ReclaimFutures

Turbo Mañana — Andrew van Hyfte | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:44:22 GMT

[WORKSHOP REPLAY]
Attendees will explore our aesthetic and socio-economic landscape and how it applies to possible futures and ways we can influence them. In a workshop format, the attendees can explore the following zones and ideate ways to create Turbo Mañana in their professional and personal lives.

How and why is it that some experiential products that sell a feeling or vibe have license to “own” radically futuristic visions? Why do others all look the same? —

At its core, it’s just about money. C.R.E.A.M (Humanist Blandcore)

Attendees will explore what lies beyond capitalist realism.

Philosophical/Existential/Socio-economic forces —

I’ve mapped out philosophical axes and socio-economic drivers that motivate and fuel aesthetics and cultural production.

We must realize that capitalism will consume Earth’s resources until it’s exhausted unless we find another way to live in-between abundance and scarcity. (McDaas/Capitalocene)

What’s Next? —

Are we going to get medieval again? (Neo-Feudalism)

Or will we wake up and places bets on activities, provocation and cultural production that inspires imagination and multitudes of possible futures? (Turbo Mañana)

A new sun rises.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/turbo-manana

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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The Mine of Humanism- in response to technological singularity — Reina Suyeon Mun | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:41:10 GMT

A speculative project made in response to the ongoing discussions raised by numerous futurists and technologists on the hypothetical point called the technological singularity. Often, the technologists and futurists talk about how this technological growth can become uncontrollable and irreversible. Either this hypothetical point be consequential or beneficial, there are a lack of conversations touching upon how the relationship between the human and technology should be. The narratives are established within the perspective from one of the people who decided to escape the city tending towards the technological singularity. The vision is to resettle a new community with a vision that speaks against technological centralisation. As mining was one of the early operations that sparked the industrial revolution, the new community is built on top of an abandoned mine settlement to invert the conventional notion of a technological revolution. The project sits in 2050 and speculates on an alternative reaction to the city tending towards the technological singularity by decentralising themselves to an extreme. The concept is inspired by the theory of relativity in space-time physics and how blockchain technology operates on its own internal time system

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/the-mine-of

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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futurities of the super like — Antoine Simeão Schalk & Azadbek Bekchanov | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:40:41 GMT

Technocapitalism has radically changed and impacted the manifestation of desire. Physical spaces where queer communities were meeting to have sex, to cruise are diseappering. Public bathrooms are being deserted, clubs are closing (1), the act of cruising in urban, natural territories, spaces not designed for such purposes, is increasingly rare. With their disappearance, whole histories and narratives are erased (2). In the absence of extensive queer archives, cruising utopias vanish, witnesses of liminal and forgotten histories.

Our video proposition investigates contemporary sites of affection-making online. Digital platforms owned by conglomerates offer the prospect of finding love, whether easily, fast or through self-promoted complex algorithms. We investigate such sites and contradictions inherent to their business model (3). Acknowledging how apps like grindr, tinder, okcupid actively support the perpetuation of normative capitalism on one hand, we dig into the possibility of counter-discourse through acts of hacking, subversive behavior. Thus, such sites can offer windows of opportunity for users to create networks, exchange practices and knowledge. We investigate how online-dating apps can be localities for radical practices. Flirting, dating, sex are powerful catalysers for production of knowledge (4). Following epistemologies that are rooted in alternative pedagogy methods, we explore what knowledge can be created on such platforms, which narratives can be expressed.

[1] Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
[2] José Esteban Muñoz, Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts
[3] Richard Mèmeteau: Sex friends - Comment (bien) rater sa vie amoureuse à l’ère numérique
[4] Ashkan Sepahvand - Everything I learned about technocapitalism, I learned at Bergain

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/futurities-of-the

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Imagining a decolonized rural future: Agro-Commune - Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:40:21 GMT

What is the rural future in the era of postcolonial uprising? How do we dismantle modern industrial capital that extracts labor from disenfranchised black womxn workers? Agro Commune is a para-fictional investigation where architecture is utilized as a lens to expose and respond to current geopolitical labor conditions. It began with the belief that architectural realities rarely start from a tabula rasa state. Rather, existing systems stand as a catalyst for new imaginations through disrupting and reconfiguring the present. The project imagines reparations for postcolonial states through farmland reform and renounces current global industries that thrive on the extraction of labor, capital and lands of others.

