Conference HaPoC 2025
2025-12-17 - 2025-12-19 | RWTH Aachen University – Super C, Templergraben 57, Aachen, 52062
The KHK c:o/re is proud to host the 8th edition of the international conference on History and Philosophy of Computing (HaPoC), taking place every two years under the auspices of the DHST/DLMPST Interdivisional Commission on History and Philosophy of Computing (www.hapoc.org).
Initiated in 2011, the conference has the aim of building an interdisciplinary community and environment to address the various facets of computing and computing technology, bringing together scholars from a broad range of disciplines to discuss the past and present cultures, practices and images of computing.
Find the program on our website.

Keynote Speakers:
Liesbeth De Mol, CNRS/Université de Lille, France
Robin K. Hill, University of Wyoming, US
Alexandre Hocquet, Université de Lorraine, France
Program Committee:
Arianna Borrelli, TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen, Germany
Jianqing Chen, Washington University at Saint Louis, US
Jack Copeland, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, NZ
Beatrice Fazi, University of Sussex, UK
Gabriele Gramelsberger, RWTH Aachen, Germany
Thomas Haigh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, US
Andrei Korbut, CAIS Center for Advanced Internet Studies Bochum, Germany
Alfred Nordmann, TU Darmstadt, Germany
Mitsuhiro Okada, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
Ben Peters, University of Tulsa, US
Mate Szabo, University of Southern California, US
Local Organising Committee at RWTH Aachen University:
Gabriele Gramelsberger (philosophy of science)
Stefan Böschen (sociology of science)
Dawid Kasprowicz (philosophy of science)
Phillip Roth (science and technology studies)
Saskia Nagel (ethics of science)
Torsten Voigt (science and technology studies)

A Portrait of the Scientist as a User - Alexandre Hocquet (Nancy)
2025-12-17 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/Berlin) | RWTH Aachen University – Super C, Templergraben 57, Aachen, 52062
Abstract:
Why are computational chemists so peculiar? The history of their relationship with software brings an interesting case study to understand how software may shape scientific activity. We present four key moments in this history — from 1962 to 2024 — to illustrate how visions of openness and user agency have evolved. These include a software-sharing initiative, controversies over licensing and user management, and debates about the Alphafold AI tool.
The multifaceted category of ‘users’ is key to understand discourses about openness. We identify patterns of evolution in the relationship between software packages and the computational chemistry community. Throughout our narration, the notion of ‘users’ becomes more complex, in line with the commodification of programs into packages and the increasing complexity of the packages themselves.
Through the dyanmics of sharing, the legal consequences of software licenses, Non-Disclosure Agreements, and End-User License Agreements, we point out that the overall resulting pattern of evolution amounts to a kind of dispossession of scientists’ agency in their relationships with their tools. We propose to view the history of computational chemistry as the formation of a particular ‘repertoire’ where software is central and where the issue of the forms of collaboration and interaction among practitioners implies visions of openness of software development, circulation, maintenance and uses, all in friction.
This lecture is part of the 8th HaPoC Conference 2025 in Aachen.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

