DISNOVATION.ORG / CURATION

A critical exploration
of the mechanisms
and rhetoric of innovation



# STATEMENT 

Over the past few decades, industrialised societies have experienced an unprecedented technological boom. The advent of information and communication technologies, irrigating whole domains of our existence, has deeply transformed our relationship with the surrounding world. This global phenomenon has contributed to put techno-sciences at the core of our belief systems and the consumption / innovation duality as the driving force behind our economy.

The notion of innovation is the ultimate contemporary rhetorical tool, spreading from the technoscientific field into the sectors of politics, management, eduction and art.
Thus we arrive at the hypothesis of a possible "propaganda of innovation", as an ideology aiming to solve any need, problem, or desire through the production of constantly changing artifacts and concepts, justifying technological obsolescence in the name of short-term economic vitality. This simple hypothesis raises many questions:
✖ Is the continuous rush towards novelty and the negation of preceding values a human necessity, an intuitive tendency, an end in itself?
✖ Is innovation the expression of a particular ideal whose purposes are dictated by mere economic and industrial choices?
✖ How do artists become tacit agents in the spreading and popularisation of innovations?
✖ What kind of critical, subversive or alternative practices does this situation generate in return?
-
Nicolas Maigret, Bertrand Grimault [2012-2014]

DISNOVATION is an open event architecture that spreads across a wide range of strategies: lectures, debates, exhibitions, screenings, performances, workshops and documentation.


# EVENTS 


NON-COMPLIANT FUTURES @ SIGHT & SOUND 2017 - MONTREAL
✖ DEDICATED WEBSITE - STATEMENT
Under the theme [Non-Compliant Futures], Sight + Sound festival 2017 will perform an autopsy of the grand narrative of innovation, the very one which promised us a radiant future dependent upon hyperconsumption, techno-positivism, digital colonialism, and the myth of infinite growth. With over thirty international guests, the festival program, curated by Disnovation.org, will question the standardized imaginaries of the future and highlight intersecting paths and strategies that aim to reveal, perturb, and pervert the cult of innovation.
Sight + Sound 2017 calls to break free from a linear notion of progress and, rather, re-introduce concepts such as degrowth and maintainability to the core of our vision of the future. It is also an invitation to embrace our alien-becoming, which we are already collectively enduring with the whole of human and non-human life.






# GO-CANNY - THE POETICS OF SABOTAGE @ VILLA ARSON - NICE
✖ Exhibit Feb. 10 to April 30 2017
With Biononymous.me, Julian Oliver, Zach Blas, Janez Jansa, 3D Additivism, Benjamin Cadon
Entitled GO CANNY! - the rallying call of Scottish dockers at the end of the 19TH century - the exhibition explores strategies of resistance, dissension, protestation, disruption, unruliness… a strategy akin to sabotage, which is the epitome of the creative act, requiring inventiveness, resourcefulness and ingenuity.




# NONCOMPLIANT FUTURES - part 3 @ JEU DE PAUME
✖ #3 DEVIANT FUTURES
✖ Interview with Revue 02 [EN]
✖ Entretien avec la revue 02
#3 DEVIANT FUTURES This last cycle opens with visions of non-standard futures, paths off the beaten track taken by artists, writers and scientists. A collection of alternative projects, utopias and fictional narratives in which imagined futures take on a hybrid form and, in so doing, become corrupted. They open out onto unresolved fields, speculations taken to the extreme and absurd visions, a whole panel of rather unlikely, but often desirable possibilities, in particular as a basis for developing debate and critical projections.




# NONCOMPLIANT FUTURES - part 2 @ JEU DE PAUME
✖ #2 TAKING THE PLUNGE
✖ Interview with Revue 02 [EN]
✖ Entretien avec la revue 02
#2 TAKING THE PLUNGE brings together attempted actions of resistance to ‘innovation propaganda’. It presents strategies by artists and activists that aim to put a spanner in the works of the system, to push it such a point that it becomes absurd. This exhibition aspires to create zones of uncertainty and complexify what is a predominantly positivist debate about the market for innovation and the ideologies that it conveys.




# NONCOMPLIANT FUTURES - part 1 @ JEU DE PAUME
✖ #1 MYTHOLOGIES
✖ Interview with Revue 02 [EN]
✖ Entretien avec la revue 02
#1 MYTHOLOGIES represents a retrospective analysis of the machine of progress and innovation as seen through the eyes of artists who collect, archive and criticise the myths and contradictions of a technological utopia that has developed over the decades, which started with the industrial revolution and has continued up to our current, post-media era.




#5 DISNOVATION @ MOSCOW
✖ Press Release [EN]
✖ Pictures of the event [FLICKR]
✖ Selection of Posters and Manifestos [JPG]
As a first part of the «Polytech.Science.Art» festival, Disnovation presented a poster exhibition and talked about «propaganda of innovation» and technological fetishism.




#4 DISNOVATION @ BORDEAUX
✖ Dedicated page / page dédiée [FR]
✖ Dossier de presse [PDF]
✖ Pictures of the event [FLICKR]
As a continuation of the first stages at Paris and Pau, Disnovation proposed a collection of critical graphic pieces in Bordeaux that interrogated the relations beetween science-fiction and the techno-scientific imagination; mutual interests between States and hi-tech giants, etc.