In sub-Saharan Africa, foreign corporations are vigorously irrigating vast rural areas for agro-industrial purposes, displacing local smallholders from their land to secure stable supplies for the rest of the western world. Since the global food crisis of 2007-2008, there has been an exponential growth in large-scale land acquisition in Africa. Western, Chinese, and Middle Eastern companies are leading a 21st-century land rush in African farmland where more than a forty million hectares are now under 99-year leases. Greenhouse colonies have become one of many architectural representations of unequal exchanges fostered by global capitalism. This workshop is based on research on the production system of Kenyan floriculture - and uses architectural language as a lens to investigate a speculative rural cooperative system for smallholder farmers.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/agro-commune

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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The Political Tragedy of Data-Driven-Determinism — Mushon Zer-Aviv | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:39:27 GMT

Polls and predictions could not foresee the wide appeal of voting for Brexit, for Trump, against the predictions, against the future that was set in the numbers. As worrisome as these phenomenons may be, we can see some hope in this turn against data-driven-determinism. How could we seize this call to action to reignite our political imagination and reclaim the future?

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/the-political-tragedy

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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The Republic of Užupis - H.E. Max Haarich | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:38:01 GMT

I would like to present the Lithuanian artist Republic of Užupis as one possible example of how to approach societal change – in the past and today.

Užupis was once established as a counterculture to challenge and support the authorities’ promises of freedom and democracy after the breakdown of Soviet Union. At the same time it was a desperate attempt to create a sense of unity within a neighbourhood formerly dominated by poverty and violence. With the help of arts, humour and paradoxy, Užupis managed to survive and unintentionally became a role model for friendly and tolerant community life. Užupis e.g. created a code of arms, a currency and even had a 13-men-army - which was later abandoned, because it was against the constitution. This constitution best reflects the unique world view of the citizens, which is the first one to ever mention artificial intelligence.

Since 1997 more than 500 ambassadors and honorary citizens worldwide were appointed like Jonas Mekas and his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. The ambassadors have the task to build bridges between people and to explore the power of paradoxy to solve problems.

Today Užupis faces new challenges. It turned from the most rundown area to the most expensive area of the baltics. It seems the threat of Socialism was substituted by the pervasive power of techno-capitalism. Therefore, I would like to show how the republic and its embassies currently approache a productive conversation with the “outside” world, while at the same time caring less and less about the rest of the world and creating their Užupis ways of doing things.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/the-republic-of

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Critical Latinofuturism- Recontextualizing Modernity - César Neri | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:37:23 GMT

With the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement on January 1st 1994, the indigenous municipalities of Chiapas in Southern Mexico rose up to demand an end to the unregulated cycle of abuse they had been subjected to since the arrival of the Spanish Crown. Under the name of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), the armed organization declared war on the Mexican State, demanding “work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice, and peace”.

Chiapas has since become a symbol of the resistance to the peculiar form of globalization that grants priority to capital (and the private tyrannies that control it) while leaving the interests of the people as incidental. The argument put forth by the Zapatistas painted a future for an alternative model of ruling structures that moves away from the conception of a Western modernity — one in which a globalized system would allow for the multiplicity of identities, conceptions, and ideologies.

Mexico 44 acts as a catalyst for the collective redefining of our relationship to these prevailing structures of coloniality. Through the elaboration and execution of speculative critical narratives, the project proposes a space for contemporary design practices to engage in the spatial transformation of individual identities with hopes of fostering a dialogue that translates the argument put forth by the indigenous communities of Chiapas.

