In an era of global crisis — ecological and economic; sanitary and socio-political — symbiosis is a notion that allows us to explore the metamorphosis afoot and to imagine possible futures. This symposium offers an experimentation incubator where artists, designers, scientists, and other thinkers will exchange and debate on processes and practices, exhibiting innovating projects along the way.
ISEA opening
Symbiosis is a cornerstone of life itself — no organism, nor any species more widely, could survive isolated and without exchanges . This applies as much to human societies as to the relations of those societies with their environments. More than a simple co-existence, symbiosis involve interdependence. It can be positive, neutral, or negative, varying according to the dynamic between the relations between the parties. We must, then, choose our symbiotic models wisely. This is the thematic orientation of this year’s conference.
Symbiosis — at once object, subject, and pre-condition for this international gathering.
ISEA2023 SYMBIOSIS is a symbiotic event: trans-disciplinary (including visual arts, theater, music, design, cinema, sociology, philosophy, economics, engineering, mathematics, biology, physics , …) and inter-sectorial, concerning the arts, creatives industries, research, and citizenship more widely.
Welcome to the 5th International Conference on Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges. DCAC-2023 will again afford an exceptional opportunity for renewing old acquaintances, making new contacts, offering a worldwide connection between researchers and lecturers, from a wide range of academic fields, facilitating partnerships across national and disciplinary borders. This International Conference on Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges is hosted by the Department of Audio & Visual Arts (Ionian University) and it will be held in hybrid way – online and in Corfu (Greece).
The aim of the DCAC-2023 is to bring together technology, art and culture in the Digital Era, as well as to provide a forum on current research and applications incorporating technology, art and culture, to deepen cooperation, exchange experiences and good practices.
Farfara2031, referring to an island that appeared sporadically on maps of the 16th century, is a project and research process, using the procedure of bidding with this fictional island for the title of European Capital of Culture (ECoC). Designed as an artistic experimental platform Farfara2031 aims to push the boundaries in thinking, practising and experiencing what an ECoC may be if virtuality is considered as a new form of cultural ‘physicality’. Farfara2031 takes the model of ECoC as a working template for investigating innovative structures and improved relations of creative and systemic thinking to develop models of collaboration, common curation and hybrid / blended models of training, capacity building, informal education and artistic production with participants and audiences at the heart of the work done.The project believes that arts programming and producing art in the digital realm should go beyond a process of digitisation of an analogue format. However this requires a shift in creative practice and, in particular, thinking and conceptualisation. Within the context of a European Capital of Culture – created in a pre-digital world – we need to examine how the knowledge transfer from current trends in arts programming and production within the digital space can be extended to an ECoC digital programme and subsequently serve as a point of departure for digital culture. The project aims to contribute to a European vision beyond the usual or known parameters, terminologies and factual argumentations, or rhetoric of competitions of “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction” (Boris Groys). It attempts to explore new modes of digital and analogue learning and sharing, and takes Farfara – this mythical Maltese island – as a potential host, model or test-bed of a new way of approaching the intense activity surrounding the conferring, programming and managing of an ECoC.In a broader context, the project will implement the first step of a longer-term project (Comino-Farfara2031) by looking specifically into the mysterious island of Farfara, to critically examine how virtuality can create a different understanding of creative activity within a non-physical space, and through the framework of the ECoC programme, itself made up of three key elements; ‘European’, ‘Capital’ and ‘Culture’. By using this framework, and the three key elements which refer to many-layered elements, such as identity, history, religions, conviviality, economics, and geographies, the project proposes a rethinking of the process of cultural experimentation. Thus, in this context, Farfara highlights the speculative components of futuring the three terms as a dynamic field of perspectives, and asks what potentials can be found by looking closely at concepts of place, community or identity through the lens of programming an ECoC for a space that simply does not exist – in other words, what does a cultural programme for digital communities which goes beyond spatial thinking look like?Ultimately, the project’s research question is: How can virtuality – understood here as a new form of urban and cultural ‘physicality’ – shape a more radical understanding of what European Capital of Cultures should achieve, by planning a cultural programme for a non-physical place?This research question will be explored through the project’s planned programme of field research, a series of online forums with a broad circle of collaborators, several workshops with experts in various related fields, and a residency programme through an open call to artists and researchers. The project will conclude with a fictional online bid for the title of Farfara2031.
