Festival of Abstract Thought — What do we get from this?
Technology. Resistance. Commons.
😸 October 23-27, 2024, Osiedle Jazdów, Warsaw
What do we get from this?— from all these algorithms, “intelligences,” and machines? We ask this question because, as more optimized, automated, and sophisticated technologies emerge, what we feel is not fear of being replaced by them or faith in the endless benefits they might bring, but anger. Once again, decisions are made about us, but without us. The profits from technology are private, while the costs are borne by society as a whole.
Technologies are material; they need water, energy, and cables running across the ocean floor. They mediate and operate in relationships with us, coexisting in a social and cultural network. Yet they remain hidden behind inaccessible, specialized language and the guarded walls of corporations. We believe we don’t need to be coding experts to have a say in whom and what these technologies serve. Our anger can transform into energy for action in favor of the commons.
During the festival, we will explore how new technologies impact our planet, its resources and their distribution, our institutions, relationships, work, psychology, and identity. We’ll consider whether the cult of objectivity, efficiency, and data truly supports our growth and meets our needs. We will search for the emancipatory potential of technology, learn how to resist digital control, and test the limits of our adaptability. We’ll also explore how technologies can be shared and support other common goods.
We particularly invite your bodies, which feel the expanding digital world so intensely. We will listen to discussions and sounds, but also stretch and embroider. In the festival café, Caffe Offline, we’ll take a break from the blue light of screens and give our thumbs a chance to recover.
In the festival program, you’ll find topics such as:
Lectures:
😻 What is Repressed Here? On the Unconscious Aspects of Our Relationship with Technology
😻 What Will Replace Big Tech? Digital Cooperatives
😻 Can AI Help Us Solve the Mystery of the Norm-Pathology Spectrum?
😻 The AI We (Don’t) Want
😻 The Posthuman Algorithm — On Monitoring Work and Assigning Tasks in the 21st Century
😻 Marx, Artificial Intelligence, and the Utopia of a World Without Work
😻 Where There Are Six Servers, There’s Nothing to Eat… or Drink — Digital Ecology
😻 Digital Monarchies (-‿◦) ~ Urbit Case Study
Workshops:
😻 What Do Digital Technologies Do in a Degrowth World? Speculative Design Exercises
😻 Exercises for the Human Psyche with Technologies
😻 Machine Learning — Embodied through Embroidery
😻 Cyborgs, Hybrids, Beasts, and Dark Ecology
😻 Tarot and Astro-Algorithms
😻 Soft Cyborgs: On Body-Vessels, Their Tissues, and Prosthetics
😻 Who Owns My Face? Deepfake, Image Rights, and Intellectual Property in the Age of AI
😻 AI in Experimental Music — Lecture + Vocal and Harmony Lab