The talk will present a brief overview of the Zapatista movement, introduce the opportunities and challenges presented by Latinofuturismo, and will go over the execution of Mexico 44 as case study.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/critical-latinofuturism-recontextualizing

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Peek- creating games for understanding futures — Evan Raskob | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:36:06 GMT

[WORKSHOP REPLAY]
In this workshop participants will make their own version of the science fiction/novel game, Peek. Peek is an entertaining game for exploring the complexities and twisted narratives of the future, using a variety of story structures from traditional literature. In a series of exercises, participants will learn strategies for developing narrative games and will ultimately use Peek as a basis to create their own version of a speculative futures game, with their own stories and characters. No experience is required.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/peek-creating-games

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

More about ReclaimFutures 2020: https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020

Can Computation Produce Novelty?- the Case of Live-Coding Music - Emma Stamm | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:33:17 GMT

The form of the digital datum is discrete, fungible, and familiar, and digital mediation presupposes commensurability between various ontic, epistemic, and aesthetic phenomena. My paper asks whether digital media may nevertheless yield new, unrecognizable or sui generis forms. I take philosopher M. Beatrice Fazi’s reading of Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetics as my primary hermeneutic lens. Deleuze claims that aesthetic novelty, or that which has no formal precedent, issues from numerically continuous fluxes. Thus it cannot originate in digital media, which are discrete. Fazi intervenes by distinguishing the form of the digital datum from the process of computation. She indicates that the latter partakes of infinite and indeterminate sources and is continuous across time. As such, computational processes retain the capacity to yield the Deleuzean new.

Offering Deleuzean novelty as a theorization of “the new,” I argue that the cultural phenomenon of live-coded music exemplifies the computational production of novelty. Live-coding musicians improvise by writing source code which instantaneously plays out loud. I examine live-coding programs and artists’ reflections to propose that the new emerges at the interface of software and musician for the duration of live-coding performances. I also draw from Henri Bergson’s work on creative processes, which emphasizes improvisation and immediacy, to attest to the salience of live-coded music as a study in digital novelty.

The final section of the paper situates my arguments politically. I write that digital capitalism secures its hegemony by means of algorithmic homogenization, statistical prediction, and cybernetic enclosure, and proceeds as an unfolding of similitude. That which is wholly new, I claim, defies and subverts this normative political program.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/can-computation-produce

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Feminist Data Set - Caroline Sinders | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:22:21 GMT

What is feminist data inside of social networks, algorithms, and big data? How can we queer data, the archive, and the internet? How can a data set act as a form of protest, of a creation of bias mitigation? This talk looks at ways of intervention, from art, design, and technology that combat and challenge bias. How can we create data to be an act of protest against algorithms? Part of this talk will focus on Caroline’s research and current art project, Feminist Data Set. Feminist Data Set acts as a means to combat bias and introduce the possibility of data collection as a feminist practice, aiming to produce a slice of data to intervene in larger civic and private networks. Exploring its potential to disrupt larger systems by generating new forms of agency, her work asks: can data collection itself function as an artwork?

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/feminist-data-set

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Last Seen Online - Ellen Lapper | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:50:47 GMT

