Scale

The concept of scale has become ubiquitous across the humanities, from discussions of the nonhuman and the planetary to artistic, political, and poetic reflections on the contemporary.

Yet, despite this new theoretical attention to scale, much remains uncertain about the term’s usage. ‘Scale’ is a shifting, polyvalent, relational term. Rather than a fixed measure, it is a fluid mode of inquiry involving manifold analytical approaches such as reducing and zooming out, focusing and expanding, dislocating and recontextualizing, or close and distant reading. To focus on a specific scale, be it the cosmic or the everyday, is to focus on objects and processes that become visible or invisible, central or marginal, at this scale compared to others, or to trace how our categories shift with a shift in scale. The relationality of scale makes it hard to define yet fruitful for engaging with complex experiences and phenomena.

This workshop reflects the ongoing collective inquiry by ICI Fellows into the concept of scale. Contributions to the workshop explore scale as it appears in various thematic and disciplinary contexts ranging from theories of artificial intelligence to anthropology and philosophy, and from literary studies to media studies to gender and queer theory. As such, the workshop aims to constellate some theoretical fragments on scale into a (necessarily incomplete) atlas crossing the human and non-human, modern and pre-modern, individual and social, local and cosmic, as well as artistic, political, and poetic.

In English

Monday, 6 October 2025

14:00 Welcome

14:15 – 15:45 Panel I – SPACE

Federica Di Blasio
‘Volatile and Determining’: Scales of the Everyday

Filippo Bosco
Scale of Things (to Come): On Drawings for Monica Bonvicini’s 75 mph (1997-98)

Tobi Haslett
Theft and Gift: The Scales of Urban Rebellion

15:45-16:15 Coffee Break

16:15-17:45 Panel II – TIME

Yuri Di Liberto
Processes Without Subjects: On Scale as Suspicion

Jasmine Pisapia
Of Dust, Volcanoes, and Death: Timescales of Disaster and the Everyday

Kirill Chepurin
Earth as Cemetery: A View from Outer Space

Tuesday, 7 October 2025

14:00-15:30 Panel III – FORM

Angelica Stathopoulos
A Grammar of Diminution (the I, the i, the eye, the Ei)

Nicolas Helm-Grovas
‘Ignoring all this…’: Notes on Stephen Heath and Metalanguage

Verónica Stedile Luna
Page as Margin / Book as Performance: Reduction and Expansion in Editorial Procedures

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Panel IV – SPIRIT

Franco Costantini
Poetry at the Edge of the Universe: The Collapse of Scales in the Empyrean

José Antonio Magalhães
Intelligence and Spirits: Prometheanism and Perspectivism in the Geopolitics of Mind

Magdalena Krysztoforska
The Measure of Generality: On the Politics of Scale in AI Model Evaluation

17:30-18:00 Break

18:00-19:00 Wrap up

How to Attend

• At the venue (registration required): To attend in person, please register using this form.
• Public livestream here (no registration required) with the possibility to ask questions via chat.