While established funding structures that promote architectural, artistic, and scholarly work often remain invisible to the public eye outside of sponsorship acknowledgements, they determine research and knowledge production within contemporary Berlin. Whether or not the resultant adaptation to funding criteria on the part of applicants affects the content of the research, it is clear that between individuals and funding institutions there is a struggle for authority. Independent agents are put in competitions, excluded or included depending on their relationships, and are required to be accountable to the authorities that be. Further, institutions are connected to each other through a variety of interests from sponsorship relations to shared board members to social and professional relationships, all of which contribute to an organization’s authority, as well as constitute a larger network of institutions that is itself a super-institution. Relationships that form super-institutions, thus their extra-authority, can be mapped as network diagrams in order to problematize the entanglement of knowledge and economic power structures. On a network map, actors naturally find their position through connecting forces, revealing the central actors, indirect links, organic clusters, structural holes, and outliers. During this workshop (in the context of a closed session with students from Learning Place) and panel we view how clusters of institutions on a map show the super-institutions that have high-power concentrations in neoliberal societies.
