Time: Monday - Thursday, 09:00 - 18:00 o'clock / Friday, 09:00 - 12:00 o'clock
CW 12: 16 / 17 / 18 / 19 / 20 March 2026
Interested students of other study programmes can register from 29. January - 9. February 2026 - by email to: studium.dfa@zhdk.ch. You will be informed until the end of calendar week 7 about a possible participation.
Universität / Haute École
for student applications
In Estonian folklore, the Kratt is a restless spirit built from everyday tools, animated through a pact with the devil, and bound to serve its creator’s insatiable demands. Reinterpreted today, the Kratt becomes a potent metaphor for Artificial Intelligence: an obedient yet unpredictable agent of human will that can slip into chaos when left unchecked.
"KRATT (extended): Technology and Fear" uses this archetype as a lens for collective speculation on how fear narratives emerge and operate. The course investigates how fear has historically been intertwined with technological imagination: from Prometheus and Frankenstein to contemporary anxieties of automation, surveillance, and posthumanism articulated by thinkers such as Donna Haraway, J. Halberstam, etc. Participants will explore how these cultural narratives influence their own artistic, performative, and technological practices.
Through the Young Girl Reading Group methodology, combining collective reading, embodied voicing, and collaborative making, the workshop merges theory and practice. The week unfolds from reading and discussion into narrative construction and culminates in performative or visual artworks presented in a final group sharing.
About the lecturers:
Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė work collaboratively across performance, sculpture, painting, and installation to explore porous boundaries between body, technology, and environment, weaving together ecology, science, and speculative narratives.
Course language: English
Learning objectives:
Students are able to,
- critically engage with theories connecting technology, myth, and fear;
- examine how narratives of fear shape cultural responses to technological progress;
- develop collaborative and individual narrative frameworks linking theory to artistic practice;
- produce artworks or performative outcomes reflecting on the entanglement of human, machine, and myth.