FIGURE IT OUT: THE ART OF LIVING THROUGH SYSTEM FAILURES
Figure it Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures explores practices and phenomena in which systems and institutions fail specific communities and populations. Trapped within constraining situations, these people are starting to develop strategies of lying, cheating and stealing to counter their limitations and powerlessness vis-à-vis these systems.From the position of the dispossessed and excluded, actions and practices that would be condemned in the mainstream,assume a different ethical and political connotation. In popular culture, these practices are frequently celebrated as a cunning and crafty reworking, often poetic or humorous. They have also expanded into the digital sphere as well, where they are getting recombined in interesting ways facing new kinds of algorithmic power structures. Figure it Out will explore the use of these practices as forms of resistance and tools for bypassing rules, as attempts to obtain access to key rights that remain foreclosed for certain groups. The aim is not to indiscriminately celebrate personal gain through illicit behavior, but to acknowledge the ingenuity that comes in finding a way out of an impossible situation. Possible examples come from a broad variety of practices – such as the avoidance of internet censorship by transformation of entire websites into image formats or the camouflage techniques of migrants adopting a ‘western’ look to fool surveillance algorithms.The project will explore similar practices that enable disenfranchised groups to overcome barriers established by administrative and algorithmic regimes. The focus is on the strategies of rural women, eco-commoners, LGBTIQ+, migrants, etc. in conflict with corporate or state rules.Figure it Out involves partners from Croatia, France, Greece, Malta and Serbia who will work with and engage different communities sharing their stories through art productions, exhibitions, a radio festival, bonfire events and web-zines.
The VR360 film titled Off-network low-impact living on the cut, published on boattr.uk, for the launch of the after progress exhibition, tells the story of the researchers’ journey on the narrow-boat Quintessence (boattr.uk) on the British Waterways, looking into off-network, local network use of technologies, as a low-impact living on the cut. The ‘boattr – living on the cut’ immersive film depicts the cut and canals of the British Waterways as a digital urban commons, through the artists’ 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. Having operated the boattr.uk, mazizone and 7061 art project over three years, this story, in form of a VR360 film, documents the development of this research.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 VR360 film makes use of video as theory, reflecting the structural and qualitative re-evaluation it aims at discussing design and organisational level. In accordance with the qualitatively new situation video is set in, the VR360 film presents a multi-dimensional matrix which constitutes the virtual logical grid of the boattr project.
The way we collectively discuss about migration, in general, and forced displacement by sea, or “boat migration”, in particular, has an impact on our responses to address the phenomenon. Narratives on “boat migration”, be it in the media or in public discourse, affect political processes across Europe, influencing our perception of “boat migrants”, ultimately having an effect on the ways they are received in (or repelled from) our societies. The challenge is to unpack and explain the causes and consequences of such narratives, examining their construction and assessing their effects on prevailing attitudes.
Sea Watch and Alarm Phone have already been working in a state of permanent crisis for 5 years now, fighting the EU’S policies of letting die at the deadliest European border, the Mediterranean. It is an avoidable and deadly crisis. Now the biggest difference is that our environment is also in one. Staying at home, in those Covid-19 times, is a privilege that the people we pull out of the water do not have. We must not and will not forget the people who are fighting for their survival on the doorstep of Fortress Europe. Flight is not a choice.
