Time-line
Call opens: January 15 2024
Submission deadline: 28 February 2024
Response date: by 30 April 2024
Symposium program announcement: by 30 July 2024
Registration deadline: 31 August 2024
Exhibition opening: 18 September 2024
Symposium dates: 19 & 20 September 2024

The BeeBuzz.Farm, launching this year, is an exciting project focused on organic bee farming and ecological sustainability. Situated in Gozo, Malta, this family-owned business emphasizes the production of natural honey, with bees freely roaming and feeding on nectar. Not just a farm, BeeBuzz.Farm is an educational hub, offering insights into organic farming, beekeeping, and the crucial role of bees in our ecosystem.
The project, serving as an Erasmus+ Green Educational Media case study, aims for organic certification. Its mission extends beyond honey production to educating the public about the significance of bees in agriculture and biodiversity. Bees are vital for pollinating a vast array of crops, contributing immensely to global food security and ecological balance. The BeeBuzz.Farm initiative is more than just a business; it’s a commitment to protecting bee populations, ensuring environmental health, and fostering a sustainable future.

feierliche_eroffnung scholz greift durch die afd wird verboten – deepfakes auch hacking the climate energy consumption of datacenters self cannibalizing ai herausforderungen der aktuellen karaokeforschung on digitalisation sustainability climate justice image making fatigue glaeserne gefluechtete who killed the internet what i learned from loab ai as a creative adversary opencoil infrastructure of a migratory bird music on mars animal city you’ve just been fucked by psyops vra buffered_daemons feierlicher abschluss

Radio Conference on Stegi.radio

How do we abandon the current standard models of AI and tech services and advocate for inclusive technologies?

From December 13 to December 15, the arts organisation VEKTOR Athens presents the International Radio Conference “Figure it Out: The Art of Living through System Failures”, curated by Katerina Gkoutziouli. For three consecutive days, from 14.00 to 18.00 EET, artists, curators, activists, academics, researchers and technologists discuss their counter strategies and practices in the technological realm. Through three key areas, namely: Figure it Out: Art & Tech, Figure it Out: Environment & Tech and Figure it Out: Community & Tech, the radio conference reflects a growing realization that the current tech landscape is rife with disparities and shortcomings that need to be addressed.

Participants:

!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Tatiana Bazzichelli, James Bridle, Heath Bunting, Yuchen Chen, Kris De Decker, Daphne Dragona, Mara Ferreri, Anna Watkins Fisher, Kyriaki Goni, Valeria Graziano, Marinos Koutsomichalis, Alex Lu, Jonas Lund, Niels Plotard, RYBN, La Labomedia 

The Conference is coordinated by Katerina Gkoutziouli, Co-founder – Director, VEKTOR Athens, and Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou, Journalist.

The Radio Conference will be streamed via stegi.radio, the online radio station of Onassis Stegi and it will be relayed to the experimental platform Π-node.

All recordings (conversations & lectures) will be archived in the form of podcasts, after the end of the Conference. The podcasts will be available via stegi.radio, VEKTOR Athens website, Spotify and Mixcloud.

* The language of the conference is English.

** Relay to p-node.org

Wednesday, 13 December 2023 | 14.00 – 18.00 EET

The Figure it Out: Art&Tech session looks into the work of artists and curators who explore the intersection of artistic expression and technology. This session focuses on inspirational practices that are driving the development of our understanding of both art and tech. Through their work, they address societal issues, offering unique perspectives on subjects such as artificial intelligence, privacy in the digital age, deep fakes, and the human-machine connection in an extremely digitalized society.

With

• !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Artists (DE) 
• Kyriaki Goni, Artist (GR) 
• Niels Plotard, Artist (Malta)
• Anna Watkins Fisher, Writer, Scholar, Associate Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan (U.S.A.) 
• Jonas Lund, Artist (SE)

Thursday, 14 December 2023 | 14.00 – 18.00 EET

The Figure it Out: Environment&Tech session investigates the current status of the earth and its inhabitants in relation to the devastating exploitation of natural resources in the name of technological advancement. Having in mind the disproportional relation between the increase of computational power and environmental degradation, this session serves as a platform to highlight the urgency of environmental accountability in relation to the increase of technological endeavors by states and private companies worldwide. Thinking about the long-term health of our planet, the focus will be on how to steer technology in a direction that supports rather than compromises the very ecosystems upon which all forms of life depend.

