Workshop: “Speculative nows” for post covid-19 futures
Workshop during “Art meets radical openness” festival 2020 Linz, Austria. May 21-23, 2020, Linz (Austria).
Art Meets Radical Openness 2020
20th – 23rd of May 2020
locations: online, DorfTV.at
The workshop is organised by: Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle (Kairus Art+Research) together with Anuradha Reddy, Bastien Kerspern (Design Friction), Özgün Eylül İşcen and AMRO participants, Art meets radical openness, Linz, Austria.
COVID-19 forces most countries worldwide into various stages of lockdown. The ‘state of exception’ reveals various pre-existing conditions of nations level of preparedness as we are witnessing a global experiment in comparative governance. Large-scale testing has turned into a sensor informing statistically valid models for better public health response. Technology such as corona tracing apps promise a quicker return to the “new normal” and the race to develop a universal vaccination is assumed to be the only path to conquer this and future pandemics. These narratives portray innovation and technology as a savior in a similar way as “smartness” has been promised to solve challenges such as climate change, over population, financial crisis, security threats etc. In the midst of a pandemic it has become challenging to think about the future. “Coronarratives” shift as new research gets published, necessary preventive measures change overnight. The feeling of uncertainty fuels adversarial narratives. The most extreme corona conspiracy theories have led to burning of 5G towers. Reflexively interpreting sensing and modelling as ‘surveillance’, active governance as ‘social control’ and the current lock-downs as ‘dystopias’ seems short-sighted and calls for a more nuanced vocabulary. In this workshop we want to take time, space and (privileged) right to think about the future. When the earlier imagined futures of “smartness” producing resilience seem to be failing we like to share experiences and discuss local community responses and alternative ad-hoc networks that emerge within our newly defined living spaces in our countries, cities, neighbourhood and households.
Please signup for the workshop at radical-openness.org
In your email please share your thoughts and observations on one or more of the following topics (max. 200 words):
- sensing, tracing and modelling the pandemic
- active governance, social control
- utopia/dystopia of current lock-downs
- local community responses
- alternative ad-hoc networks
The workshop is organised by: Linda Kronman and Andreas Zingerle (Kairus Art+Research) together with Anuradha Reddy, Bastien Kerspern (Design Friction), Özgün Eylül İşcen and AMRO participants.
Bio:
Anuradha Reddy is a PhD candidate in Interaction Design at Malmö University, Sweden. Her research tackles matters of ethics and responsibility in IoT at the most intimate level, where we are currently experiencing a clash between data-driven logics, the messiness and material needs of everyday life, and societal values at large. Grounded in feminist ethics, her work attempts to show how a feminist approach can pave the way for a total re-orientation of how IoT should be developed and used. Anuradha has an interdisciplinary background in Engineering and Design that combines her ability to prototype and experiment with novel design methods.
Twitter: @anu1905
Website: http://anuradhareddy.com/
Bastien Kerspern is an interaction designer specialised in public innovation. He believes in innovation by transgression with a huge dose of cultural jamming inherited from digital subcultures. With a strong experience on designing participatory experiences, he pushes experiments in public debates and design for controversies. Interested in mundane frictions and uncanny narratives, his current works explore how digital technologies and related innovations might influence social models. Bastien also carries a discrete, but stubborn, passion for experimenting with interactive writing processes. Aside Design Friction, Bastien is also an associate designer at Casus Ludi and a visiting lecturer on the topics of design fiction and games for futures (L’École de Design Nantes Atlantique, Umea Institute of Design, AHO Oslo).
Twitter: @Kastien
Website: http://design-friction.com/
Andreas Zingerle is a media artist, designer and researcher from Austria. As part of the Kairus art collective they explore topics such as vulnerabilities in IoT devices, corporatization of city governance in Smart Cities and citizen sensitive projects in which technology is used to reclaim control of our living environments. Their practice based research is closely intertwined with their artistic production, adopting methodologies used by anthropologists and sociologist, their artworks are often informed by archival research, participation observations and field research. Besides the artworks they publish academic research papers and open access publications to contextualize their artworks to wider discourses such as data privacy & security, activism & hacking culture, disruptive art practices, electronic waste and materiality of the internet.
Twitter: @wearekairus
Website: http://kairus.org
Linda Kronman is a media artist and designer. She is currently a PhD candidate at University of Bergen in the Machine Vision project. She holds a MA in New Media from Aalto University, Finland (2010). In her artistic work she explores methods of interactive and transmedial storytelling, visualizing data and creative activism. She is part of the artist duo KairUs and has been producing art together with Andreas Zingerle since 2010. Their artistic research topics includes surveillance, smart cities, IoT, cybercrime, online fraud, electronic waste and machine vision. Together they have edited the books Behind the Smart World (2016) and Internet of Other People’s Things (2018), both open access publication bringing together critical perspectives on everyday use of technology focusing on artistic research and tacit knowledge that is produced through cultures of making, hacking, and reverse engineering. She has organized several participatory workshops, taught at Woosong University, Daejong, South Korea (2017-2018) and presented her work at international exhibitions and conferences including Moscow Young Arts Biennale, Siggraph ASIA, WRO Biennial, ISEA, ELO and Ars Electronica.
Twitter: @wearekairus
Website: http://kairus.org
Özgün Eylül İşcen is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Program of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University, United States. Her dissertation examines the current applications of computational media within the context of the Middle East, thereby underlining wider flows of technology, culture, and capital. She has a background in media, film and soundscape studies. She has presented her work at multiple academic and art institutions, as well as published in a variety of edited book volumes, academic journals, and art catalogs. She received her BA in Sociology from Koç University, Turkey, and MA in Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Website: https://cmac.duke.edu/people/ozgun-eylul-iscen
Art Meets Radical Openness 2020
20th – 23rd of May 2020
locations: online, DorfTV.at
“We meet at your place!
AMRO is a biennial community festival that explores and discusses new challenges between digital culture, art, everyday life, education, politics and activism. The festival is organised by the Linz based net culture initiative servus.at.
Due to the circulating Covid-19 pandemic, it was not possible to organize this years edition and gathering as usual. We will miss the possibility to meet our community in the physical space and we will miss the excellent food which was always provided.
Nevertheless, we take this as a challenge and decided to come up with a radical digital version for this years edition of our event which includes our DIY culture of setting up our own trustworthy digital environment. We will be distant but we will be social and happy to welcome you within our online event.