What Is a Computer Program? Or, How I Liberate(d) Myself as a Computer User - Liesbeth De Mol (Lille)
2025-12-18 09:30 - 10:30 | RWTH Aachen University – Super C, Templergraben 57, Aachen, 52062
Abstract:
The aim of this talk is to present the PROGRAMme project, a collective work amongst researchers from diverse disciplinary and ideological backgrounds who met for several years to work on the question “What is a computer program?”. In that project we develop a research programme which assumes it is possible /and/ necessary to work together across disciplinary and other boundaries to turn around a number of fundamental problems we are facing in connection to “programs”. In that regard, the project is ﬁrst of all a humanistic work: while programs have been interpreted before as an exempliﬁcation of cold, inhuman rationality, it is clear that more humanistic visions are possible. I present the project from a personal perspective and show how my version of PROGRAMme is deeply anchored in a more activist stance aimed at user liberations which, in my case, goes hand-in-hand with so-called academic nomadisms. I conclude with some concrete proposals for the future of the history and philosophy of computing.
This lecture is part of the 8th HaPoC Conference 2025 in Aachen.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Art Event: The Ambiguity of Sorting
2025-12-18 18:00 - 20:00 | RWTH Aachen University – Super C – Generali Saal 639, Templergraben 57, Aachen, 52062, Germany
The Ambiguity of Sorting
How do technologies of separation bring us together?
Digital systems are based on acts of transformation from continuity and unity into discreteness and separation. These acts of transformation have been popularized in the multiple ways in which humans engage with AI systems and other forms of digital technologies. Everything we do is transformed, one could say, automatically into data. It is transformed into discrete units that can be computed. Digital technologies have become more than tools for research; people produce knowledge with them, engage emotionally through and with these systems, generating new forms and spaces of intimacy. At the same time, these technologies carry a history of creating disconnections, failing to account for different ways of engaging with the world. They are the result of a certain imaginary of the human and intelligence, one that leaves aside many other existing ways to be in the world. What kind of communities are enabled by technologies? What kind of technologies are successful in bringing communities together? Can we imagine a history of technology that is based on plural ways of understanding intelligence and the human? How can we design technologies that bring people together? How can we imagine technologies that enable communities?
The Ambiguity of Sorting is a pop-up exhibition and a panel discussion that takes place during the 8th edition of the Conference of the Society for the History and Philosophy of Computing. The event brings together installation, performance, and conversations to discuss how the history of intelligent systems embodied ideas of intelligence, the human, and how we live together. With the panel, we invite to think of a different history of computing, one where those that were not thought to be fitting within their categories were creating their own technologies all along.
With contribution by: Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, Ren Loren Britton, and Verena Friedrich
Organization and moderation: Ana Maria Guzmán Olmos
Find out more about the artists and their artworks on this website.
Header photo: Sasha Bergstrom-Katz, On the Subject of Tests: Opening Boxes, 2022. Video.

Desk to Discourse: Development of the Philosophy of Computing from Wordstar and VisiCalc - Robin Hill (Laramie)
2025-12-19 09:30 - 10:30 | RWTH Aachen University – Super C, Templergraben 57, Aachen, 52062
Abstract:
While the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Philosophy and Computers started its mission with community tech help and suggestions, the path proceeded through technique, practice, and application to philosophy. To explore interesting stages along the way, this talk identifies and follows features of office software through their effects and implications to emerging philosophical questions. Some are known, some are trivial, but we find questions of potential depth concerning the affordances and constraints of naming, values, separation, and structure, all appropriate for the philosophy of computing.
This lecture is part of the 8th HaPoC Conference 2025 in Aachen.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Reimagining Cities: Computational Thinking in the Post War Period - Nathalie Bredella (Hanover)
2026-01-07 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
This event is part of our winter term 2025/26 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Did the Computer Drive Science? Hardware Development and Digital Complexity in the 20th Century - Ulf Hashagen (Munich)
2026-01-21 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
The assumption that economic, technological and scientific development is driven by technological
determinism is widespread in politics, business, and society, as well as among scientists and
engineers. A notable example of this belief is the current notion that advances in scientific
knowledge are inextricably linked to the development of AI technology. Since the AI boom in the
2010s was based on the particular potential of graphics processing units (GPUs) for implementing
deep learning algorithms, the question arises as to what extent modern science in the 20th century
was already based on computers and driven by hardware innovations.
A historical review should enable a critical examination of this assumption from a broader historical
perspective. The lecture addresses the question of the extent to which the development of computer
hardware and scientific development have influenced each other since the invention of the computer
in the 1940s. Historical research has shown that the design and development of the first computers
was primarily driven by scientific problems in war research. From the mid-1950s onwards,
universities and non-university research institutions increasingly entered into “alliances with
industry” in the planning and production of new computers and eventually became customers of the
computer industry. How this bilateral producer-customer relationship and the trilateral relationship
between the computer industry, the state, and science have developed since the 1950s in terms of
research funding, the equipping of scientific institutions with computers, and their use by scientists
from various disciplines is a question that has received relatively little attention in historical research
to date.
These questions are discussed against the backdrop that, since the 1970s, the history of technology
has been committed to a model of contextualized historiography and has sought to prove in
numerous studies that the assumption that technology is an autonomous factor in the continuous
transformation of the human environment is a naïve idea.
This event is part of our winter term 2025/26 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Digital Complexity in Historical Perspective: Lessons from the Study of Technological Transitions in Data Production and Visualization - Charlotte Bigg (Paris)
2026-02-11 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany

