as the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2022, he was invited to give the Walter Höllerer Lecture at the Technische Universität, Berlin, and the Poetics Lecture at the University of Hildesheim. In 2024, he received the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature by the Electronic Literature Organization.
Professor Bajohr is not only a theoretician but also a practitioner of digital literature. He has published numerous generative works as a part of writers’ collective 0x0a, including the volume Halbzeug (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), which was translated into English as Blanks (Denver: Counterpath, 2021). In 2023, he published (Berlin, Miami), a novel co-written with a self-trained large language model.
Currently, he is working on a project about “post-artificial writing,” the impact of generative AI on literary reading expectations; and on another on “negative anthropology,” a strand of German philosophy that eschews any definition of an “essence of man” but still insists on making the human the main focus of its attention.
Together with Nina Beguš, he runs the projects "The Latent Spaces of Culture" (funded by the France-Berkeley Fund) and "NarrAItion: Bridging the Humanities and AI" (funded by a Peder Sather grant).