#3 DISNOVATION @ GLITCH PARIS
✖ Main Glitch event page [EN]
✖ Pictures of the event [FLICKR]
✖ Event @ gaité Lyrique Paris
reFrag: is an annual symposium exploring new connections between art, culture and technology. reFrag: Glitch presents the different ways that digital anomalies artistically manifest themselves in our daily life. The alterations are produced in different domains: deconstruction of instabilities and errors of the financial markets, hacking and tactical anomalies and the absence of neutrality in technological systems.




#2 DISNOVATION @ PAU 
✖ Press Release Download [PDF]
✖ Accès)s( festival web page [FR]
✖ Pictures of the exhibit + Festival [FLICKR]
A selection of international artists reveals the unseen aspects in any technological innovation, by underlining its temporary, playful, enslaving or threatening dimensions when urging in the same time to alternative or subversive uses. Aside from the exhibition, the festival took form in performances, talks, conferences, workshops, concerts etc.




#1 DISNOVATE @ ART HACK DAY 
✖ Dedicated page [EN]
✖ Pictures of DISNOVATE/Paris [FLICKR]
Art Hack Day is an internet-based nonprofit dedicated to hackers whose medium is art and artists whose medium is tech. Sixty artists-hackers and hacker-artists inhabit an art space to create an exhibit from scratch during 48h.




# COMMISSIONED & RELATED PROJECTS 


✖ 3D Additivist Cookbook - Daniel Rourke & Morehshin Allahyari (and contributors)
☠ Digital Publication
The 3D Additivist Cookbook is a compendium of strategies that aim to turn 3D printing into a tool for emancipation, activism and disruption. It brings together speculative texts, 3D models, prototypes, recipes and practical suggestions.




✖ Planète Laboratoire - Bureau d'études, Ewen Chardonnet
☠ Journal
The 5th issue of The Laboratory Planet will envisage the devastation of the Earth as being part of the preparation to abandon it in the future, as a symptom of alien capitalism. The term ‘alien’ here refers to someone who leaves behind his/her terrestrial origins to become ‘other’, to adopt other corporal forms and experience other futures.



✖ Beta-Tasters: New National Dish - The Center for Genomic Gastronomy
☠ Performance
Beta-Tasters: New National Dish is a performance that collects trends, forecasts and data to prototype a new national dish for a given region. Visitors contribute their preferences by selecting three attributes to be processed and translated into tasters by our computer. What constitutes a national dish anyway? Or a country for that matter?



✖ Technological Disobedience - Ernesto Oroza
☠ Artwork
By studying how Cubans invent and manufacture objects to overcome economic restrictions, Ernesto Oroza showcases models of behaviour and reactions to technology itself, but above all to the authority and veracity that these capitalistic products supposedly embody. These practices and gestures are grouped together under the concept of «technological disobedience».



✖ Institut Précognitif de la Propriété Industrielle - RYBN
☠ Artwork
The Precognitive Institute is carrying out a systemic analysis of works of science fiction in order to identify the potential technological and industrial developments that are described within. Once a technology has been identified, a patent will be applied for at the timely moment, when the technology in question is close to becoming a reality.



✖ Smart City ABC - Manu Luksch
☠ Artwork
The vision of the « Smart City » was introduced by some of the largest tech corporations to address population growth, political instability and resource scarcity. SMART CITY ABC aims to decode a topic that has produced a specialist vocabulary, in order to promote accessibility to the debate.




✖ Refonte - Dardex
☠ Artwork
Refonte” is a series of basic spears and weapons, made ​​from different electronic waste materials. The scrap metal was melted and poured into molds, echoing the ancient techniques of making primitive weapons, made of copper alloys, aluminum and gold. These weapons offer a post futuristic evocation.




✖ The Algorithmic Trading Freak Show - RYBN
☠ Artwork + conference
Algorithmic Trading Freakshow is a collection of uncommon, unnatural, shocking and scandalous specimens of speculative trading algorithms. Forgotten by the markets, obsolete, inoperative, these pieces of collection are organised for the occasion under the form of a cabinet of curiosities.




✖ Terminator Studies - Jean-Baptiste Bayle
☠ Artwork + conference
As the famous ‘Terminator script’ is becoming more and more credible, every day brings its share of validation of its fictitious hypothesis. When a mad killer believes he’s Batman’s Joker, when drones strike at a distance away, when Google hires DARPA director, when Oxford University initiates its own Terminator Studies center... When reality surpasses fiction, warning is at its peak for the Terminator Studies.




✖ Computer Store Original - Clemence De la Tour Du Pin
☠ Synthetic Perfume + Artwork
Computer Store Original is an experiment in capturing the smell of « the brand new ». The artist and four perfumers worked on this project. The obtained scent is that of a computer store, it has been sampled on industrial packagings and synthetized in order to be replicated in the exhibition space.




✖ Retail Poisoning - BENJAMIN GAULON
☠ Research blog + conference
Retail is an ongoing research and collection of art an activism projects. Retail poisoning is a disruption of consumerism that injects critical actions into the market. The methods of attacks are similar to those used by anti-piracy organisations to prevent file sharing of copyrighted content.




✖ The Equation of Hapiness - Emmanuel Ferrand
☠ Research blog + conference
Serious research laboratories, like the rest of society, have to deal with neo-liberal governance and reorganise their functioning accordingly to its models. The scientific discourse, now designed to pinpoint issues in the media and rally decisionmakers, all too often comes off as cold rationality and becomes directed by financial and/or ideological interests. This is the open door to every approximation and absurdity. We will consider by the way, how the production of artists can be used by technoscientistic complex.