About the Festival
State of Time
In language and in action, we handle time as concretely as money in the bank – we borrow it, spend it, keep it, lose it, and never have enough of it. Until, that is, something stops the clock. A brilliant movie makes hours pass like minutes; the same amount of time that can turn a pre-lunch meeting into eternity. Cars crash in slow motion; week-long vacations slip away in a flash; our heart is broken, the next days feel like fifteen weeks, and suddenly we wonder: What, if anything, does time even measure?
One look at our ageing bodies and time can feel fairly real. But while we go about our days perceiving, measuring, and planning our experience in neat, linear increments, generations of physicists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have done their best to burst our bubble:
What exactly constitutes time? Does its passage depend on events taking place within it? How is it that experience of time varies by culture and age? Would time pass if no conscious entity would be present to perceive it? Why does time seem to flow in one unilateral and irreversible direction?
Aside from putting a dent in basic human sanity, research into the nature of time carries a whiff of scientific utopia – of time travel, teleportation, and the malleability of our identities in the here and now. How we will eventually digest and utilize our scientific and philosophical musings, well, only time itself will tell.
Experience Science
With STATE Festival, we inspire new forms of science outreach and act as a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists and artists. The program contains scientific talks, interactive installations, a short film competition, workshops, panel discussions, performances and a dinner event.
STATE takes its visitors in a parallel universe to explore and cross the boundaries between science and art. STATE establishes an international platform for collaborative work, inviting scientists and artists from all fields to meet, create and discuss both during the festival and all year round. We want to encourage an open dialogue between all attendants regardless of their specialization.
STATE Festival will take place for the first time from 31.10. to 2.11.2014 in Berlin and will be established as an annual event.
More than 200.000 knowledge workers, scientists and artists from all over the world, 100+ international research institutions, numerous universities and an internationally renowned creative scene make Berlin the ideal location to bring this new festival concept to life.
STATE is honored to work with exceptional partners like Imagine Science Films, Paul Drude Institute, and Wissenschaft im Dialog to name just a few.
Who are we?
We are an independent team of young scientists and artists that believe that science is too great to be left to scientists alone. In order to realize innovative ways for bringing science to you - the public - we founded STATE Experience Science GmbH, a startup with origins at Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) in Berlin and the company responsible for the festival. STATE OF TIME, our first festival, is organized in collaboration with the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik.
