Artwork has the ability to bring people from diverse backgrounds together to encounter,
discuss and address the pressing challenges of our ages. At this year's ICT4S,
the art collective DISNOVATION.ORG
is very present, as featured in Wednesday eveningâs program and with a continuous presence
in the lobby with a poster action through the whole conference.
This workshop will be an opportunity to work closer with the artists,
exploring methods for generating innovative transdisciplinary approaches to complex issues
such as climate change and energy transition. Participants can bring their own pet ideas,
current preoccupations and open questions, especially ones provoked by presentations
at ICT4S 2023. Together, we will synthesize key problems and then break into groups
to sketch out creative approaches to addressing these problems.
The workshop goal is on one hand to represent, through art practice,
sustainability issues, and challenges and on the other hand to understand
challenges in new ways through collaborating artistically. Outputs will include sketches,
mind-maps and other aesthetic approaches to the issues that we will work on together,
as well as the experience of working speculatively in new ways, towards future
transdisciplinary collaboration and the development of the participants'
pedagogical and communication methods.
RESUME DOCUMENT OF: RADICAL RAPID PROTOTYPING FOR ICT4S
WORKSHOP RESUME RADICAL RAPID PROTOTYPING FOR ICT4S
Art practice performs a vital role in opening spaces of creative ideational permissiveness within strong disciplinary exchanges.
At the intersection of ICT and concerns for the sustainability of humanity on the Earth, the ICT4S series of conferences brings together academics, IT professionals, actors from the IT business sector and from NGOs and other political organizations in a format which is scientifically rigorous, yet especially susceptible to the kinds of transdisciplinarity required to grapple with complex questions relating to sustainability. The authors have attended two ICT4S conferences, as artists focussed on key questions in science and technology.
SURVEY
In preparation for our workshop we carried out an anonymous survey in which we probed the contradictions participants may be experiencing with regard to ICT4S. The results confirmed our experience of exchanges we had in informal conversations at coffee breaks and at bar evenings. Many of the responses to the survey express far more urgency, frustration, anger and sadness than would be permitted in professional fora. Many of the responses were explicitly political, or made strong ethical judgements, both orthogonal dimensions to customary official conference discourse forms. One responder referenced Andreas Malm and blowing up pipelines for example.
Above you will find the full sheet of responses to our survey.
- Questions 2 and 4 are of particular note.
- Question 1 was a general warm up question.
- Question 5 was intended as a provocation to be included in our keynote presentation as a prompt for others in the audience to join our workshop and participate in our survey.
- Question 3 is a general literature reference question, to get a sense of what kinds of literature are helping the participants come to terms with the contradictions they face in ICT4S.
PROBING PARTICIPANTâS CONCERNS
In our informal conversations we have detected certain tendencies among the participants:
- The question of sustainability is not merely an intellectual, scientific or even practical one, it involves the whole person, and as such surpasses the conventional compartmentalization expected for conventional technical or scientific approaches.
- There is cognitive dissonance and ensuing emotional discomfort among the participants, often in the frustration of the insufficiency of their efforts in their professional life to produce noticeable improvements in how sustainability is addressed at scale.
--- Problems resolving the time they spend at work and the urgency of attending to the âclimate emergencyâ, especially when confronted by/with their children.
- Participantâs private understandings of the prospects for satisfactorily addressing concerns about sustainability, through technical improvements or otherwise, are often marked different from those they are/feel permitted to express in their professional life.
--- Markedly more pessimistic
--- Markedly anarchistic/exasperated âburn it all down!â / âblow up the pipelinesâ
--- Lack of faith in the political system / capitalism
--- Lack of faith in the academy to address the problem satisfactorily
--- Markedly more realistic, with regard to social harms exacerbated by tendencies in ICT
Faced with an insurmountable looming gloom and threat, the tendency seems to be for technicians to put their nose to the grindstone and get on with their work, regardless of their misgivings. But the questions, concerns and doubts continue to persist and erode sense of purpose, creativity and importantly the social dimension of professional life.
COMING TO TERMS
Through artistic exercises, synthetic presentations, structured discussions and workshops we have prototyped new practices which may be developed to innovate academic or technological conference structure, to open up the realm of what is permissible to express, and thereby produce circumstances where the complexity can be addressed more fully and more concerted action or solidarity cultivated.
Essentially at the outset, all participants in the exploratory workshop agree to provide for themselves and others a âsafe spaceâ for uncertainty, doubts, confusion and mistakes. It is understood that the workshop will be more beneficial to the participants if they permit themselves to go beyond what is normally permitted in professional exchanges, and open up unfamiliar territory, both emotional, and intellectual, and in the confluence between the two. A âsafe spaceâ for self-identification and for respectful exchange, in general must be agreed by all at the outset as well, of course.
As a warm-up in our workshop, we discussed some of the survey responses and gave participants some time to think about if there were any other responses they would like to add. The result of this exercise gave us the first contours of the problem areas we would explore in the workshop.
The synthetic exercise externalizes questions or challenges so that they can be addressed from many perspectives and with many senses, permitting more and unforeseeable, trans-disciplinary thinking and exchange between participants. Externalization, in the form of sketches, diagramming and performance, also provides a way to articulate the contours of a challenge or trouble without claiming to have captured or explained its essence. The externalization âart workâ serves to attract the attention of others so that collaborative understanding may unfold, each with their own experience and each at their own pace, always incomplete, and incompletely together.
ART KIOSK
A final note about our kiosk presence at the coffee breaks. Having a kiosk where we offered and discussed products of our practice to be given away to conference participants gave us a good opportunity to have more rigorous exchanges with the participants, for them to get to know us and us to know them and to build a sense of trust and common purpose, for us to gauge each otherâs commitments to what what being discussed in the conference proper.