Case Study: Integra by Maria Pisani
Integra Foundation’s vision is that of supporting inclusive, non-discriminating and non-disabling societies, where all individuals have the right to human dignity, freedom, respect and social justice. Our mission is that of facilitating the space for marginalised individuals and groups to be listened to and to have an active and meaningful say in their lives and well-being on their own terms. The objectives of the Foundation are as follows: a. working towards a successfully integrated society that recognises and embraces strength in diversity; b. providing support to marginalised groups through tangible inclusive community development projects; c. engaging minority groups in order to maximise their potential as full members of Maltese society; d. facilitating access of minority groups to essential community services in Malta e. lobbying for the integration of minority groups into Maltese society; f. raising awareness on issues relating to minority/marginalized groups by providing accurate, timely and objective information; g. Actively opposing racism, xenophobia and cultural intolerance as well as any other form of discrimination in Malta; h. partnering with other relevant national and/or international organizations in order to maximise synergies in operations and to disseminate knowledge in regard to pertinent issues.
Case Study: Sarobmed by Violeta Moreno-Lax
As long as there is no option of safe passage to Europe, people will continue risking their lives,forced to take what is now the host of some of the the world’s most dangerous migration routes, the Mediterranean Sea [Fargues Philippe, “Four Decades of Cross-Mediterranean Undocumented Migration to Europe” (International Organization for Migration, 2017).]. Setting off in flimsy rubber boats, many soon find themselves heading for rocks or sand banks that can readily capsize or sink a dinghy. Others are abandoned by smugglers who drop them at beaches that are inaccessible via land. The majority of people are wearing fakelife jackets, giving them a false sense of safety [Hannah Al-Othman, “Tricked into death: 150,000 migrants’ life jackets – many of which are useless fakes- lie piled on the coast of Lesbos in a grim memorial to those who die crossing the Mediterranean” (The Daily Mail, 2017)].Despite the need of proactive Search and Rescue Operations (SAR), aiming to deter migrants fromcrossing the Mediterranean, the EU and its member states pulled back from rescue at sea at the endof 2014, leading to record numbers of deaths. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were forcedto deploy their own rescue missions in a desperate attempt to fill this gap and reduce casualties.However, SAR NGOs are currently operating in an increasingly hostile environment, both at seaand on land, facing smear campaigns and legal actions from EU member states
[Melanie Fink, “The Aquarius incident: navigating the turbulent waters of international law” (Ejil:Talk!, June 14, 2018) & Cusumano, Eugenio. ‘Straightjacketing Migrant Rescuers? the Code of Conduct on Maritime NGOs’, Mediterranean Politics, (2017), pp. 1-9.], and parts of the media [“The German NGO ship Lifeline – people smugglers or life savers?”, (The Local, 28 June 2018) & “NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale” (Gefira, 04 december 2016)].
Moreover, governments have tended to adopt an approach of secrecy when it comes to incidents at sea; without precise details about the actions taken (or not taken), it is difficult to hold governments accountable for failing to uphold their SAR and human rights obligations.These state prosecutions, which are often supported by part of the population too, come at a heavy price: each ship that is stopped from rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean results in either the loss of migrants at sea or the detainment of migrants by the Libyan Coast Guard and transport to Tripoli,where violation of human rights are committed on a daily basis. As reported in the ‘MareClausum’ paper
[Mare Clausum, a report by Forensic Oceanography (Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani), affiliated to the Forensic Architecture agency, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018],
it has been four years since more than 1,200 people perished at sea in the 12 and18 April 2015 shipwrecks – the largest to have been documented in recent Mediterranean history.These deaths were the result of the termination of the Italian Mare Nostrum operation, which had patrolled close to the Libyan coast to rescue migrants in distress. The end of Mare Nostrum left a gap in Search and Rescue (SAR) capabilities that was meant to deter migrants and instead led to a staggering increase in deaths at sea in early 2015. In the wake of this harrowing loss of life, even the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, was obliged to admit that “it was a serious mistake to bring the Mare Nostrum operation to an end. It costs human lives”.