With

• Heath Bunting, Artist (UK) 
• James Bridle, Artist, writer (UK/GR) 
• **James’s talk will be accessible exclusively through the conference archive.
• Daphne Dragona, Curator, writer (GR/DE) 
• Kris De Decker, Founder, Low-tech Magazine (ES/NL) 

Friday, 15 December 2023 | 14.00 – 18.00 EET

The Figure it Out: Community&Tech session delves into the status of unserved-by-technology communities working and living in precarious conditions worldwide. Looking into the inventiveness and resilience of communities, this session touches upon the algorithmic inequalities of certain groups and their exclusion from tech structures, exploring issues such as the ethics in the technological sector, care, digital autonomy, whistleblowing, and data security. Given the potential of technology to deepen divisions and injustices, this session encourages us to look into the deeper-rooted problems, such as uneven power dynamics, cultural biases, and historical injustices that shape today’s technology landscape. 

With

• Mara Ferreri, Assistant Professor of Geography, Polytechnic University of Turin (IT)
• Valeria Graziano, Visiting Lecturer, Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Justus Liebig University Giessen (IT/DE)
• Tatiana Bazzichelli, Artistic Director, Founder, Disruption Network Lab (DE) 
• Yuchen Chen and Alex Lu, Sociotechnical Scholars (U.S.A./CN) 
• Dr. Marinos Koutsomichalis, Artist, Assistant Professor, Director, Media Arts and Design Research Lab, Cyprus University of Technology (CY/GR) 
• RYBN & Labomedia (FR)

Credits

Conference Curator: Katerina Gkoutziouli

Visual Identity: Oleg Suran

Communication: Maria Paktiti

Recording and post-production: Stefanos Konstantinidis – Fabrika Music Studio

Organised and produced by: VEKTOR Athens

The Conference is realized in the framework of the project FIO: the Art of Living through System Failures, which is financed under the Creative Europe Program (CREA-CULT-2022-COOP-1).

Game-changing technologies are at the heart of the EVA-Berlin 2023 conference. Machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain and XReality applications are the innovative drivers in the ecosystems of the cultural sector, in creative industries and in artistic production. Haptic components of a work can be made tangible and pictorial representations can be put into appropriate words. A landscape painting gains an acoustic horizon of experience as a soundscape, or it is embedded in a game setting as an animated weather backdrop.

The educational mission in cultural institutions benefits from these possibilities. There are fundamentally new ways to interact with the audience and to address a broader public. Multimodal access and personalized communication services support the inclusive demands of today’s visitors and open up for a barrier-free perception also by disadvantaged or impaired audiences. At the same time, innovative technological tools have become firmly established in the fields of documentation, conservation and reconstruction. Machine learning tools ranging from linguistic analysis of historical records to OCR on handwritten texts are already providing valuable metadata for documentation. Digital twins are successfully utilized in the conservation and restoration of artworks to analyze damage, to suggest restoration methods, or even to plausibly reconstruct the colors and textures of destroyed artifacts.

However, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Generatability’ also entails serious risks. The new coexistence of man, machine and objects predictably dissolves familiar ties to the factual, to the material testimony of the artefacts and to the physical presence at the scene of the real. This raises questions of credibility and verification. Who are we actually talking to when entering into dialogue with an algorithmic counterpart?

The 27th EVA-Berlin Conference invites you to present current positions and practical application examples on these topics. Innovative contributions are welcome for the conference and for application-oriented workshops. Novel procedures, technologies and products can be presented at an exhibition at the same time.

As part of the international EVA Conference Network, the Berlin event is a platform for international exchange and European cooperation.

