Generating New Narratives

The Turkish based cultural association diyalog invented and realized the Mahalla Festival dedicated to migration, exile and cultural identity in the frame of the Istanbul Art Biennale 2017. The second Mahalla Festival took place in the frame of Valletta European Capital of Culture 2018.

The festivals brought together cultural actors and initiatives from different fields and different backgrounds in Europe and beyond to support an intercultural understanding in the field of migration, inclusion and local communities. Under the title Generating New Narratives the festival in Malta displayed art works, performances, installations, screenings, readings and talks reflecting aspects of borders, armed conflicts and migration, minorities, hospitality and hostility, urban structures, inclusion and intercultural communication.

In November 2016, following an invitation of the Villa Romana in Florence, various cultural initiatives from Europe came together at the Museum Centro Pecci, Prato, and at the Villa Romana, Florence, under the title Gravity for All. The question of this first discussion was: if the European migration crisis continues to be a scandal, how should artists and cultural actors behave?

The participants expressed the desire to establish a sustainable international network for the exchange of experiences between cultural initiatives and artists of the host countries and the newcomers. Since then the Mahalla Festival was established and is continuing on different locations. In 2020 we are planing to organize the Mahalla Festival in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

University of Malta @IDFAcademy

Maltese students visited the IDFAacademy during the IDFA festival. To stimulate new talent and high level documentary production, IDFAcademy organizes year-round training programs for emerging filmmakers. IDFAcademy Summer School in July and IDFAcademy during IDFA in November are aimed at international participants, while the Kids & Docs Workshop and the IDFAcademy & NPO Fund Workshop are open to Dutch-speaking participants. For international talent in the field of documentary storytelling and interactive media, DocLab Academy offers a five-day program in November during IDFA.

Bellingcat – Truth in a Post-Truth World (Trailer) from Submarine on Vimeo.

TABOO-TRANSGRESSION-TRANSCENDENCE IN ART & SCIENCE

The third international interdisciplinary conference “Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science” takes place in 11-13 November 2018 in Mexico City, hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the Centro de CulturaDigital. Including theoretical and artwork presentations TTT2018 continues to focus: a) on questions about the nature of the forbidden and about the aesthetics of liminality – as expressed in art that uses or is inspired by technology and science, b) in the opening of spaces for creative transformation in the merging of science and art. Coordinated in partnership with the program of the FACTT 2018 – Festival Art & Science Trans-disciplinary and Trans-national the conference is co-organized by the Research and Creation Group  Arte+Ciencia , UNAM (Mexico), Arte Institute (USA),  Cultivamos Cultura  (Portugal) besides the Department
of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University (Greece). Art is, in so many ways, a reflection of reality, its glorification as well as its challenger, in an instinctive understanding that nothing is stable despite the effort to keep a balance between the comfort of belief and the delusion of control. Art and science
interrelations are not always clear and one could have the impression that the artist seems more permeable to the influence of science than the scientist to the influence of art. Art’s playfully transgressive nature offers creative bypasses to the grammar of science and expands the dialogue with its openness to a multiplicity towards the new. Nevertheless, art – albeit its originary
affinity with the taboo – is never completely liberated from moral considerations. Deeply involved into this lively discourse on the nature of the taboo, art becomes the very domain of contemporary experimentation with transgression, in order to provoke and sparkle discourse, catalyzing possible forms of transcendence.

Adnan Hadzi presented the paper ‘boattr – towpath as social commons’

This paper discusses the towpath/‘network’ of the British Waterways as a digital social commons, through the researcher’s journey on the narrow boat ‘Quintessence’ and the development of the ‘boattr’ prototype in collaboration with MAZI (for “together” in Greek), a Horizon2020 research project. For three years the researcher joined the community of bargees 1 , travellers 2 , who use the canals to live 3 on them, with a temporary permit 4 to stay for two weeks in one place 5 . The paper will offer a critical view on the housing situation in the UK and EU in general.

The boattr project connects narrow boats to the ‘Internet-of-Things’ and allows for open wireless mesh-networking within the narrow boat community, by using affordable microcomputers. The paper analyses the technology and knowledge that aims to 1) empower those narrow boats who are in physical proximity, to shape their hybrid urban space, together, according to the specificities of the respective local environment, and 2) foster participation, conviviality, and location-based collective awareness of the canals. The paper looks into capabilities offered by Do-It-Yourself networking infrastructures – low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and wireless technologies – and how small communities or individuals can deploy local communication networks that are fully owned by local actors, including all generated data. These DIY networks could cover from a small square (e.g., using a Raspberry Pi) to a city neighborhood (e.g., RedHook initiative) or even a whole city (e.g., guifi.net), and in the case of boattr the towpath of the canal network. Boattr integrates existing Free and Open Source Software software (like those under development by the P2Pvalue project, mobile sensing devices, and recent developments in open data and open hardware), allowing it to be appropriated by different non-expert users according to their respective context and use case. This paper is being proposed in combination with a 360 installation, alongside a running boattr prototype, and the boattr micro-computer book launch (see boattr 360
installation proposal). The conference visitors will be able to experience boattr through a VR headset, and access the boattr prototype and book over any WiFi enabled device. boattr 360 – living on the cut
This 360 video installation lets the conference visitor experience the ‘boattr’ project through a VR headset, and access the boattr micro-computer book over any WiFi enabled device. The installation encompasses a photographic triptych showcasing canal life, a seating representing a narrow boat’s bow on which the viewer can sit and immerse into a journey on the narrow boat Quintessence. With the evolution the moving image inserted itself into broader, everyday use, but also extended its patterns of effect and its aesthetical language. Video has become pervasive, importing the principles of “tele-” and “cine-” into the human and social realm, thereby also propelling “image culture” to new heights and intensities. The boattr 360 installation makes use of video as theory, reflecting the structural and qualitative reevaluation it aims at discussing design and organisational level. In accordance with the qualitatively new situation video is set in, the installation presents a multi-dimensional matrix which constitutes the virtual logical grid of the boattr project. The installation translates online modes into physical matter (micro computer), thereby reflecting on logics of new formats – by rendering a dynamic, open structure, allowing for access to the boattr micro-computer book over the ‘boattr’ WiFi SSID. The boattr DIY infrastructures offer a unique set of special affordances for local services to the narrow boat community, outside the public Internet: the ownership and control of the whole design process that promotes independence and grass-roots innovation rather than fear of data shadows; the de facto physical proximity of those connected without the need for disclosing private location information, such as GPS coordinates, to third parties; the easy and inclusive access through the use of a local captive portal launched automatically when one joins the network; the option for anonymous interactions; and
the materiality of the network itself.