Mutual Training for/by Portal Workers

This worksession brings together a group of 20 'portal workers' to engage in mutual training as a form of collective inquiry. The session will provide participants with modes of attunement to each other's rehearsals for collective life that are sometimes-depleted, some-times wild and feral and shiny -- reclaiming, letting go and shaking assumptions against the imposed narratives of the self-centered powers, from their very very centers and also not. Through the joyfully dissident technosciences, mourning humanities, rebel poethics, organising tactics and complex crafts that continue to try to world otherwise the many worlds that fit in this.

The session is designed as a mutual training ground for and by portal workers. It is a spacetime to actively attend to, register and acknowledge the sensibilities, perspectives and modes of intervention that portal work towards liberation might entail. As an insurgent collective research situation, it will allow us to read each other's work in resonance and in solidarity with each other but without the need to cohere. 

+ info: https://titipi.org/wiki/index.php/Mutual_training_for-by_portal_workers 

Digital Discomfort: Read-Write-Chaos

 Date: Friday, 19 January 2024 [NEW DATE]

Time: 13:00 - 18:00 (free dinner for participants)

Location: Varia, (Gouwstraat 3, Rotterdam)

Note: this session will be held in English

Participation: is limited, to join please send an email to info@varia.zone with [ Digital Discomfort ] in the subject.

 

The Digital Discomfort Working Group proposes a one-day gathering to collectivelly engage with the questions and praxis of discomfort aesthetics as a potential form of contemporary (techno)political resistance.

As a tentative situation, we propose read-write-chaos as a method, in order to provide ourselves and others with a spacetime for attending to the emisions, erasures, receptions and recursions of a multiplicity of computationally mundane inscriptions, semiotics and poethics. Digital Discomfort can be understood in many ways (geopolitically, somatically, informatically), but on this occasion we propose to stay close to the aesthetic component of it. Or in other words: to explore discomfort as a queer aesthetics with potential of performing resistance, underwhelmedness and resilience. It is perhaps capable of adding up to what circulates as sensible matter as well as what gets to be experienced by means of friction, slowness, fun difficulty and/or surprising obliqueness in a too linear, too seamless, tending-to-flattenness digital everyday. Read-write chaotic struggle for awlessness might emerge in the midst of spreadsheets, in the making of complex diagrams, in the mess of collective text annotation or in the middle of mumbling discussions.

Cared for by Cristina Cochior, Karl Moubarak and Jara Rocha, the open-ended research on Digital Discomfort learns, dialogues, and experiments with ways to refuse compliance with what science and technology scholar and ecofeminist Donna Haraway calls the “informatics of domination,” and what could be referred to as “totalitarian innovation.” From within and beyond specific (infra)structures, CfDD’s drive is to operate as an agitator of disobedient, practice-based, para-academic research on, across, and despite the techno-colonial establishment of BigTech. CfDD undertakes mundane but attentive experiments to collectively study non-Eurocentric/white origins of computational paradigms and to propose instead trans*feminist infrastructural entanglements, anti-extractivist connecting cultures, and intersectional notions of hosting and hostility in the online structures we inhabit. With “Digital Discomfort, CfDD continue their collective study of cultures and practices of computation and invites other reflections, grammars, and actions that contribute to a plurality of inter-dependent, anti-colonial, trans*feminist, anti-ableist, and environmentally just worldmaking practices of computation.

This event will take place on location at Varia and English will be the main language of operation. To sign up, please send an email to info[at]varia.zone with [ Digital Discomfort ] in the subject header and please indicate if you have any needs to access the events that are not addressed on this page: https://varia.zone/en/pages/accessibility.html or any dietary restrictions.

[encuentro] 480+20 / Escuela Perturbable / Museo Reina Sofía

"480+20 es un grupo heterogéneo formado por artistas, estudiantes (presentes, pasados y futuros), profesoras, ciudadanas… que empleará un tiempo largo para pensar juntas sobre el aprendizaje de las artistas en la universidad. En “La enseñanza del arte como fraude”, Luis Camnitzer cuenta que entre los 5000 estudiantes que tuvo cuando daba clase en universidades estadounidenses, de los 500 que “tenían la esperanza de lograr éxito a través de muestras en el circuito de galerías”, solo unos 20 lo lograron. Los 480 restantes “terminaron con la esperanza de vivir de la enseñanza”. Para sobreponernos al desencanto de sus reflexiones, querríamos indagar otras aritméticas. Somos 480 y queremos ser más. Somos 20 pero aspiramos a ser 500. Estamos masificadas y de ahí nace nuestra fuerza. Sin idealizar, hay que trabajar en la idea de estar juntas. No hay rivalidad, porque tampoco está claro si hay pastel para repartir o nos convendrá más cocinarlo entre todas."

"Escuela Perturbable es un programa extendido de estudios, residencias y producciones culturales que transcurre en paralelo a la exposición Luis Camnitzer. Hospicio de utopías fallidas (Museo Reina Sofía, 17 de octubre de 2018 - 4 de marzo de 2019) y parte de las incisivas ideas de este artista en cuanto a las relaciones entre arte y educación. Pretende situarse en la tensión de no ser un programa pedagógico, ni un programa artístico, ni un programa de curaduría, sino una experiencia de aprendizaje radical cuyo objetivo fundamental es visibilizar la importancia de la educación artística como práctica emancipadora en las sociedades contemporáneas."

El lunes 26 compartiré una práctica pedagógica (llamada "Signos de desorden clandestino en la muchedumbre uniformada y codificada") desarrollada junto con Femke Snelting, Josep M. Marimon, Blanca Callén y unos 160 estudiantes de 1º de Diseño durante el curso 2017-2017, en una escuela de diseño de Barcelona.



[...y actualizo, con la ficha que elaboraron Selina y Lila para la web del Reina con fin de que la práctica pueda ser replicada: https://www.museoreinasofia.es/sites/default/files/educacion/prototipo_4_jararochaelisagonzalez.pdf ]

Ageing companions / Geprogrammeerde veroudering / Les cyborgs vieillissants

Ageing companions explores the interconnected ageing of bodies and technologies.

The lifecycles of different species are linked via electronic circuits with limited lifespan: accessories that measure biorhythms or monitor the growth-rate of specimens; interactive medical implants, networked pacemakers or wireless defibrillators are an everyday reality. As minerals, plants, animals, people and machines wear out, the technologies they carry and/or are part of, age as well. The ageing processes of biological and technological merge and it is not always so clear whether we are faced with physical or programmed obsolescence.

The worksession takes place from 17 until 23 June 2018 in the kunstenwerkplaats and gemeenschapscentrum De Pianofabriek, Brussels.

+ info: http://constantvzw.org/site/-Ageing-companions-.html