A series of twelve short-form digital caretaking ☲fireside☲ talks broadcast online; topics are poised at the frontiers of open art and design culture, digital caretaking, and future literacies to intervene in the growth logic that drives the marketplace to nurture Climate Resilience Development.
The ☲fireside☲ series features esteemed transdisciplinary researchers whose offering of hands-on approaches and home-brewed remedies advance aesthetic techniques of locally codesigned infrastructure, are spawned from computing arts savvy, sanguine tactics of tacit somatic practices, citizen-led commitment to equity in governance and making processes that acknowledge our planetary catastrophe.
The SCHEDULE Digital Caretaking Talk series – is hosted every second Tuesday nautical twilight from 9.7.24 – 3.12.24 at 17hrs AEST / 09.00hrs GMT+1 + 08.00 CEST / . *)
The 20-30min short-form mode ‘Quick-and-Dirty’ ardently embraces confusion, paradox, and uncertainty as communicative outcomes. Aptly described by occultxenosystems “The sheer dirtiness of its signal makes it a powerful antenna, picking up on connections and information sources that tidier discussions would dismiss as pollution”, an addendum that spawned Xenofeminism and other postpatriarchal feminisms to come.
Nancy Mauro-Flude as sister0 media divination a form of digital caretaking
This is a Digital Caretaking initiative dedicated to empowering underserved communities, FLINTA, artists and allies with tactics, skills, free and open-source technology, designs, philosophies and craft knowledge.
To raise awareness around the alternatives to “Big Tech” infrastructure and discuss the ecological, corporeal, and transcendental costs associated with such dependencies, the discussions occur against the burning backdrop of climate catastrophe in the wake of the fourth industrial automation and sixth species mass extinction. This must not be mistaken for e/acc acceleration; instead, more along the lines of Sadie Plant’s social poetic theory, Tiziana Terranova’s post-autonomism (grassroots public seminars, workshops, etc., artists, activists, precarious knowledge workers & the imperilled who may be still officially affiliated with universities).
What? A series of talks bringing together a network of Digital Caretakers (designers, artists, theorists, feminist economists, radical administrators, sandboxing soothsayers, blockchain researchers, and software developers) to address the messy and complicated dynamics of digital colonialism. Weaving in the transformative agendas of the permacomputing movement, feminist webserver sandboxing cooperatives, and The Collapsible Project , among others.
Why? Many of us are faced with an over-reliance on a variety of techno-cultural imbroglios and are renewing questions of how pervasive infrastructures are normalised and based on the imperial conventions and the extractive needs of “Western Industrial Educated Rich Democracies” (WIERD) that perpetuate implied norms, rules and protocols that become obstacles to diverse and divergent kinds of people. For this reason, we must ask how citizens can better assert their rights in networked contexts amid the uninformed consent strategies of Big Tech— Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (FAANGz) that, arguably, rely on unsuspecting users and assumptions of their rudimentary digital literacies.
The talks create a space for these exceedingly complex and intimidating issues, holistically and critically raising many propositions that computing in particular – and advanced technologies in general present vast material consequences
How? Tuesday (online) 20-30-minute talks, made possible through video conference software. A cadre of artists provides a glimpse into the tools, mediums, and approaches they use through alternatives to WEIRD FAANGZ. The informal talks seek to ruminate on the ethics and politics of participation by reinforcing agency within the domain of networked infrastructure. We hope to further engage in discussion with the artist community and allies and spark meaningful discussions and actions towards broader techno-political and infrastructural (digital) literacies. As we mark the waning death of the 2024 Sun at the winter solstice and follow its rebirth through the blossoming of spring to the summer blooming of the first AC/DC+ Summer Assembly February 2025.
Where? Please share your interest here. We will contact you shortly before each transmission with further information about how to join us.