Workshop: Digital Capitalism & Varieties of Science (Tokyo, Japan)
2026-03-12 10:00 - 17:00
In recent years, digital technologies have not only given rise to new sociocultural realities, thus reshaping economies, but have begun to profoundly alter the ways in which knowledge is produced, validated, and disseminated. Against this backdrop, this workshop explores the intersection of varieties of science and varieties of digital capitalism through a comparative and interdisciplinary lens. Starting from specific digital technologies – particularly the metaverse, extended reality, and human augmentation – we examine distinct institutional, cultural, and epistemic configurations.
Our focus lies especially on Japan, which has been characterized as a coordinated market economy alongside Germany. The workshop adopts an approach that investigates how science and capitalism co-evolve under conditions of digital transformation – understood here as a topic for critical inquiry (following Stolterman and Croon Fors 2004). Moving beyond modernization theory, we ask how digital tools and platforms take shape across a range of socio-political contexts, and how they in turn affect knowledge regimes and research practices.
By bringing together perspectives from STS, economics, and Japanese studies, along with insights from practice, the workshop seeks to open up a productive dialogue on how emerging technologies, digital capitalism, and scientific cultures co-constitute one another – across regions, disciplines, and epistemic traditions. We hold that the case of Japan, the first non-Western country to become an advanced economy and fertile spawning ground for technoscientific imaginations and attributions, offers particularly valuable insights into these processes.
Co-Organizers: Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (RWTH Aachen), German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) Tokyo
Convenors: Stefan Böschen, Harald Kümmerle, Nicole Müller
Location: German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), Tokyo
The Sessions on Day One (“Digital Technology in Context”) will be livestreamed for a public online audience. Please register via: maxweberstiftung.zoom-x.de/webinar/register/WN_dKDVTS-VS5agd0_ea9wzaA.
You can find more information in the program and the speakers’ bios.
Please keep the time difference between Japan and Germany in mind!

Dis/Trusting Generative AI? Assessing Four Types of Deception Through Generative AI - Judith Simon (University of Hamburg)
2026-04-15 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
Generative AI has taken the world by storm, intensifying debates on the ethics of AI in general and notions of trustworthy Generative AI in particular. In my talk, I propose the notion of quadruple deception to capture a distinctive feature of Generative AI with significant epistemological, ethical and political implications: 1) deception regarding the ontological status of one’s interactional counterpart, 2) deception regarding the capacities of AI, 3) deception through content created with Generative AI as well as 4) deception resulting from function creep of Generative AI. Arguing that deception endangers trust and trustworthiness, I assess the epistemic, ethical and political implications of these four different types of deception for trust and trustworthiness. I will end with some conclusions on how to increase the trustworthiness of Generative AI to enable more justified trust in such technologies.
This event is part of our summer term 2026 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

DFG-Workshop: Erkennen und Handeln zwischen Simulation und Realität
2026-04-16 - 2026-04-17 | Stadtpalais, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
The DFG workshop “Erkennen und Handeln zwischen Simulation und Realität” (Recognizing and Acting Between Simulation and Reality) will take place from April 16 to 17, 2026, in the c:o/re lecture hall. The event will be held in German. The full program can be found here.