Possible film screenings: – Forensic Oceanography & Sea Watch – Aquarius (MSF) – Juventa (Jugend Retted)
Media & Migration: Key issues in Critical Migration Studies (Joshua Neves, Masha Salazkina, Krista Lynes, Ishita Tiwary)
In 2014, a collective of scholars, artists and activists initiated a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of key terms and concepts to fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration (“New Keywords: Migration and Borders,” subsequently published in the journal Cultural Studies). This project focused on what they perceived as significant “binding” words that shape how we come to understand migration and borders in the contemporary conjuncture, and worked to frame the keywords chosen as indispensable conceptual categories for cultural studies today.
The Media Stream of this Summer School takes this text as a point of departure for developing strategies to interrogate the link between mediation and of migration, both in our times and historically. It proposes then to begin generating together “key terms and concepts” that define the mediation of migration and/or the migration of media in a way that could be productive for making critical interventions from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and approaches. Participants of the stream will be asked to come up with terms, which resonate with their interests in the area of migration studies while also engaging with issues of media/mediation, to be shared on Day 2.
Following an introduction of this on Day 1, participants will be invited to think about the work of developing and interrogating key terms through two key terms that were the intellectual engine for the edited anthology Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis: “moving images” and “crisis”, which will be briefly discussed on Day 2.
The longer workshop on Day 2 invites participants to come prepared with a “key term” of interest to them (one that indicates in some manner the entanglement of mediation and migration), as well as an example (this could be an image, a story, an anecdote, an event, etc.) that helps elucidate their chosen term. Participants in the workshop on Day 2 will be invited to share their key term and explain their interest in it among workshop participants as a way to begin the dialogue which we hope will continue beyond this 2-day event.
“There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” —Walter Benjamin
The island nation of Matla, as any statutorily political and physically real place, exists in the relations and transformations of documents and monuments. It is a reality of written inscriptions and physical places, in resonance. National and physical infrastructures require traceable regulations, policies, agreements and decisions—reams of documents that originate, validate and catalogue terrains, construction and operation. Policy, agreements, letters of agreement and legislation serve to instantiate and defend physical cultural sovereignties and borderlands, these also becoming historical monuments changes wrought to lands and peoples. Legal and governmental procedures and decrees, abstracted and composed at distance from their sites of application, materially change how and where material goods human and non-human bodies are able to move.
Islands are bodies in the making, worlds of flows, connections and liquidities. The Maltese archipelago is geopolitical and geophysical infrastructure, a place where security, value and identity are wrought through transport, transfer and movement. The documents and monuments that regulate this process are the subject of this workshop, noting that it is amongst the central tenets of capital flow in our contemporary age that materials — raw, commodity, consumable — are much more “free” than are people. If we characterise freedom in part through the ability to move around, it is apparent that “free trade” means it is easier for a Walmart T-shirt sewn in Asia to move across borders than it is for the human labourers who made it to do the same. This is all explicitly enabled by real infrastructures like the Belt and Road Initiative, a global development philosophy and infrastructure project being undertaken by the Chinese government, which involves development investments in 152 countries.
The relation of documents and monuments that allows for migrations of materials and peoples will be explored in this workshop. We will trace the migratory effects of specific documents (historical and contemporary policies, agreements, contracts, and laybills) on linked sites, industrial and infrastructural objects and installations, regions and landscapes) as resulting in and stemming from monuments (specific sites, industrial and infrastructural objects and installations, regions and landscapes). Maltese archipelago, and its relation to globalising initiatives like the Belt and Road, will attempt a bureaucratic forensics using data, field visits, and investigative tracing, visualization and storytelling.