In a time in which death is moving rapidly online (funeral streaming services during COVID-19, #RIPcelebrity hashtags trending on Twitter), we all have to face the question of what happens to our own digital afterlives, as well as those of our loved ones. Digital death is the ultimate clash of familiar human concepts of time with the ubiquitous computational time. Facebook and Instagram offer possibilities for “immortalisation” with a memorialised profile, Twitter only offers deactivation. The need to humanise algorithms is now vital; Facebook friend suggestions and birthday reminders of the deceased aren’t exactly perceptive. Cue capitalising companies offering to use AI to analyse activity and learn how to post for you after death. But are their promises really immortal? And if, as predictions suggest, the dead soon outnumber the living on Facebook, who’s going to pay for their upkeep? Dead people aren’t very useful consumers; they won’t be clicking on those targeted ads. So what happens to the feedback loop when it’s the deceased generating the data? And who ultimately owns this data? This research began from a personal note following the death of my father. Unprepared, I found myself clinging to the digital traces that remained of him. Using participatory methods, I conversed with Facebook users who were vocalising a death on the platform. This research explores the presentation of the self across public platforms and negotiates a physical absence in light of a persistence digital presence. Anthropological research into death and grief online faces new challenges: omnipresent online traces, ethical algorithms, data storage and an online field-site. Essentially death is an inevitable accompaniment to our existence and, like in other fields, we are constantly catching up with technology and surrendering our control; this is no exception, perhaps we just need to acclimatise quicker than the companies.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/last-seen-online

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Things are people too - Adrian Demleitner | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:28:47 GMT

“Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things.” - Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

The talk circles around notions of care for the non-human and more specifically for the technologies that we surround ourselves with. Anne-Marie Willis’ ontological design describes how we not only design objects, but also how these objects design our ontologies. Consumer electronics and algorithms became steady companions in our life. Not only do we interact with them on a regular base, they also accompany us throughout the day. We could call them companion technologies, following Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species — digital technologies and people, who are bonded in significant otherness.

These technological products and processes are highly designed and branded experiences, to be consumed and discarded. They gift us a membership of specific cultural demographics. They’re not made to last, unlike you would expect from a good pair of shoes. Their frictionless design makes them easily replaceable, which also expresses itself in the sheer unrepairability. Following these lines of thought, design practices disable not only the care for the thing, but also our understanding of the importance to care for our immediate environment.

Consumer electronics become mediators of ontological affordances.

Alternative ways of caring for companion technologies are found in animistic practice. Animistic epistemologies enable us to level the ontological field and create social ties to things. These epistemologies then enable different ways for caring and respectful relations to the non-human. In the light of the environmental impact of todays technologies, cared for and long-living companion things seem to be a desirable alternative.

How then can we imagine our relationship to technological products and processes otherwise? How can we imagine their ontological status and our entanglement with them anew?

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/things-are-people-too

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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I can remember - Guillaume Slizewicz | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:20:02 GMT

“I can remember” is a project that probes our relationship with machines by exploring the collectiveness of memories in the cycle between humans and machines. What is today often named artificial intelligence technologies are, in fact, cyborg technologies. They encapsulate an array of sentient experiences; they are the result of many different experiences of the world.

This piece links three types of memories that, in interaction, form a new collective representation of moments of the past where the contributions of humans and machines can no longer be told apart.

Personal, intimate memory

The piece starts from photographs documenting daily life in the rural area as seen through a subject’s lense. They are the images of this moment, the memories that remain, partial, biased and framed. They represent the personal and intimate memory of the subject.

Algorithmic memory

The photographs are then put into poems and written words based on the memories of image recognition algorithms which can only recognise what they have been trained to recognise. The algorithms’ reading of the imagery unearths what the images represent to them who are restricted by the labels and words embedded inside them. The memories become a new kind of sentience, encapsulating the algorithmic understanding and experience of the world.

Data workers memory

Often unaccounted for, the poems are also shaped by the data workers memory, the memory of the people who trained the algorithm or on whom the algorithms have been trained. Image classification algorithms rely on people labelling data, classifying them or contouring them. The image description, the colour names, the handwriting styles in this piece are all derived from human work. This piece encapsulates their memories (muscle memories, lexical memories, and phenomenal memories).

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/i-can-remember

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Understanding the 5G controversy in the context of ecological breakdown – Gauthier Roussilhe | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:19:31 GMT

During the past years 5G has been adverstised by industry leaders as the future of the tech. Nevertheless there is little data about its environmental impacts and about the necessity of such infrastructure for future challenges (global warming, resource scarcity, …). This talk intends to describe the 5G infrastructure and some of the different controversies around it like energy and environmental impacts. The rise of big tech infrastructure, such as 5G, without any public consultation is heavely problematic as it locks down on a specific, and presumably unsustainable, technological path. 5G is likely to be a keystone to reclaim governance and democratic debate on future infrastructures. 5G also asks a key question : can we collectively steer and manage the evolution of internet traffic or are you condemned to an exponential growth to the benefit of some private actors ?

