Renewable Futures 2021 Conference
Dates (Period): 04/11/2021 – 06/11/2021
Location: Oslo, Norway / Online
Organizer: FeLT (Futures of Living Technologies)
View the conference program in pdf here.
Renewable Futures is a conference series that originated in the Baltics and the North European region with an aim to invent new trajectories for more sustainable and imaginative future developments. This edition will be online, hosted by FeLT in collaboration with Creative Europe project GREEN. We welcomed paper proposals from researchers and artists of interdisciplinary practices from fields such as contemporary art, artistic research, art theory, media art, design and architecture, applied artificial intelligence, artificial life, robotics, life sciences, art education and other relevant practices. The conference will feature presentations of artistic and transdisciplinary research projects, as well as examples and discussions of applied projects, and a curated screening program.
The conference is online only and will take place from the 4th to the 6th of November 2021.
Additional workshops will be offered on the 7th of November. Specially invited keynote speakers and presentations will be included in the program.
4TH RENEWABLE FUTURES CONFERENCE – THE FUTURES OF LIVING TECHNOLOGIES
November 4-6, 2021
Oslo / Online
The Renewable Futures Network was established in 2008 and strives to facilitate new contact zones between traditionally separated domains – art and science, academic research and independent creative practices, sustainable businesses and social engagement.
The 4th Renewable Futures Conference questions how we experience and express life and the sense of aliveness today. Actualized by our current global pandemic, we invite artistic, academic or applied research perspectives on relations and intersections between human beings, living environments and machines. This might evoke a sense of the uncanny and a fear of domination and surveillance. It might also reveal a world of possibilities of becoming, creation of new forms and behaviors. Could we co-create a more balanced existence? Can we enhance our senses and communication to become beings that are more adapted to co-existence with our environments and other species?
The interdisciplinary artistic research project FeLT (Futures of Living Technologies) hosts the conference in conjunction with the Creative Europe project GREEN (Green Revisited: Encountering Emerging Naturecultures).
The four thematic tracks of the conference:
*Ecologies beyond Green: reconfiguring complex relationships to the environment
Against the grain of the metaphorical overall ‘greening’ of activities, be it in commerce, the arts or academia, the notion of ‘prismatic ecology’ has emerged to rebuke the colour green and its cultural construction. How can new discourses overcome binary ideas of the other-than-human world as an idealized nature? While greenness as a superficial metaphor needs to be disentangled from terms— both putatively non-technological—such as ‘life’ and ‘nature’, how do artists and designers use and question technologies beyond anthropocentrism within a larger biosemiotic web ? How can media help to interact with ecologies understood as a shared ‘oikos’ (household) beyond anthropocentric ethics interested in ‘our’ environment only as a beneficial milieu for humans?
*Making with: multispecies communication and co-creation
Practices of communication and co-creation with living organisms – such as microorganisms, plants or animals – might involve working with technologically complex systems as well as agriculture or indigenous knowledges and traditions. To rethink interspecies relations in the framework of a climate emergency moment can be a way to form entangled multispecies alliances
*Living technologies: living environments, humans, machines, intelligence, life and emotions
By the term living technology we think of the complex structures and functions of living organisms which have entered the hybrid and synthetic technologies. By including critical perspectives on the merging of technology and areas involving emotions, sensing and empathy, we question possible and speculative convergences of machine technology, artificial life, artificial intelligence and human bodies. We invite perspectives on the implications of future integration and communication between the machine and the living as well as speculative or applied.
*Sensorium: how we experience, interpret and develop applied aesthetics today
Sensorium – how we experience, interpret, develop applied aesthetics today in order to reconnect with the environment, expanding the senses technologically inside and outside of institutions. Technologies continously provide new ways of filtering our experiences and different means of relating to the living environment. Aesthetics today are also affected by perceptual complexity, relating to experiences that transcend art and include a vast array of both natural and constructed environments. Human perceptions and sensory modalities are influenced and affected by the way we interact with our digital tools, and their presence is becoming characteristically transparent. Can the sensorium as an expanded aesthetics provide new modalities for connecting with natural resources? What new opportunities exist for interaction and how do technologies extend and provide explorative possibilities within sensations ? And, in what way do institutions understand and relate to this sensory complexity as a sustainable choice?
SCREENING PROGRAM
November 4-6, 2021
Oslo / Online
We will present a screening and remote performance program curated for Renewable Futures 4th conference-FeLT. The screening and performance program will feature screen-based artistic works at the intersection of ecology, art and technology.
Curators: Jens Hauser and Kristin Bergaust
The open call for the conference and screening program is closed and the applicants have been notified about the results!
More information:
https://feltproject.no/