Summer School Open Syllabus by Pirate.Care (Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak)
Pirate Care: Collaborative Online Syllabus: “Pirate Care primarily considers the assumption that we live in a time inwhich care, understood as a political and collective capacity of society,is becoming increasingly defunded, discouraged and criminalised.” This Introduction gives an overview of the main questions and concerns voiced by the expression ‘pirate care’, which also the gathering principle for bringing together the different knowledges, techniques and tools shared in this collective syllabus.Pirate Care primarily considers the assumption that we live in a time in which care, understood as a political and collective capacity of society, is becoming increasingly defunded, discouraged and criminalised. Neoliberal policies have for the last two decades re-organised the basic care provisions that were previously considered cornerstones of democratic life – healthcare, housing, access to knowledge, right to asylum, freedom of mobility, social benefits, etc. – turning them into tools for surveilling, excluding and punishing the most vulnerable. The name Pirate Care refers to those initiatives that have emerged in opposition to such political climate by self-organising technologically-enabled care & solidarity networks.
X-Sprint and Open Climate Knowledge (Simon Worthington – Open Science Lab, German National Library of Science and Technology)
A practical workshop using two digital toolsets to make experimental sprint driven publications on topics that combine ecology and migrations. The workshop will involve making a publication in a day on a topic set by the group participating. Participants will learn about: visual prototyping; research PID usage; and data mining. Research colleagues working on X-Sprints and Open Climate Knowledge are Dr Ina Blumel of TIB and advisory board Europeana, as well as Peter Murray-Rust, Chemist and Open Access pioneer. The first toolset is termed ‘X-Sprints’. The ‘X’ refers to ways to record and capture heterogeneous social media types used in art, design and architecture such as: Sketchfab; Instagram; TikTok; Twitter, etc. The ‘Sprint’ part refers to working collaborative in real-time, together, or online, while being directed at the goal of producing as publication. An accessible FOSS workflow would be used for the sprints: WordPress using Gutenberg Blocks, DIVI Themes and Shifter static site generation and GitHub versionsing. The second toolset is ‘Open Climate Knowledge’ and data mining of research papers. See Open Climate Knowledge (OCK) is an open research project for data mining Open Access (OA) papers related to Climate Change — to build stats on OA rates, and for researchers to use in their work. OCK is intended for researchers inside and outside of academe.Using OCK participants can search global open research databases easily to retrieve papers and make collections for sharing.The research questions are:Social Media – how to capture this ephemeral media and make it citable as part of design practice.Community science (AKA citizen science) (Reed Petty 2017) – how to make participatory workflows for the public at large. Collaborative working processes have been established for the researcher workflow but not for the public to participate in scholarship. Specifically the interest is to see how ContentMine FOSS software used in Open Climate Knowledge can be made usable in citizen science contexts.ReferencesReed Petty, Kate. ‘Is It Time to Retire the Word “Citizen”?’ BLARB (blog), 2017.
Climate is interconnected with almost every other discipline. Physics, maths , chemistry, bioscience, medicine, psychology , economics, sociology,law, philosophy. Simon Worthington, (TiB, Hanover) and I have created OpenClimate Knowledge (OCK) and we believe that many “solutions” will come from multidisciplinary. In COVID-19 we see that social aspects(distancing, BAME, demographics, politics…) are critically important to finding ways forward, the same is true for climate.Inspired by Wikipedia/Wikidata, OCK creates dictionaries for such disciplines, allowing scholarly articles to be classified and interrogated by AMI, a machine amanuensis for human readers and analysts). This presentation shows how we tackle a new subject within a few hours (a”scoping review”). I shall take “Climate and Human migration” and show the types of article that are published and hope to highlight disciplines.Among the existing dictionaries we shall use are country, disease, funders,and we’ll create one for migration.
EFAP members were due to meet during the SAR conference, which unfortunately was cancelled due to COVID-19. Statement by the SAR organisers: Due to the current Coronavirus outbreak, we unfortunately find it necessary to cancel the conference in Bergen. We apologize for the inconvenience this entails for the participants. The decision is founded on an overall joint assessment by the University of Bergen and SAR, based on the current advice from The Norwegian Institute of Public Health in relation to the growing concerns on the quick spreading of the virus. The Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design and SAR are truly sorry for having to cancel the conference due to these unfortunate circumstances, but are looking into the possibility of transforming the contributions into a more permanent format, like a publication or through digital dissemination.
