CREATIVE CALL: STRATEGIC NARRATIVES OF TECHNOLOGY AND AFRICA
This call is for cultural producers of all types working in Africa, in reference to Africa, or in its varied diasporas: artists, writers, technologists, designers, filmmakers, and more. We seek creative work that explores and demonstrates — directly or indirectly — ways to revisit, reframe, and recode the future of technology on and for the African continent.
Creative Works, Systems, Technologies
Fuchal, Portugal Sept 1-2
http://snta.m-iti.org/
Submission deadline: 1 May 2024
What kinds of critical interventions into the discourses and practices of technology are artists and other cultural producers already making? What are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that could be offered to the world through new systems and processes? How might we generate alternatives to the current influx of Silicon Valley narratives of tech entrepreneurship? How might new narratives nurture and promote a vision of the continent as a crucible for radical new socio-technical paradigms? Addressing questions such as these and more, we hope to paint the “art of the [radical] possible” and demonstrate new threads and pathways for the development of alternate socio-technical approaches. We hope that this focus on the possible near future will differentiate the event from the many generative but phantasmal Afrofuturist speculations of late.
Creative works and technologies eligible for consideration include, but are not limited to: software, technical systems (“low” or “hi”), images, objects, demos, film/video, poetry, performances, interventions, illustration, and more.
A juried selection of works will be exhibited in Funchal, the capital of Madeira, at the galleries of the Colégio dos Jesuitas, a re-purposed 16th century Jesuit compound. A Portuguese territory off the coast of Africa, the island of Madeira is an historical site of mutual entanglement among the Atlantic continents and was a point of departure for European colonization and the slave trade — a complex history that makes the island a charged location for exploring artistic and critical interventions into Africa’s technological futures.The exhibition is part of an international transdisciplinary conference, Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa, in which the scholarly and the creative will coexist equally. We intend that the artworks, objects and texts in the exhibition will inspire new thinking among scholars, and that theoretical discourses generated during the conference will inspire new creative and technical approaches, generating a virtuous circle imbricating writers, artists, theorists, and technologists.
For more information about the event and detailed submission guidelines, please visit the conference website or send questions to Cátia Jardim at snta-admin@m-iti.org.
Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa is organized by the Critical Technical Practice laboratory at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI), Madeira, Portugal.
Fuchal, Portugal Sept 1-2
http://snta.m-iti.org/
Submission deadline: 1 May 2024
What kinds of critical interventions into the discourses and practices of technology are artists and other cultural producers already making? What are key epistemologies and ways of being which are endemic in Africa that could be offered to the world through new systems and processes? How might we generate alternatives to the current influx of Silicon Valley narratives of tech entrepreneurship? How might new narratives nurture and promote a vision of the continent as a crucible for radical new socio-technical paradigms? Addressing questions such as these and more, we hope to paint the “art of the [radical] possible” and demonstrate new threads and pathways for the development of alternate socio-technical approaches. We hope that this focus on the possible near future will differentiate the event from the many generative but phantasmal Afrofuturist speculations of late.
Creative works and technologies eligible for consideration include, but are not limited to: software, technical systems (“low” or “hi”), images, objects, demos, film/video, poetry, performances, interventions, illustration, and more.
A juried selection of works will be exhibited in Funchal, the capital of Madeira, at the galleries of the Colégio dos Jesuitas, a re-purposed 16th century Jesuit compound. A Portuguese territory off the coast of Africa, the island of Madeira is an historical site of mutual entanglement among the Atlantic continents and was a point of departure for European colonization and the slave trade — a complex history that makes the island a charged location for exploring artistic and critical interventions into Africa’s technological futures.The exhibition is part of an international transdisciplinary conference, Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa, in which the scholarly and the creative will coexist equally. We intend that the artworks, objects and texts in the exhibition will inspire new thinking among scholars, and that theoretical discourses generated during the conference will inspire new creative and technical approaches, generating a virtuous circle imbricating writers, artists, theorists, and technologists.
For more information about the event and detailed submission guidelines, please visit the conference website or send questions to Cátia Jardim at snta-admin@m-iti.org.
Strategic Narratives of Technology and Africa is organized by the Critical Technical Practice laboratory at the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute (M-ITI), Madeira, Portugal.