Are there other options besides abrupt deceleration and hyper-lubricated acceleration? Can we learn more sophisticated ways of identifying how regimes (of truth, ideology or representation) affect our most immediate naturecultures? It won’t all happen in a two-hour workshop, but we can try to come up with a rough outline together.
| Duration: | 2 hours |
The hegemonic acceleration of contemporary technologies imposes a series of conditions that lead to the persistence of cultural forms of totalitarian innovation which must be resisted and contested. Yet those same conditions also constitute a complex of latencies and absences with which we must affirmatively coexist, driven by the need for attentive, politicised presences. In a way, the persistent practice of finding “bugs” (is there any other way to conduct research?) tracks the potential to, as Donna Haraway proposes, “stay with the trouble” in a responsible, creative way.
In other words, writing disobedient, collective, inventive “bug reports” can be seen as a method of pushing the probable and expanding the possible. Discussing technological sovereignty and infrastructural self-defence initiatives is a good place to start. The first step is to methodically identify and affirmatively publish the damages that turbo-capitalism updates on a daily basis; it is urgent that we join forces and write “bug reports” on the system, in order to technically equip ourselves with partial and localised repair possibilities.
Jara Rocha tends to find herself immersed in cultural mediation, research and independent curatorial work. Her main areas of inquiry have to do with the materialities of present cultures, which she explores by means of two fundamental approaches: critical thinking and distributed doing. She trained simultaneously in the humanities and free culture, and her work has been published in various books, academic journals, fanzines and digital media. She has also shared her ideas at venues such as Transmediale, MIT, Piksel and CA2M. On the collective front, she founded the gender and technology group at Medialab-Prado, embarked on the Euraca Seminar on Tongues and Languages of the Final Days of the €uro, and hopped on and off several editions of Relearn summerschool. Together with Femke Snelting, she is currently working on the inventory of Possible Bodies (Akademie Schloss Solitude + WKV Stuttgart, Hangar Barcelona and a.pass + Constant Brussels).