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/understanding-the-5-g

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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personal archive / public action III - april vendetta | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:18:51 GMT

In order to understand the complexities of our existence, the task of archiving needs to be inclusive. It is inevitable that no archive can ever be entirely complete but there should not be premeditated erasure. Our interest in archiving is not merely to gather information or to catalog it within the walls of a private institution. We have been working for six years to generate an archive that can be sent into the world – with the goal to create something that can be freely seen in an undeniable way.

We believe in a world rooted in the practice of archiving. To record and review creative self-expression, something that can be an extremely empowering and humbling experience. To be witnessed and be a witness with empathy. To share our personal stories with each other without the threat of violence or imprisonment. Each shared archive has the ability to become a resource and generate conversations that have the potential to aid in reckoning with past and present injustices of the world.

Excerpted and edited from archive.org/details/awaytobegintoregainaccesstoyourself

personal archive / public action III

access is a key component to obtaining data. data is written in many formats with various permissions. your personal archive informs your public action. when access is granted to others, there is potential for collaborative action to be set in motion.

digital content for personal archive / public action III will livestream and then be archived on HUMAN TRASH DUMP on archive.org as a public repository. files generated during the duration of the event might be audio, image, video, or text among other formats. Potential considerations for digital content will involve ideas around privacy, collectivity, equity, tools, and manuals. Public Domain and Creative Commons will be encouraged.

personal archive / public action launched on June 29th, 2020 for a live virtual audience as part of PERFORMANCY FORUM: CORPUS COLISEUM, produced in collaboration between the Operating System/Liminal Lab, and PPL (Panoply Performance Laboratory).

“I try to depict the inner life of the subject, to give outward form to an inner state. I think my pictures have stories behind them, but I like to leave a feeling of openness. I hope that things keep going in the viewer’s mind. There’s nothing more boring than a story too quickly told. Once all the elements of a story are nailed down, the viewer is left with nothing but the artist’s technique.”

-Kent Bellows

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/personal-archive-public

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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The afterlives of digital rubbish - Nicolas Nova | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:03:48 GMT

Among the various waste streams that our companies produce, e-waste (electronic waste) is the one that has been growing rapidly for several years, due to the constant replacement of telephones and laptops, televisions and game consoles and other miscellaneous peripherals. This kind of digital rubbish, which remains when their use is over, are generally discarded, sometimes stuffed in a box in the attic, sometimes in the trash, or in more or less serious recycling circuits. In addition to the refurbishment of digital objects such as smartphones, computers or connected objects, many unique and original reuse practices exist to make these machines last, or reinvent them: techniques for the conservation or enhancement of past machines, reuse of parts and components taken from unused devices to create low-cost information systems, electronic craftsmanship aimed at customising, adapting or creating digital objects in limited editions, competitions, festivals and workshops for the design of video games, demos or musical content on computers and consoles from the 1980s and 1990s, etc. On the basis of an ongoing investigation of the re-use practices of digital objects, this presentation will address the anthropological issues of the second life of digital objects. In doing so, it will address ways of returning to the idea of progress, of questioning it and of finding original avenues by integrating the sustainability of our digital devices.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/the-afterlives-of-digital-rubbish

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Melancholic Cryptonymy - Charlotte Norwood | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 14:59:35 GMT

Full title: Melancholic Cryptonymy and the Aesthetic Threshold of Detectability- The Blue Conceptualists, The Haunted Painter and The Existential Crisis of the Cadaver.

