Conferences
Let us imagine how a city can engage and involve its citizens in exercising democracy through artistic practice, by promoting digital literacy and the impact of media on the processes that shape our socialisation. Consider what kind of futures can be architected by citizens who are well informed and proficient in the use of media that are often deployed as systems of surveillance and behavioural conditioning, by reclaiming these systems and mobilising our practical and political imaginations.
The conference programme of the 2024 INDEX Art and Technology Biennial prompts us to mobilise our attention and our imagination, to persevere in the search for modes of coexistence that allow us the freedom and the space to invent common worlds. Worlds that go beyond modes of survival and subjugation to the ghosts of the past, that shift us away from the familiar politics of hostility and exclusion of the other, of those who are different from us, and at the same time allow us to delineate creative barriers to forms of social life that lead to subjugation and mere survival. A community that is not only human but also integrates the ecological and technological systems and whose interrelationships in terms of behaviour, energy, and life must be taken into account in an environment where the separation between nature, culture and technology is losing its meaning. How, for instance, can we reflect on the singularities of new entities endowed with artificial intelligence that intertwine social relations with human beings?
We will also consider how today’s technologies are disrupting politics – through political interference in third countries, for example, through the creation of fake news and deep fakes – and their political implications, which, in the light of cross-cultural perspectives, are reconfiguring our understanding of what technology is.
We will discuss the practice of whistleblowing, an important means of exposing, denouncing and raising awareness of social, economic and political wrongdoing. We’ll talk about how the sounds of war – which continue to torment us – penetrate, mark and silence our bodies. At the intersection of music and philosophy, we will explore the connections between the colonial imaginary and the contemporary perspectives on space exploration, looking for echoes of the past in the ways we project the future. We will also practise modes of coexistence that remove the human from the centre and embrace the communion of species, expanding the notion of citizenship to include the indigenous ecosystems and technologies of the forest, inviting us to participate in a Planetary Coexistence between a plurality of times and imaginaries.
Liliana Coutinho
Curator of the Conferences Programme
This program is supported by the European Commission under the EU Digital Deal.
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