Digital Complexity: De-Anthropological Trends in Computing, AI, and Robotics - Gabriele Gramelsberger (RWTH Aachen University)
2026-04-29 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
Current developments in the fields of simulation and artificial intelligence (AI) have shown that the complexity of digital tools has exceeded the level of human understanding. We can no longer comprehend, understand or explain the results that AI delivers. Even AI deceptions and hallucinations are now almost impossible to detect. This raises the question of the relationship between humans and their technology anew. Are technologies as instruments useful extensions of human capabilities, as it was understood in the classical philosophy of technology, or are we now extensions of our technologies? Will AI dominate and manipulate us in the near future?
This event is part of our summer term 2026 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Hidden Futures: Prediction and Promise
2026-05-08 13:00 - 2026-05-09 20:00 | PACT Zollverein, Bullmannaue 20a, Essen, 45327, Germany
Our futures are made by technologies. How do data, algorithms, platforms, and code structure the future? What kinds of visions of the future are designed and foreseen by scientific practices and technological development? Who is included in such visions? How can we act in the midst of our technological present?
Together with PACT Zollverein, an international center for the performing arts working in the fields of dance, performance, theater, media, the KHK c:o/re organizes the event series “Hidden Futures”. The series brings together activists, researchers, and artists, opening new perspectives on the increasing complexity of digital life. Here, the future is not merely conceived as a distant vision, but also as a concrete reality embedded in the present – inscribed in data and platforms, in decision-making systems, in landscapes, infrastructures, in actions, and in social contexts.
The second edition, “Hidden Futures: Prediction and Promise”, explores how technological development creates future scenarios, shapes human and nonhuman life, and forms social and ecological contexts in the present. On May 8 and 9, 2026, we will engage in a series of conversations, walks, and tours to unpack how the future is being made and decided, with and by technologies.
On May 8, we are taking a bus tour into the Rhenish mining area: Where the massive pit of the Hambach surface mine still stands today, a new lakeland is set to emerge in the coming decades – one rich in ecological, economic, and tourist potential. In Elsdorf, Manheim, and Bürgewald, we meet people, including artist Silke Schatz and landscape and open space planner Daniela Karow-Kluge, who are planning, accompanying, or questioning this structural transformation.
On May 9, we will meet at PACT Zollverein in Essen, where artists and researchers will engage in a dialogue to explore different forms of knowledge and practices that go beyond the promises of technological developments. The future is conceived here as a present shaped by predictive systems that already organize and yield reality. With Choy Ka Fai, Ren Loren Britton, Nonhuman Nonsense, Nelly Y. Pinkrah, Yi Gu, Tomas Percival and many more.
Find further information and tickets on PACT’s website here.

Inferential Blueprints and Windows on Reality - Michela Massimi (University of Edinburgh); only online via Zoom!
2026-05-13 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Only online via Zoom!
Abstract:
In this talk, I present a key aspect of my 2022 book Perspectival realism (OUP), namely the view of scientific models as inferential blueprints. Against a long-standing tradition that has focussed on the representational role of scientific models, I explain the rationale for regarding models as primarily inferential blueprints that allow different epistemic communities to exchange relevant and appropriate inferences on the relevant target system. I illustrate the view with both historical and contemporary examples of scientific modelling and I spell out the nature of the modal knowledge licensed by scientific models.
This event is part of our summer term 2026 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Causation as Sign Action: Semiotic Empiricism and the Causal Complexity of Large Language Models - M. Beatrice Fazi (University of Sussex)
2026-06-03 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
Can large language models (LLMs) engage with causation, or are they confined to detecting correlations in data? This talk argues that addressing this question requires rethinking what causation itself is and how it becomes intelligible. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic theory of signs, the talk develops the position that causation is semiotically constituted: causal relations become meaningful not through experiential grounding alone but through irreducibly triadic sign processes involving signs, objects, and interpretants. Albert Michotte’s “launching effect” experiment provides a key departure point, demonstrating that causal perception is already semiotic rather than a matter of direct apprehension or Humean inference. This reframing challenges Judea Pearl’s influential “ladder of causation”—which positions LLMs as processors of correlations incapable of causal reasoning—while also taking seriously Pearl’s own acknowledgment that causal information is embedded in the training texts on which these models operate. The talk proposes “semiotic empiricism” as a framework in which experience is structured by meaning-making rather than preceding it, and examines its consequences for understanding how LLMs might participate in causal reasoning as semiotic machines, thus moving the debate beyond both dismissive critique and anthropomorphic overclaiming.
This event is part of our summer term 2026 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Cybernetics and Critique: A Theory of Digital Governmentality - Anna-Verena Nosthoff (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg)
2026-06-17 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:

Elon Musk describes X as a “cybernetic superintelligence,” Mark Zuckerberg views companies as “learning organisms,” and the inventor of Google Glass says, “Cybernetics is everywhere, like air.” These statements are not coincidental. Anyone who seeks to understand the digital transformation must look at its cybernetic origins. In her lecture, Anna-Verena Nosthoff offers insights into her recent book, “Cybernetics and Critique: A Theory of Digital Government” (Suhrkamp Verlag), and illustrates its fundamental theses with the current authoritarian shift in Silicon Valley. Indeed, contemporary techno-fascism, as promoted by figures like Musk, can be understood particularly well from the perspective of cybernetic constructs. This brings into focus not only transhumanist cyborg fantasies and solutionist, post-ideological concepts of technology, but also binary and affect-centered concepts of the public sphere and technocratic, information-centered understandings of the state. These topoi find totalitarian parallels in the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” in Musk’s decidedly right-wing management of his platform “X,” and also in the current AGI hype. Against this backdrop, contemporary “Muskism” (Lepore) proves to be a simultaneously disruptive and incremental form of digital governance: it is primarily recognizable as cybernetic authoritarianism.

This event is part of our summer term 2026 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

The Stack of Territory: Digital Complexity and the Making of Geospatial Infrastructures in China - Yi Gu (University of Toronto)
2026-07-01 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany
Abstract:
will follow soon
This event is part of our summer term 2026 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.
If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.

Summer School: The impacts of digitalization on science and society in the quest for more sustainable futures
2026-07-06 - 2026-07-10
The PRAXIS research group at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS, KIT Karlsruhe) and the KHK c:o/re at RWTH Aachen University will host an International Summer School for PhD students, titled “The impacts of digitalization on science and society in the quest for more sustainable futures”, from July 6-10, 2026, in Donostia-San Sebastián.
The transformative effects of the digitalization of science are evident at various levels, but its interactions with, and future impacts on, the broader socio-cultural transformations of science and society remain largely unknown and call for further research. Accordingly, the Summer School will focus on the following key topics:

Transformations in scientific knowledge production through digitalization
Transformations of scientific cultures in everyday practices
Transformations of science–society interactions in transdisciplinary and transformative research through real-world experiments using digital twins
Concepts and methodologies for the assessment and governance of digital transformation activities
Varieties of knowledge production and their transformation through digitalization worldwide

Keynote lecturers of the Summer School will be Prof. Dr. Gabriele Gramelsberger, KHK c:o/re, c:o/re Fellow Prof. Dr. Harro van Lente, full professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Maastricht University, and Prof. Dr. Stefano Balbi, Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) and IKERBASQUE – Basque Foundation for Science, Basque Country.
The Summer School invites PhD-researchers worldwide from a broad range of Humanities, Social Studies and Cultural Studies, Science & Technology Studies (STS) and Technology Assessment (TA) and other inter- and transdisciplinary approaches such as policy-, sustainability-, and transformative-research, which address the interrelations of digitalization of science and socio-cultural transformations.

Artificial Intelligence as Cultural Technique: Do Chatbots Understand What They Communicate? - Sybille Krämer (Leuphana University of Lüneburg)
2026-07-22 17:00 - 18:30 | Stadtpalais/Online, Theaterstraße 75, Aachen, 52062, Germany

Freedom of Research: A European Summit
2026-11-04 08:00 - 2026-11-05 17:00
For more information about the program, check out the event website.
The Summit is organized by the Charlemagne Prize Foundation and RWTH Aachen University’s Knowledge Hub and Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re).