Random Chronicles is an oxymoron. ‚Chronicle‘ derives from the Greek chrónos, meaning time, and chronicles are usually historical records or accounts that follow chronological time. A randomisation of time is therefore a contradiction in terms, an upsetting of a particular sequence or order of things.
Raphael Vella and Bettina Hutschek, the two artists in this exhibition, present drawings and videos which gather their material from a variety of traditional chronicles – old films, books, online archives – and randomly mix them anew. The source materials permit ‚old‘ information to acquire a new sense of relevance. Recent or unfolding events are re-interpreted through a layering of old and new lenses, combining historical or scientific fact with the fluidity of fiction and artificial intelligence.
Raphael Vella’s collages and animated video borrow their imagery from sources as varied as medicine, anatomy, politics and parliamentary architecture. In his collages, simplified floor plans of parliament buildings are superimposed by anatomical, microscopic and other fragments lifted from medical textbooks. In the video Bitterbetter (2023), the artist illustrates a strange exchange with the AI system ChatGPT, in which he asks whether politicians have used medical metaphors during public speeches. An initial reply by ChatGPT related to Angela Merkel and the ‚bitter‘ situation of migrants in Europe is soon followed by an apology: the information given previously is incorrect. What supposedly happened in historical time actually never happened, and the story of this weird exchange is told in a quick succession of stop motion drawings, medical imagery, texts…and disappearing migrants.
Bettina Hutschek‘s video The case OGAMI presents a fictitious UFO-logical case report about three so-called „entities“, who manifest on earth in the shape of human beings. After the discovery of TV-imagery, the new aliens get absorbed into the imaginary of sexual and violent symbolism and repeat it. A voice-over analyses movements and actions of the three humanoid being in pseudo-scientific language. The story is told with archive footage from the 50s, ranging from atomic bomb tests to educational films. The entities and their communicative development up to the „human trap“ turn into an ironic metaphor for humankind.
Her series Typewritings combines typings, drawings and collages. Not sure what they mean.

Bettina Hutschek is a visual artist, filmmaker, and artist-curator who lives and works between Berlin and Malta. After studying art history and philosophy (BA) in Florence and Augsburg, she received her MA from Universität der Künste (UdK), Berlin, and her MFA from HGB Leipzig. She worked in art mediation and spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Department of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She works as freelance conference interpreter and likes to explore the world.
In 2013, she founded FRAGMENTA Malta, a project space to organise exhibitions in the public space of the Maltese islands. In 2017, she co-curated together with Raphael Vella the Malta Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia.
Bettinas work has been exhibited, screened and performed internationally, e.g. at NBK Berlin; Malta Contemporary; Art Cappadox Festival, Anatolia; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes; SSA Edinburgh; Foundation Cartier Paris; Blitz, Valletta; Musée Malraux, Le Havre; Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig; uqbar, Berlin; NGBK Berlin; ICCA Bucarest; Palais du Tokyo.
Today, she uses fragments of different realities to examine the possibilities of knowledge transfer – that is: to tell stories.
www.bettina-hutschek.com

Raphael Vella is an artist, educator and curator based in Malta. He has exhibited his works in international exhibitions and venues, including the Venice Biennale, Domaine Pommery (Reims, France) and Modern Art Oxford and has curated many group and solo exhibitions in Malta and internationally. He was art critic for the Malta Independent between 1992 and 2000 and won the Commonwealth Art and Craft award (London) in 1998. He was artist-in-residence at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand for a year in 2000 and was a founding member of the artists’ group StART in the early 2000s.  He has published numerous articles and catalogue essays about contemporary art, culture and education and initiated many artistic projects, educational ventures and international exchanges that have helped to transform the cultural scene in Malta. In 2017, he was co-curator (with Bettina Hutschek) of the Malta Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia. He is also a full professor at the University of Malta. His latest solo exhibition is That Other Place, curated by Maren Richter at Valletta Contemporary, Valletta, Malta (September-October, 2023).

Article that mentions ISSA by Brian Sholis, writer and editor based in Toronto, published in the Frontier Magazine under the title “Way Out There – and Everywhere”

I’m always seeking examples of self-organized and non-accredited educational initiatives. Two recent initiatives have caught my eye, both independently and for how their core ideas simultaneously align and diverge.

