Vera Bühlmann

Bio

"Vera Bühlmann is Head of the Laboratory for Applied Virtuality at Ludger’s Chair for CAAD. She holds a PhD in media philosophy from Basel University and her background lies in cultural theory. What interests her is a philosophy of artificiality in general, and within this, the role of technology more specifically. One of her greatest concerns is the increasing level of inarticulacy between the disciplines. To her, some of the most basic notions relating to culture, such as those of information, of unit and value, of formula, code and formalisation, today lack a theoretical conception that is complex enough, and therefore adequate, to meet the unprecedented performance of contemporary technology at eye level. With energy being so much at the core of everything that we use and describe, she sees as maybe the most profound challenge today a rethink of what we consider real, possible, feasible, or reasonable. And this not just for the sake of it, but because so much of what we can do, indeed the very directions into which we are able to look, are determined by this. To address these issues anew, and to reappraise our notions of reality, we can invoke an ancient term that has recently earned itself a great, if somewhat dubious, topicality: the ‘virtual’." (source: ThePower Book)