Where the melancholic is resistant to mourn what is understood in psychoanalysis as the lost object, which instead of being replaced by the process of ‘introjection’ is ‘incorporated’ or ‘internally vomited’ into the subject forging a psychic crypt of which the phantom is harboured, I propose that due to the failed promises of modernity, hauntological practices resist to mourn the loss of the future it’s movement is denied by ‘incorporating’ it; signalled by visceral, linguistic disjecture and encrypted transmissions that are looped, relayed and brought back in coded ways, the operation of the psychic crypt, generated and sustained by repetition, is symptomatic of the function hauntological practices aestheticise by way of regurgitating and renewing un-activated potentials of the past for future constructs.

If repetition is at the heart of hauntological practices providing an aesthetic threshold of detectability into melancholic cryptonymy, then the representation of this neurosis as a cultural movement can only respond to the ontological and temporal displacement of the present Colin Davis describes as ‘the figure of the ghost at that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive’, (Davis, 2005, p. 373) by bequeathing the slow cancellation of the future: ‘Repetition’ as understood by Blanchot in the context of trauma is ‘neither mournful nor nostalgic, the undesired return, repetition, the ultimate over and over, general collapse, destruction of the present’. (Blanchot, 1995, p9).

Incorporating the loss of the future, on the side of the pathology, not the cure, re-acting, repeating and escalating the symptom of the psychoanalytical dream, The Blue Conceptualists of Ryan Gander, the practice of the haunted painter Vanessa Disler and the existential crisis of Ed Atkins’ cadavers are emblems my research investigates through the gauze of Vico’s eternal recurrence; contextualising the model of history as an auto- cannibalistic feedback loop which reiterates and sustains itself by endlessly living out its own death.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/melancholic-cryptonymy-and-aesthetic-threshold

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Critical thought around computational thinking - Mathieu Payn | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 13:38:55 GMT

Computational thinking is now taught in many higher technical courses. CT involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior, by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. In this presentation we will take a critical look at the CT approach and its epistemological foundations. I will present the paradigms on which the problem solving process is based, introduce the “Conquer & Divide” method, and illustrate the sometimes unhealthy interaction of CT with society through examples and anecdotes. I will end this critical overview with initiatives that assimilate CT in a critical gesture, such as de-computation. My wish is to generate astonishment and reflections that participants can share after the talk.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/critical-thought-around

From cradle-to-grave- Tech won’t save us — Recyclism aka Benjamin Gaulon | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 12:27:22 GMT

“The future is already here..it’s just not very evenly distributed.” William Gibson 1993

”From cradle-to-grave : Tech won’t save us” explores the social and environmental impacts of information and communication technologies, using the life-cycle analysis as a framework for that research.

Using this systemic analysis, Benjamin will introduce works by new media artists, designers, researchers and hacktivists that are addressing those issues, using strategies such as Tactical Media, Retail Poisoning, Urban Hacking and more.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/from-cradle-to

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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Through the Algorithmic Lens — Irini Papadimitriou | ReclaimFutures2020

ReclaimFutures — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 12:23:54 GMT

To quote Lizzie O’Shea in Future Histories, “The purpose of a usable past is not simply to be a record of history. Rather, by building a shared appreciation of moments and traditions in collective history, a usable past is a method for creating the world we want to see.” Very often past events and history can give us important signs to understand contemporary systems and technologies, and sometimes, also where decisions - good or bad - might be rooted. This talk will explore how algorithmic systems are becoming essential bricks for building and reorganising big parts of our society, but also how, while these systems are being adopted across different areas, we start to perceive the world through a less human and more machine-like lens. Touching on historical and literature references the talk will look at the politics and consequences of an algorithmically driven world and how artistic and activist groups can inspire critical conversations around the deployment of these systems, while enabling us to rethink and redesign these, for the shift to a more equitable AI.

https://reclaimfutures.org/rf2020/events/through-the-algorithmic

Intro music: sumthing tethered - GOD69 (https://god69.bandcamp.com/track/sumthing-tethered)

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