Last weekend, on Vis, a small Croatian island in the Adriatic Sea, Italian philosopher Franco Berardi helped inaugurate the Island School of Social Autonomy with a lecture titled “How Will We Live?” I’ve been following along as the school’s co-founders painstakingly renovate an old stone house in the hills above Komiža and reading with interest as they publish essays that cite many of the culture and education critics I most admire. I’m also intrigued because its list of cofounders includes not only philosophers, theorists, artists, and poets, but also actor-activists like Gael García Bernal and Pamela Anderson. That kind of support—both in visibility and funding—can give experiments like this one the momentum it needs to stay afloat.

The founders make the distinction between education and learning, noting, correctly, that learning mostly happens outside the formal institutions we have for education—and that the kinds of things taught in school may not serve us well for an “age of extinction.” So the ISSA should be “a place that imagines, experiments with, and cultivates forms of knowledge production and sharing that go beyond traditional notions of education and its purpose.” Its principles include “no curriculum,” “no quantification,” “play,” “hospitality,” and, “Pomalo!”

On Vis, that last term, they suggest, “is both a greeting meaning ‘take it slow’ and an island philosophy of how things can get properly done or how to react in utter crisis.” They’ve chosen to locate the project on the island in part for that attitude, how it refuses the orthodoxy “time is money,” and for the island’s antifascist and other histories. “Similar to ISSA itself, the island of Vis embodies an essential dialectic relationship between autonomy and dependency, nature and society, local and global. For ISSA, it is not an either-or situation.”

And what about that goal, social autonomy? “We perceive social autonomy as the ability of individuals to function as cooperative group members, engaging in communal self-governance while being aware of the interconnectedness and interdependence of communities within broader networks (or archipelagoes) of human and non-human life-organization.”

ISSA (..) is a model of rigor and camaraderie, a beacon shining from the (quite literal) hills.”

CARPA8 combines colloquium and laboratory, by bringing together two processual activities and keeping them in motion: dramaturgy and artistic research. The event, dynamic in form and content, aims to combine embodied artistic practice with timely conceptualisation and theorisation to enquire what happens to artistic research when it takes a dramaturgical twist. We will assemble artists and practitioners from the performing arts field with innovators, researchers and theorists to explore, experiment and discuss how expanded notions of dramaturgy and artistic research cross-fertilise each other and expand into other fields.

Dramaturgy and artistic research are fields that evolve through critical processual activities that question how ideas, words, materials, humans, plants, animals, actions, interactions, activities, data and performances materialise. They both disrupt the taken for granted, linger in liminalities, embrace not knowing and ambivalence. They both oscillate at the edge of experiments where repeated actions and techniques continually expand upon the known and unknown. They both extend what dramaturgy and artistic research are and do. Simultaneously they create new settings, situations, and places in which they occur, both within and beyond the performing arts and academia, and address key issues of broader social, cultural, economic, technological and environmental contexts.

Solvitur ambulando, solved by moving, asserted St Augustin to argue that practical demonstration can prove a theoretical problem. There are many levels on which our complementary fields, dramaturgy and artistic research, can relate to this dictum. One of them is the engagement of action and movement as a way of furthering various knowledges. Motion activates shape, place and space and informs our thinking. It invigorates our perception, awareness, action and ways of knowing.

In CARPA8 we consider movement a gestus, a gesture as social comment and commitment that aims at eliminating borders and limitations. Moving across thresholds allows us to diversify the paths we trod. This inspires us to ask: how can dramaturgical thinking and artistic research actively engage in a motion that contributes meaningfully to timely art practices that address the burning issues of our societies? With CARPA8 we are interested in expanded and process-oriented concepts of dramaturgy and artistic research.

a salute to the extraordinary journey we undertook, a sojourn that set us sailing upon the anti-tourist tide. it was to the azores we ventured, those storied isles scattered like emerald fragments in the great expanse of the north atlantic.

