In the face of multiple global-scale crises, what direction should we take as artists and thinkers? What can we do when all we have is a bag of bad ideas? What importance does art have when the earth is burning? There is a growing sense of paralysis: all available options seem inadequate, but we’re not about to give up.
While we feel compelled to hack, critique, or develop answers to the many man-made challenges in the world, the usual polemics of the art and tech sphere ring a bit futile. Idle criticism is useless without proposals for change, yet action without thinking is what got us here in the first place.
Speaking to this shared sense of analysis paralysis, Rosemary Lee and Sophie-Carolin Wagner discuss what art and theory have to offer a world on the brink. This conversion is a starting point for dialogue about cultural actors’ role in confronting real-world problems and the current state of interdisciplinary work with art and technology.
with Sophie-Carolin Wagner (Lee-Wagner Co-Lab)
Photo: Dasha Ilina (IG: @dashesandcommas), 2022
presented at:
Art Meets Radical Openness
Art Meets Radical Openness (AMRO), is a biennial festival for art, hacktivism and open cultures, organized since 2008 by servus.at in cooperation with the Linz University of Art, Department of Time-Based Media.
The 2022 edition of Art Meets Radical Openness is dedicated to the rituals and the philosophies of debugging. As a gathering of communities with interests across arts and cultures, networked technologies and political action, AMRO offers space for sharing knowledge and practices, focusing on the potential of debugging both inside and outside of the purely technical realm.
In the technical world, debugging is a set of more or less formalized routines to investigate and fix software malfunctions – bugs. Bugs in this context become visible when a program crashes or the browser window gets stuck; when the developers’ biases come to surface and where the limits of the current infrastructure are reached. We have also learned that the denial of access to widespread commercial services is driven by geopolitical interests.
(Software) bugs are much more than simple technical errors. Under certain circumstances, they can be seen as one of the fundamental features of the current age, which is characterized by ubiquitous technologies and power structures.
Are cultural practices of debugging and fixing bugs within free open source communities transferable to socio-political challenges?
How can we address social inequalities through the lenses of open source cultures and radical, autonomous technologies? And in the case that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, how can we strengthen the connection and exchange between individuals and communities aiming at radical openness?
Besides the common and familiar cultural practice of the user, such as a reboot, debugging can also mean opening up a black box, examining its inner workings, taking it apart, and isolating what needs to be fixed. This is not just about isolating the problem, but also identifying what works well and using that to find a new working equilibrium, perhaps with a clever hack or freshly gathered knowledge that comes from someone in a community.
AMRO as a gathering of communities with interests across arts and cultures, networked technologies and political action offers space for sharing knowledge and practices, focusing on the potential of debugging both inside and outside of the purely technical realm.
Art Meets Radical Openness
16 June 2022
AFO, Linz