there we were, seeking not a leisurely dalliance but rather immersion in our experimental publication project, chasing the shadowy spectre of the tax evasion industry, through the lens of offshore tour operators. eyes, minds and hearts tuned to a different frequency, one that the average wanderer may scarcely comprehend.

and what serendipity it was to uncover those elusive threads on the very pathways we wandered! like a mystery novel unravelling itself page by page, we found our clues scattered across the rugged terrain of ilha de sao miguel. one by one, they revealed themselves to us.

i am pleased to share with you the insights and observations gathered from our recent trip to the azores, where we adopted an ‘anti-tourist’ perspective to examine the locale in a fresh manner, exploring the azores beyond its popular tourist appeal and delve into the less-known facet of its offshore business, specifically related to the tax evasion industry.

as part of our ongoing experimental publication project, we sought to engage with the off-shore operators. despite a thorough examination of leaked documents for local contacts, only three entities are to be found on the island of sao miguel linked to the offshore industry, which we unexpectedly encountered near our day trip destinations.

1) on our way to the arts centre, one can come across the name ‘urrutia servicios generales’.
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/85043307
2) while visiting the abandoned hotel, the name ‘jose romao leite braz’ surfaced.
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/56098526
3) during our trip to the university, one can find ‘jose manuel almeida braz’.
https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/56094919

interestingly, these three names appear to constitute all of sao miguel’s involvement in the offshore industry, a far cry from the proliferation of such businesses in many other parts of europe. the absence of a significant offshore industry in the azores, suggests that the tax evasion industry has not fully infiltrated these islands.

we must, however, be cognizant of the changing global landscape regarding tax havens and offshore industries. increasing regulatory pressure from international organizations such as the eu and the oecd could significantly influence the development or curtailment of offshore activities in this region in the future.

while our excursion provided valuable insights, it also highlighted the necessity for ongoing monitoring of the azores’ economic and regulatory landscape. this will ensure that we remain abreast of changes that may impact our research, and potentially reshape the offshore industry on these islands.

indeed, it seems the offshore industry has yet to reach its tendrils into the azores, an island untouched by the usual financial whirlwinds. yet, our venture taught us that even the seemingly untouched islands can be woven into the complex fabric of our investigations.

as we reflect upon our voyage, let us remember our journey not as mere sightseers but as curious explorers unearthing a different narrative. we’ve walked the less travelled paths, painting each step with the colours of intrigue, inquiry, and insight. we’ve exchanged the typical postcards and souvenirs for a richer bounty of knowledge and understanding, a testament to the true essence of our anti-tourist ethos.

so, here’s to the roads less travelled, to the untold tales of the azores, and to us, the wanderers who dare to peer behind the veil of the ordinary. as we turn the page to our next chapter, may our spirits remain unquenched and our curiosity forever untamed.

In the Sustainable Futures Camp (04.06. – 09.06.) local groups from Croatia, Germany,Greece, Finland, Malta and Poland will get together in a rural one-week camp near Berlin. Therewe will have nature experiences and explorations and reconnect to indigenous wisdom.Furthermore, partakers will form groups of 4 people and ideate and accelerate their concepts tospread knowledge about positive futures supporting the convivial conversation and neededsocio-ecological transformation.

Although millions of people around the world are demanding climate protection andsustainability, the speed of the necessary adaptation and mitigation is completely inadequate.Many people recognize that planetary boundaries, the climate and biodiversity crisis, theunregulated globalised financial system, and the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth thatendangers peace as a whole poses existential problems for human societies. They are ready toquestion the world and critically reflect the way they have lived up to now, and search forsolutions. At the same time, however, existing solutions seem partly unknown, unclear orcontradictory or difficult to imagine. Climate change is proven to be the most urgent andconsequential issue humankind has ever faced. How content producers address it in the nexttwo decades might determine the kind of world current and future generations will live in. In thebook “The Future We Choose” by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac (they lednegotiations for the UN’s Paris Agreement of 2015) two possible scenarios for planet Earth areoutlined. One describes what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if Paris climate targets will befailed. The other one refers to a carbon neutral, regenerative world, and how head-on optimismcan fend off the occurring disasters.